Denmark's The Spot

Jenn and I have been a lot of places, but Scandinavia was uncharted territory for us before this weekend. There is so much we would have liked to see, but we didn't have too much time. You've got to start somewhere, and where we started, was Copenhagen.

We'd heard great things about the city and had really high expectations. After arriving on an early morning flight, buying our Copenhagen tourist cards, and dropping our bags off at the Kong Frederick Hotel, we hit the ground running. Our first impression was that the city was much dirtier than we expected. It's not that it was dirty per se, but we expected it to be spotless (like Singapore), and it's far from it. We walked up Stroget, which is the main shopping street, and onto the Rosenborg Castle, one of several residences for the royal family. The crown jewels are stored there and were both absurd and impressive at the same time.

We ate lunch at the Royal Cafe, known for their famous smushies, which is a modern take on smorrebrod, the open faced sandwiches that Denmark is known for. They were a little fancy, but pretty good. We shared three: meatloaf, smoked salmon, and scallop hash. Everything, including food, is incredibly expensive in Copenhagen. It's painful. This lunch of three smushies and water set us back roughly 30 bucks.
In order to maximize our time and get the most out of our recently purchased Copenhagen cards, we then walked over to and through the Jewish Museum. It was small, but better than most Jewish museums we'd been to in that the focus was actually on Jewish history in Denmark, as opposed to simply showing Jewish symbols like torahs, menorahs, etc.

The sky was still bright blue and the sun shining brightly, so we walked outside some more. We walked to the water and checked out the beautiful Royal Library building. One side is the old traditional library building, but the other is a modern all glass creation known as the Black Diamond. We hung out and enjoyed the nice weather for a while and then went back to the hotel to nap for a couple of hours before our late dinner reservation.

Danish cuisine is very hot right now. It's crown jewel is Noma, which was just named the top restaurant in the world by S. Pellegrino's Top 50 Restaurants in the World, whatever that means. We were not able to get a reservation there, but there are plenty of excellent options. A lot of the menus, however, didn't look that appetizing to us. Sometimes restaurants can just be too out there with their menus. I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who enjoy shelling out two to three hundred a person for food that looks like it belongs in a modern art museum, but not us. Even the Top Chef judges constantly are reminding the contestants to keep it simple. If Padma says so, then I'll listen.

Dinner was at the excellent Fiskebar, at the entrance of the old meatpacking district. They still have the old meat hooks (gross) as coat hangers to prove it. Sitting in this place, one gets the sense that they think they are too cool for their own good, but it's a neat place. We shared scallops over puff pastry for the appetizer and pan fried witch, which is kind of like flounder, for the entree. Both were outstanding. This was the type of meal that makes one appreciate food. It was simple food, prepared well.
There was more great weather on our second day and we enjoyed the city as a local does and did so by bike. We took the tour with Bike with Mike, and it was great. We rode through the heart of the city and saw most of the highlights: Copenhagen Cathedral, Christianhavn area, Nyhavn neighborhood, the opera house, the Royal Palace, and of course the Little Mermaid. The Little Mermaid is a small statue that was inspired by the Hans Christian Andersen tale. When watching tourists fawn over it and desperately try to touch it, it comes across a lot like an idol being worshiped. It's a little strange. It was impossible to get a picture of it without capturing onlookers and "touchers" in the background. As I realize every time we do such things, I enjoy biking much more in theory than I do in reality, but it was a very enjoyable three and a half hours. One thing that struck us was how relaxed things are there as opposed to the United States. Mike didn't have biking helmets for us and very rarely looked back to make sure his participants were with the group and/or alive. It all worked out in the end though, so I guess he knows what he's doing.
We had a late lunch al fresco at Cafe Victor, which was awesome. Jenn had the lobster bisque and I had the brunch plate, which consisted of scrambled eggs, delicious smoked salmon, chopped liver, and some other things. Everything was excellent.

We only had about an hour before the Christiansborg Palace was to close, so we rushed through it. It was actually very nice. The highlights were the Great Hall, which is adorned with modern tapestries created and given to the Queen in honor of her 50th birthday (though they weren't actually given to her until her 60th because they took 10 years to make), and the ruins below the palace of previous castles that stood at the same site. We probably could have used more time there.

