I was completely unprepared for Copenhagen- on arrival at the airport it occured to me that I didn’t speak a word of Danish, had no idea what to see, and although I was staying with friends hadn’t even noted down the address- not that I had a map anyway…
I was there for a ‘nodermeet’, in which about half a dozen everything2 users took over a vacant day care centre for the week. We rapidly turned this base into a geek compound thanks to high-speed broadband and an almost 1:1 ratio of computers to people. This made it surprisingly difficult to unplug and go sightseeing as a group, although we did eventually make it out each day. As well as having no accommodation costs, access to a kitchen saved us a lot on drinking and dining too – when we did go out in town, it was as painfully expensive as I’ve come to expect from Scandinavia. We quickly settled into communal living patterns that reminded me of my early undergrad days – only with better cooking and a greater tendency for people to pitch in with the cleaning up afterwards!
Fortunately the others were variously better equipped with ideas, maps, guidebooks or Danish skills, so I still got the chance to see plenty of Copenhagen’s attractions despite my own ignorance.
