Several pastries later

I am a wizard who works excellent tricks! Seeing that the forecast was for rain for the rest of the week in Copenhagen I went out and bought a raincoat on my first day there. It hasn't rained on me since!

Enjoying the fine weather, I've been to see a bunch of stuff around Copenhagen and Odense and tomorrow I'm heading to Århus to finish my Denmark trifecta. So far I've concluded that Scandinavia is great! Pricey, but great.

Here are some arts that I have mastered:
1) the art of seeing a large amount of things in one day
On my first day in Copenhagen I somehow managed to see what felt like a really large amount of things. To save you a long list, my favourite things were going under Christiansborg Palace to see the excavated ruins of the old castle, Kastellet, and the cellar of old wine (1614!) in the Royal treasury. This bodes well for all the cities I'm planning on heading to just for a few days!
I also went to the spot where the Little Mermaid "should be" - they've shipped the statue off to the Shanghai expo and instead have a big screen showing a live video feed of people walking past the statue in Shanghai. I found this pretty funny, but was glad I knew in advance before hiking out there!

2) the art of catching trains
Actually, I consider myself still an apprentice to this art. But I've activated my Eurail pass and used it to head to Roskilde for a day trip and then to Odense. Far out, it's so good! As long as you're not on a busy train that needs a reservation, you just hop on, no ticket required (something I needed to actually do to believe).

My day trip to Roskilde was awesome - I went to see the Viking Ship Museum and it was mighty cool to see one of my favourite things I studied archaeology for real. I thought I'd be well Vikinged out after this and wasn't planning on heading to the National Museum, but then I read some good reviews so went there the next day and woah, this had pretty much everything else I ever enjoyed in archaeology. Aurochs and lurs and coin hoards and tons of things I recognised from having their pictures in my lecture notes. It was also just a really well laid out museum. Probably the best one I've been to so far! Also, free. I'm well glad I went!

3) the art of sleeping through anything (without any aid from earplugs or eyemask)
This excludes the alarm clock that went off at 7am this morning, waking up everyone in the room I was staying in excluding the guy who'd actually set it, who was wearing earplugs.

4) the art of "eating in advance"
This one is technically more an art I mastered for one night but hope to never do again! Last night, my first night in Odense, I had just eaten a really hearty and filling lamb biryani for dinner and then went out to get a beer in "the Australian Bar". The place was packed and it turned out I'd unintentionally crashed a function for psychology students - but they had three trays of hamburgers and three huge bowls of chips that the staff told me were leftover and needed to be eaten otherwise they would get thrown out.
The prospect of free food in Scandinavia was too good to turn down! After steeling myself with beer I scoffed down "second dinner", concluding that I would just store all the energy in lieu of lunch the next day. Mostly I just felt really full. But apart from that, my plan did work, and I got free food!

My first night in Odense got even better after this, as when I was walking around trying to walk off double dinner I found an open air cinema in a plaza where people were sitting down with picnics and getting ready to watch a movie. I slyly infiltrated the crowd and sat down to see what movie was showing, and this is how I ended up watching Dirty Dancing (and had a really good time of it, largely due to the fact that I was stunned by my double-dose of free things and because the crowd were getting so into it! So many lines got mega cheers.)
Sasha and Abby: the watermelon scene was still my favourite (though somehow since you originally told me about this, I'd gotten the watermelons and "the lift" mixed up in my memory and had always imagined that the scene involved dancing in a lake whilst trying to hold watermelons over their heads).

Today I went to the Odense Zoo, which was a really good day out and even though my lunch consisted solely of reserved energy from last night's hamburger and a great bag of "snack carrots", I decided to get an icecream as well.
At the freezer I was confronted with: Batman icecream, Catwoman icecream and "Crazy Jungle" icecream.
Completely unable to choose just one out of these three amazing icecream options I ended up eating all three over the course of my day at the zoo. And that was how I ended up just eating carrots and icecream for lunch today.

Another story I have from Denmark is that I was helped out at the post office by a guy who was the splitting image of James Corden in "The Lodger", who told me I had a cool name because it's like Brian Moriarty, the 80s video game designer. This is one I've never heard before, except from myself. What a champion! This guy can be my Danish best friend!

I have some pictures to prove all of the above but it looks like uploading them is going to take longer than my patience before heading out to eat some proper food for dinner. But in the meantime, here's a picture that I intend to use as the cover of my first solo album, I guess entitled "Moriarty in Moscow" or maybe something else more inventive (thanks to Tony for the pic!).