& other mistranslations

lyrics: "And I was heading up north To a place that I know, Eating well, sleeping well...Oh, it's a kind of natural fact Sometimes you're just left to be alone"

words for denmark: practical, natural beauty. straight-forward, open-minded. precise and concise, succinct. conscious. when i arrived i was afraid but felt like that is the way that it should be. the money looks like play money and the currency conversion rate never sticks in my head so i always am just comparing prices to how much the coffee costs and using that as a standard. i met a beautiful couple at a cafe in a bookshop who were philosophy students from copenhagen and we started talking and then the old man sitting next to them, who i thought was a bum, joined the conversation to tell us about hippie communes and the swine holocaust happening in Jutland, a part of denmark on the mainland.

i carry my journal around with me everywhere but currently feel unable to fill it with anything but lists: when i am living so immediately, it is exhausting to relive it all by writing an account of what i see, what i do, and i still feel impotent at describing feeling -- the heaviness of loneliness or the boundlessness of freedom, for example, never permeate my daily musings to my satisfaction. i take pictures of everything though, to capture and collect the fleeting moments so that i am able to extrapolate and expand on them when i feel everything has settled enough for me to form fully composed thoughts. (also, the book that i am reading seems to more successfully express how i feel right now.)

i cross the cobbled streets at dark, streets shiny from the rain that i missed while i was in the museum, while looking both ways to avoid the weaving bicycles, just to look in the windows of the closed antique shops. it is not the same kind of trappings of loneliness, to be sure: i could talk to the people in my hostel if i wanted to, but i am too busy with my own thoughts & desires. you are right, everthing is very green here, so green it almost reverberates.
i went to two danish design museums, & many of the exhibitions & quotes more elaborately described my initial impressions of denmark: clean, useful, natural beauty. nothing that is not practical. form based on function. succinct and articulate. almost all of the buildings are made of brick, dark red brick, and everything is a uniform height except for the tall clock towers and church spires. there is a strength in unity to this, but it can make the streets difficult to navigate.

my two favorite places of denmark were humlebaek, where the louisiana museum of modern art sits perched on the edge of the north east coast of the country, looking over to sweden from its reverberating green hills; and the second was nyhavn. this small canal had colourful houses lining the streets facing the water, & looked like freshly-sharpened pencil crayons all lined up, ready.