In the evening (and I use that word lightly in that it doesn't get dark there until around 10pm), we visited the famous Tivoli Gardens. These gardens, legend has it, are what inspired Walt Disney to create Disney World. It's a weird place. As for the actual grounds, it's very pretty. The flowers, mostly tulips, were in full bloom, and were beautiful. Otherwise, it's a nice amusement park with roller coasters, carnival games, etc. What is strange is that as opposed to Six Flags and the Disney parks, where there is vending stand after vending stand hawking hot dogs, burgers, and other greasy fare, Tivoli has many high end restaurants, a couple of which have Michelin stars. Since we were there at night, it was mostly adults there, probably there for dinner, and the way too overhyped fountain and laser show. Since it was Sunday, several restaurants were closed and the ones that were open didn't interest us much. We opted for organic hot dogs from the vending stand... in the Asian section of the park, since, of course, organic hot dogs from... Asia, are so good. We selected this over the hamburgers offered from the other stand in the Asian section.

It was finally dark and we took and evening stroll over to see the opera house lit up at night, which nice. We passed the Royal Danish Playhouse, which is another beautiful glass building along with every other glass building in the city. There were tons of people filing in for a post party after attending what we found out was some theater awards ceremony. They were in formal wear, and while most were walking, it was funny to see many of them riding their bikes, as the Danes like to do. We thought it would be fun to crash it as it didn't seem too hard to sneak in, but we didn't have anything any on closely resembling formal wear, and I'm not capable of such a thing.

On our third day in Copenhagen, we still had wonderful weather. It was Jenn's birthday. We walked outside a lot. We toured through the Danish Design Center in the morning, which was pretty much an advertisement for how great the Danish are at designing things. I thought perhaps they were taking credit for a few things that weren't necessarily their original ideas, but who was I to argue? Lunch was at Ida Davidsen, which seemed to be the oldest and most famous smorrebrod restaurant. It was overpriced, but the sandwiches were good. We shared three: smoked salmon, a kind of baked potato one, and roast beef with fried onions on top.

After walking through a few of the local department stores and in and out of the Royal Copenhagen china store, we went over to the Norrebro neighborhood to check it out. We sat in the front row of the metro and the front of the train is a clear window (like the monorail), so it felt like video game. It was awesome. There wasn't much to see once we arrive, but there was one street with some cute shops and restaurants. I got some ice cream, so was happy. On the way back, we walked through the Assistens Cemetary, which doubles as a park where people rest, relax, sunbathe, and whatever else people do in parks. It was a little strange to see people sunbathing right next to gravestones. We saw Hans Christian Andersen's grave. There are some other famous Danes buried there, including Soren Kierkegaard, and Cristen Jacobsen, the founder of the Carlsberg brewery, but we didn't know that until later.
After a beer sampler at the Brewpub next to our hotel, we were about out of time. We grabbed our bags from the hotel and had really nice birthday dinner for Jenn at the Nimb Hotel Bar 'n' Grill. We were the only ones in the restaurant for a 5:15 reservation, but we had to eat early so we could catch a train to the airport for our flight out at 8. Dinner was great, and the chocolate fondant with vanilla ice cream was a great way to top it off.
It was a perfect end to Jenn's birthday and to our trip. The flight back was uneventful. It was nice to get back to Bratislava. It'll be nice to spend a few weeks back at home without any work travel for a while.

For more pictures, click here.

Hockeytown USA

Slovakia is hosting the World Hockey Championships, which is like the World Cup for hockey. The final rounds as well as some of the higher profile earlier games will be in Bratislava, while Kosice (pronounced Ko-sheet-zeh), in Eastern Slovakia, has the remaining ones. The US was set to play Austria in a first round matchup. We made a roadtrip out of it along with our friends, Jory and Caitlin, and had a great weekend.

We took the train early Saturday for the five hour trip to Kosice. We passed the time sleeping, eating snacks, reading, chatting, looking out the window at some beautiful scenery, and playing scrabble. What started out as a five hour trip ended up taking about seven. There was a problem on the track ahead, so the train stopped eerily in what seemed like the middle of nowhere. The entire train was emptied and we waited with drunk Austrian hockey fans, several nuns, and a couple hundred other annoyed people to board buses to get to the next train station where we would board another train to complete the trip.

