Friday, April 12

The Duke and Boothnavy and the air mattresses they called home.

Jakob came over and accompanied us to Kirstine's apartment, where she and birthday boy Lasse fed us all sorts of wonderful Danish bread, with assorted cheese and jam. We gorged ourselves. Then Tony and Lasse headed off to pick up Rick and Judi at the airport, and Jakob brought us Freezepoppers shopping. We went to a nifty cyber-wear store, and some good thrift stores. I think that of all the cities we went to, Copenhagen was the most Allston-like. They even had 7-11s there, which was kind of shocking, because it seems that in general, the Europeans don't really go for convenience too much. But for us nutty Americans who want our soda 24 hours a day (i.e. Sean and to a lesser extent the Duke, and to an even lesser extent, me), it's a pretty good thing.

We headed back to Lasse's to gather our gear and head off to soundcheck. The club, Loppen, is located in Christiania, which was formerly military land that was claimed by hippies in the early 70s. Wow. It's a weeeeird place. It's like entering a third-world country, the roads aren't paved, there are tents and shacks set up everywhere, random piles of scrap metal lying around. Practically the first thing we see is some guy bent over, with his pants split wide open! He turned around and made a face at us. If only his toothless grimace could have erased the vision of his hairy butt crack that had been burned into my mind. We got a LOT of stares driving in. Basically, Christiania is THE most un-Freezepop place in the world, and us suavely-dressed youngsters in our French rental car were clearly not locals. The big attraction is Pusher St., where street vendors sell hash. There was a nice pond full of swans, and some kinda cool houses, but for the most part, Christiania was dirty and creeped us out a whole lot.

Loppen, however, was quite nice. And Rick and Judi showed up during our soundcheck! It was great to see them again. After soundcheck, the club fed us a wonderful dinner and then we hung out downstairs with some nice boys from Danish pop bands Junior Senior and Superheroes. We hid out until showtime, and then went upstairs to find a huge crowd! The band we were opening for, Jupiter Day, are quite big locally, so the place was sold out. We were pretty different from them musically, but the crowd seemed to be into us as well. And it's such a nice feeling playing in some new place but having old friends in the audience. It was a really fun time.

These are all by Rick.

After the show, the club had a DJ, so we hung out for a while, and then there was a plan to head over to 80s night at some other club. But by this time, it was like 3 am, and I'd had one too many gin-and-tonics and was really amusing myself just a little too much insulting Boothnavy and the horse he rode in on... Sean and da Boof were brave enough to venture out, though. They're troopers like that.