second shooting in Norrebro

http://politiken.dk/newsinenglish/article567508.ece

This is literally a couple blocks from my house. The mean streets of Copenhagen indeed.

Interestingly enough, the first one was a drive-by on a scooter. Yeah, you heard right. Drive-by on scooter. Hard to take that one seriously.

A trip to the Viking market

Last weekend we went to the Viking market.

There were singing vikings.


And angry vikings.


There were mini vikings.


And victorious vikings.


There was a spice merchant.


And somewhere a company that was missing its entire IT department.

It's true - everything is better with more cowbell.

OK, for some reason the picture doesn't want to be a link today, so go here if you are curious:

http://www.morecowbell.dj/

Early senility and a motorcycle trip to Sweden

So I spent a long weekend touring the Swedish coast on the back of Brian's Aprilla (Italian sport bike). Picture lots of rolling fields, amazing sea views, a glass of port in the library of a castle, pine forests... It was as lovely as it probably sounds except for two small problems: 

1.) I spaced packing my camera and the scenery truly was amazing, so I was kicking myself all weekend - although we did take some bad camera phone pics that I will try to post at some point. 

2.) Italian racing bikes have no place for baggage, meaning our entire long weekend's worth of clothes and gear ended up on the back of yours truly. (I am really going to be hating myself for buying 10 bottles of hair products tomorrow.)

In other news, I really like Sweden. It's got forest, it's got coast, it's super pretty and the people don't suck. Plus, on the coast, you can actually buy seafood. Good seafood. From real fishermen. (Take that, Fyn.) And everyone has cool singsong accents, so it actually sounds like you are in another country. (Unlike Denmark where everyone just sounds like they are from the States.) Although the Swedish chef accent that most Americans remember from childhood actually sounds more like Norwegians, who definitely win hands down in the cool Scandinavian accent contest. 

Even more surprising, after a year in Scandinavia, Nordic food is growing on me. I sometimes kind of like pickled herring, and I absolutely love smoked eel. Don't get me wrong. The choice between French and either Swedish or Danish food will never be much of a contest. And our really nice little hotel had something they labeled caviar that tasted something like bile favored with honey that almost made a bulimic out of me. However, for the most part, Danish and Swedish food doesn't make me run screaming in abject terror anymore. And I think that is progress.

All great things come to an end

Goodbye 

Today is my last day at Hello. Well, actually last Friday was my last day, but I've been finishing up some projects this week so I've been back in the office quite a bit. I know a lot of people come across this blog who are looking for a job at Hello, so let me just say that my leaving has nothing to do with the agency. It's a great agency, and it was really hard to leave. I was just ready to do something else.

In any case, have spent the last few weeks tying up loose ends, so not had a chance to check in. One good consequence of my leaving is that this blog can go back into stealth mode. It got a bit sanitized once I realized clients were checking it - it's hard not to self-edit when that happens.

I think I will keep my new workplace to myself for that reason for a while. Suffice it to say, few writers are lucky enough to work on a client they are truly passionate about. Now, I am one of them.

A-kayaking we did go

I've been wanting to get into longer kayaking trips for a while. I think sea kayaking gets kind of a bad rap, but like most things, you can do it easy, or you can do it intensely. A couple years ago, I went to Belize for about 5 days kayaking island-to-island off the coast. While fun, I realized I was definitely ready for a bigger challenge.

I found it in Greece. Nine days of 4-6 hours of intense kayaking a day through ridiculously beautiful scenery. Amazing.

I lucked out in a kayak partner as well. One of the guys from work is also very into kayaking and came along for the ride. I found a company that rented us all the equipment we needed so all we had to bring was a sleeping bag. They also gave us printed maps to work with, and we were off.

To be honest, I've always prided myself on my athletic ability - particularly when it comes to water sports. However, this trip definitely taught me some humility. While I've sea kayaked with guys before, they were never as good as me technically and usually not in as good of shape. Søren was the first time I'd sea kayaked with someone who was as good technically (if not better) and better than me athletically.

As we were on our own, we had the freedom to set our own pace. For us, this meant all out. We beat the estimated times by about 2 hours a day, and he was barely breaking a sweat. To some people, this would probably be a total nightmare. For me, it was heaven. We got to visit almost every island in the Greek isles, saw a lot of things most people don't get to see and actually ended up in better shape after our vacation than we were when starting it.

If you're me, it doesn't get any better than that.

Doing the Roskilde thing (delayed post)

Oh dear. It has been a while, and a whole lot has happened.

Hello Roskilde:

What can I say? Four days of mayhem. I've posted the pics to my facebook account, so I won't bother to repost them here. We were spoiled with VIP status (thanks to Hello), so we had showers and could escape to the press area when the general scene got to be too much. Our protected campsite meant that I did not experience anyone peeing on my tent - which is apparently a common occurrence in the regular camping. Plus, it meant that none of us got too smelly, which is always good.

Didn't drink as much as I feared - afraid my system doesn't really do the hardcore partying thing anymore, but saw some amazing bands. Cocorosie was my personal favorite.

Also, one final note about peeing - I have never seen so many people peeing in public in one place. I am serious. Women squatting down barely on the edge or sometimes even in the middle of the crowd, men against every wall and every tree. Have to admit I was super thankful that it didn't rain like last year, which made it easy to avoid all the wet spots.

Diesel ran this human car wash, where dirty people could get hosed down by hot women in bikinis. (As showers were few and far between in general camping - it's a pretty good draw). I thought that was an interesting bit of marketing. They even had a window where you could watch as it happened. As you can see, this was often as crowded as the wash itself.