We arrived at the Kosice train station with about 25 minutes until the start of the game. We had a taxi drop us off at the hostel at which we would be staying for the evening. It was at this point that it started pouring down rain. Because of the hockey, it was very hard to find a hotel room, which is why we ended up sharing a room with 4 beds at the hostel. This was to be my first hostel experience. I'd always been curious about it and even though I've become softer and more sheltered over the years, I figured because of my time at summer camp, I could handle it. We dropped off our stuff and ran the last couple of blocks over to the arena.
We finally made it in, bought some beers, and some food, only to find out from the usher that we could not leave the concourse and go to our seats as long as we had food and beverage in hand. None of us had ever heard of such a thing at any sporting event, but since there was no way to smuggle in 500 ml beers, we consumed our refreshments while watching on the video screen from the concourse. I'm not sure what the logic is to this rule. I guess it's to keep the arena clean, but what it seems to promote is shotgunning beers which leads to lots of drunk fans. We made it to our seats finally, after we, of course, shotgunned our beers. Our section was crowded, but the rest of the arena was half full. I can understand the US not being a big draw, but I thought Austria would have plenty of support.

The rest of the game was anti-climactic as the US easily cruised to a 5-1 victory. It was fun to be there to support our country, and made me much more proud of my country than for the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Not that I think negatively of his death, but it makes me extremely uncomfortable to see and read about throngs of people storming the streets and celebrating. It makes me worry, that's all, for lots of reasons.
We spent the rest of the evening walking around the very nice city center which has been re-developed in recent years. There was lots of excitement for the hockey, but not so much activity out at the bars. We ate street food for dinner and continued the drinking we started at the hockey game. The problem for me was that I'd just returned from Asia on Wednesday night after two and a half weeks, so every half liter beer I drank, I probably became 10 times more tired. After a couple of hours, I was struggling to keep my eyes open. As much as I wanted to stay out, I couldn't, and while I tried to tell Caitlin, Jory, and Jenn, they could stay out without me, they all came back to the hostel.

In the early morning, I passed a man walking down the hall wearing leopard print underwear on my way to the bathroom. The rest of the morning was much less eventful. We walked around the main street, had some breakfast, some ice cream, and headed back to Bratislava.

The train back was thankfully much less eventful than the ride to get there.

It was a short, but fun trip. It was great to be there to support our country.

For more pictures, click here.

Back to Bratislava - Airplane Reviews

The day began with a 5am wakeup call in a hotel room in Penang and ended with an 11pm arrival at our flat in Bratislava. In between, the trip included stopovers in Kuala Lumpur and Dubai. It was a long day. As much I travel, there is no getting used to it. The days just seem longer every time I do it.

I read through Time's 100 Most Influential people, which wasn't bad. Maybe one day I'll be influential.

I also read some more of the book I'm reading, Traffic, which is un-ironically, about traffic and why we drive the way we do. It's about as boring as it sounds, but I'm forcing myself to get through it.

I ate lunch and dinner on two different Emirates flights. Both were chicken dishes with vegetables, and neither was bad. I still say Emirates has the best food of any airline on which I've been. The dessert on the first one was chocolate cake that they, for some unknown reason, ruined by slapping an apricot on top of it. The chocolate dessert on the second one wasn't bad. It was the same chocolate cake as the first flight (sans the apricot) but was surrounded with kind of a mousse cream. I read something recently that said the best way to fight jet lag is to fast when traveling. I've thought about this, but I have to eat when I'm hungry. However, I've stopped letting the airlines dictate when I should eat since they are serving trays of food constantly. I only eat the meal if I'm hungry. Otherwise, I take a pass.

As for entertainment, I finished two movies that I previously had fell asleep during on previous flights and watched one in full.

TRUE GRIT
I only had a little bit left to watch on this one. I fell asleep watching it on my trip from Hong Kong to Kuala Lumpur. I've been wanting to see it as I generally enjoy the movies the Coen Brothers put out. I sense it was nominated for an Oscar purely because it was tagged as "Directed by the Joel and Ethan Coen." The movie was fine, but there wasn't anything particularly memorable. It was a well made Western film. The actress who played the girl was pretty good.

FAIR GAME
I cannot remember when I started this one, but I had seen a good chunk of it on some other flight at some point. What's funny (and not the best endorsement for the film) is that I fell asleep again watching it today on my 2nd flight and had to pick it up again on the third. This is less about the movie and more about that I'm rarely on a plane now when I'm not totally exhausted and badly in need of sleep. This film stars Sean Penn and Naomi Watts and tells the "true" story of CIA operative Valerie Plame, who was outed and made a scapegoat by President Bush's administration in an effort to distract the general population and the media from the fact that they weren't finding WMD's in Iraq, and her husband, Joe Wilson. The story was extremely one sided and extremely slanted to the left, which makes sense because it was based on the books by Wilson and Plame, and because Sean Penn was in it. Overall, I enjoyed it, but I prefer movies that are accounts of true stories to be a little less biased and attempt to paint the whole picture so that the audience can decide what they think. I don't like being told what to think.

