Sankt Hans — St. John’s Eve — in the suburb of Valby was lots of fun. All the action took place at the house next door to Luisa’s parents: I arrived to find a sea of children and their parents dining on a buffet of tasty delights. Olle grabbed me a plate, Luisa brought me some wine, and we men hunkered down in the corner for some serious talk with Luisa’s father about Italian wine, urban agriculture, and the similarities of grappa, slivovitz and other distilled beverages.

Halfway through the night one of the big tablers said “who’s the guy from Canada?” and when I raised my hand, and explained I was from Prince Edward Island, I had an instant conversational entrée to the Anne of Green Gables reader across the table. We had a nice chat about U.S. politics, about the difficulties of learning Danish for an English speaker (a topic considerably enhanced by her imminent graduation as a speech-language pathologist) and about whether PEI is as beautiful as L.M. Montgomery wrote it to be (I had to admit that, at least for now, it still is).

Somewhere in there we actually did sing Vi elsker vort land (“We love our country”) — there were song sheets and everything — and also Happy Birthday, or at least the Danish version thereof, as it was one of the wee folk’s day (the big line in this song is “med dejlig chokolade og kager til” — “all with tasty chocolate and cakes.”)

The kids went to bed, the crowd thinned out, some mind-cracklingly good espresso was served to accompany the fruit salad for dessert, and before I knew it it was 10:30 p.m. (although you’d never know it from the light still in the sky at that hour).

I retrieved my plates from the dishwasher — I attempted a reasonable facsimile the Catherine’s standard tapas offerings as my contribution — loaded up the bike, and walked with Olle and Luisa to the train, honoured to again have a backstage pass into regular everyday Danish life.

I decided to move ahead to the next level of the S-train experience for my trip down to Valby this evening: taking my bicycle on the train. It turned out to be very simple: I bought one ticket for me (20 DKK), and another ticket for my bicycle (12 DKK):

When the train arrived on the platform, the first carriage had a huge image of a bicycle painted on its side, so it wasn’t hard to figure out which carriage was meant for me.

There is a cycleway that leads from just the other side of the Bispebjerg S-train station down to Nørrebrogade and then across to the end of Jægersborggade. I cycled the route with GPS running this afternoon on my way back from shopping (I bought bread a Katz Kitchen) and you can see my route here.

Along the way I encountered a piece of public art seeming custom-tailored for me: it’s a large paved mound about 25 feet across with its latitude and longitude painted on it in big block letters:

It must be a relatively new installation, as it doesn’t show up in Google or Yahoo Maps nor in Google Earth.

It’s Sankt Hans here in Denmark tonight. I’m busy learning the tune to Vi elsker vort land so as to be able to hold my own at the bonfires. Around supper time I’m headed down to Valby to join Olle and Luisa and Luisa’s family and friends. We love our country.

Nokia announces the acquisition of Plazes. I’m obviously a fan of both.

Sadly, George Carlin has died at 71. It was only Friday that I was thinking that I needed to dig up A Place for My Stuff — I was headed over to Malmö with a backup with a subset of my stuff (“now what stuff do I bring?!”).

Of course the routine that Carlin was known most for was “Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television.” Apparently you still can’t say these words on TV; witness this cowardly segment on CNN:

“A word for excretion.” What brave journalism.

The audacious monkey known as Curious George in Canada is known as Peter Pedal here in Denmark:

The Man with the Yellow Hat, however, retains his identity as Manden Med Den Gule Hat.

I’m not one for the scripty type, but the letters on this house sign are just beautiful: