September 1

Last night I turned into a student, just for a few hours. My friend Carlos invited me to a party organized by the Copenhagen Business School so I decided to go and see what it was about. In just a couple of hours, the Drunken Flamingo‘s rooftop went from relatively quiet to this. Not bad if you ask me. There was a nice atmosphere, good music (despite of “Get Lucky”), friendly people and loads of hot girls everywhere. After 6 months, I still get a bit overwhelmed by the number of painfully good looking individuals dwelling in this city, all blonde and tall and fit. Strong jaws and high cheekbones wherever you look, it’s crazy.

I spent most of the evening chatting with 3 swedes (a couple of guys and a girl), who recommended me to go to Gothenburg in the winter. Apparently is not as cold as you would expect and it’s beautiful in that time of the year so if I’m still around in Scandinavia in a couple of months, I might as well take the train and find out for myself. At the party, I also ran into a few Couchsurfers who I didn’t know study at CBS, which was a strange coincidence; I wasn’t expecting to see more than one familiar face in the crowd so walking into the place and suddenly being greeted by a group of five was a little bit of a surprise, in a cool kind of way.

I had a few beers and decided to cycle back home around 1:30am, just in time to see Copenhagen’s night life at his best: drunk people staggering in the streets, falling from their bikes, passing out on the sidewalks, having a casual wee in front of the clubs, making out, laughing, cheering, yelling, puking, and in general, being young and alive. A radical change from the courteous behaviour you see during the day.

This morning I woke up around 9am, put “Things the Grandchildren Should Know” in my bag and headed to Sort Kaffe Og Vinyl for my mandatory caffeine fix. Klara wasn’t there, a major bummer, but the sun was shining so I decided to sit outside and read chapters 5 and 6. The former is particularly sad, humbling and disturbing, it made me feel thankful for everything I have. At times I feel like such a lost cause but then I read stuff like this and I’m quickly reminded that I’m nothing but one little lucky motherfucker. Which probably explains while I like the Eels so much and why I do everything in my power to see them live whenever they are on tour; I feel almost obliged to show E my gratitude and also the need to feed from that positive energy he transmits.  It’s a pity I won’t be able to make it to London next week for their show at Shepherds Bush Empire, I understand is pretty much the same show and setlist they did in Copenhagen back in April, but still, I would have loved to see them again.

By the way, speaking of music, I’ve decided to turn the daily record-listening experience into a weekly ritual. Yes, I was struggling a bit to keep up with the day-to-day routine but the real reason why I’ve chosen to do it only on Sundays is because I think I will enjoy and appreciate it much more that way AND I’ll just have something to look forward to every weekend apart from doing my laundry…

August 31

Well, yesterday was my last day at the agency that hired me earlier this year. I have been let go due to cutbacks and a badly-managed organizational crisis, which means I face, once again, a stressful race against the clock. Quite a tough one, really. Being let go in the middle of the Summer, in one of the most expensive cities in Europe, where my professional network is very limited and looking for a role that’s almost a luxury in Denmark makes for a very inconvenient scenario: if I want to stay here, I need to secure a new full-time contract before I run out of money. That is, finding a highly-paid job in less than a month.

Yeah, I know, good luck with that.

* * * * *

I’ve just been to my new favourite coffeeshop, Sort Kaffe Og Vinyl, and decided to actually start a conversation with one of the baristas there: a beautiful girl called Klara, whom I instantly fell in love with a couple of weeks ago. She’s not your typical Scandinavian hottie; not blonde, really short hair (like Sinead O’Connors circa 1989) and very soft-spoken. She has a lovely smile, too. I always hesitate when approaching people out of the blue, particularly here in Copenhagen where everyone is so reserved, but I have decided to start shaking things up a little bit around here so I went for it. It took a little bit of effort to get the ball rolling but shortly after it was all fine. Turns out Klara is learning Spanish and wants to travel around South America very soon so we briefly chatted about where to go, what to do and so on. We also talked about our names and the meaning behind them. Oh dear, I think I’m slowly developing a crush on her.

Once people started arriving, it was time to bring the small talk to an end and move on. I went to the back of the place, where you can’t fit more than 10 people, and sat there, sipping coffee and munching a cinnamon roll while reading the first chapters of “Things The Grandchildren Should Know”, one of my favourite books of all times. Given the circumstances, going through this masterpiece once again seems just about right, particularly on a day like today…