RED
This one I watched from beginning to end. It came out last year and stars Bruce Willis, John Malkovich, Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman and some other old people. They are retired CIA agents who have become targets to be killed. It was fun, entertaining, and relatively well written. All the characters are likeable and the pace of the story was great. The 2 hours flew by, which is exactly what you want when watching a movie on a long flight. It was a perfect movie for airplane viewing.

That's all for now from the airplane seat. There will be more to come in June, which looks like it'll be my next trip to the US.     

Malaysia

Before I worked for Dell, all I knew about Malaysia was based on the prominent role it played in the movies. It's where Demi Moore is seen touring the manufacturing line on a recorded news story when Michael Douglas exposes her (unlike earlier in the movie when she exposes herself) during a press conference at the end of Disclosure. In Entrapment, it's where Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta Jones perform the heist at the twin towers. In reality, it's a huge manufacturing center for almost every technology company, including Dell.

I am in Penang. There is a mix of Malays, Chinese, and Indians, so touches of all three cultures as well as food are prevalent. The nice thing for me is that English is the primary language spoken because it's common between the three groups of people. Tourism seems to be big, but I'm not sure why. There really isn't much to do and while there are beaches, they aren't great. The climate is much like New Orleans or Houston, hot and humid.

I made an attempt to explore the city on Saturday, but the woman working at the front desk of the hotel really didn't have much to recommend. Neither did the people I knew who worked in the Penang office.  I had the taxi drop me off in Georgetown, the old town area. I walked past the Town Hall, Upper Penang Drive (which was dead during the day), Fort Cornwallis (where Captain Francis Light, the founder of Penang first landed), and the Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion. The mansion was built by an incredibly successful businessman, Cheong Fatt Tze. I didn't go inside. I'm fortunate to not have been taken out by a car or motorbike as there are no sidewalks or crosswalks. It's not a pedestrian friendly city. In the evening we went out to Strait's Quay, a big restaurant and shopping development, with some other members of the audit team that were also there working. We ate at a fish and chips place that was decent.
On Sunday, Jason and I went out to the Shangri-La Rasa Sayang Resort to indulge in their decadent Easter Sunday brunch. It was magnificent. There were different buffets serving Chinese, Malay, and Indian food, but also a fresh seafood station and a large dessert bar. I'm not a big buffet guy, but not only was the selection good, but the food quality was outstanding. My buffet routine normally consists of one plate of food and then one plate of dessert and I'm done, but on this day, I went crazy with a second food plate which consisted of boiled shrimp and crawfish. The dessert area had some things you don't normally see for dessert at a buffet. There was cotton candy, shaved ice, and made to order crepes. I didn't feel disgustingly full at the end, so rather than go back for more (since getting disgustingly full and getting your money's worth is the goal of eating at a buffet, right?), I cashed in my chips right there and walked away a winner.

It rained in the afternoon, so I walked to the mall next to the hotel and saw the movie Source Code with Jake Gyllenhaal. It was pretty much a long Quantam Leap episode. It was entertaining, but the whole thing went to shit at the end of the movie. Whomever wrote it or decided on that ending ruined all the goodwill that was built up with the audience for the previous hour or so. If you are a huge Jake Gyllenhaal fan and are super psyched to see this movie and don't want the ending spoiled, you may want to skip the next couple of sentences and move to the next paragraph. This exemplifies one of my big problems with fiction. When a story and plot is created, especially when it's science fiction-y, rules are laid out to make it believable. The premise and "rules" for the source code are far fetched, but nonetheless, there are strict guidelines laid out. When the ending, which seemed very Hollywood-ish, totally discounts everything that was previously laid out and goes against all the rules outlined, it shows very little confidence in the story to begin with and no faith in the audience. Hollywood must think we're all idiots. Maybe we are.

The highlight was the Indian food I ate at Sri Ananda Bahwa and the other at Kapitan. I liked Kapitan so much that I went back a second time. It's been a long and busy two and a half weeks in Asia. I am beyond ready to board the plan tomorrow to head home.