I didn’t get to commute by bicycle — it was pouring rain when I set out to leave and I lack the proper rain slicks to make a rainy bike trip — so I quickly calculated a backup plan involving walking and bus (it takes about 3x as long this way as by bike, proving why bikes are so useful). I overshot the Nordre Fasanvej stop because I thought Nordre was somebody’s name — “Hey, Nordre, pass the salt!” — whereas it actually means “north” (as “søndre” means south). But only by a block. So I arrived at the Kedelhallen early enough that there was still a health stack of name tags in the “P” pile.

On the way in the alley I ran into Dannie Jost and Henriette and it was like [[Old Home Week]]. Quite a change from reboot 7 last year where I was able to slink in under the radar; today Dannie greeted me with “I thought you were going to ride your bike!?” There are no secrets.

To save you from an exhaustive blow-by-blow of the day’s events (and to save myself — I have to get up in 7 hours and do it all over again), here are the highlights of my day:

• Adam Arvidsson condensed a year-long introduction to sociology into 45 minutes. It was brilliant. Now all I need is the same exercise for the other disciplines and I’ll be able to make up for my lack of formal education (always running into problems when people quote James Joyce and I’ve no idea who they’re talking about…). Favourite thought: in the 21st century social bonds are unstable, and we’re continually forced to reproduce them (we can no longer rely on technologies like religion to cement our bonds); in this way we are becoming more like monkeys.
• Ulla-Maaria Mutanen on “Crafter Economics.” I wish [[Catherine]] could have been there — this was a perfect demonstration of the overlap of our two disciplines. Ulla-Maaria’s thinklink project is intriguing. Favourite idea: “learning motivates exchange” (mostly because that’s what motivates me).
• An early morning exchange with Martin Roell and others where we talked about how the colours of photos in Flickr change with the seasons, and how we could write an app to extract a sort of Flickr Colour Temperature — the aggregate colour of the photos flowing in on a given day — in the style of the terror alert system in the USA.
• Running into Matthias Müller-Prove again and remembering that he wore red trousers at reboot 7, and intriguing (or confusing?) him with that memory. This year, by the way, he is wearing a sort of “ruddy tan” trouser.
• A chat with Jacob Friis Saxberg, also an acquaintance from reboot 7.
• JP Rangaswami — best speaker of the day, bar none; a sort of “Steve Jobs, but with dissonance.” Favourite ideas: “we never used to have privacy, why do we need it now?” and “the way to prevent bad ratings [in recommendation engines] is to do good things.”
• Steve Coast on OpenStreetMap. A brilliant idea and a tremendous tool for humanity going forward. Steve’s an excellent presenter, too.
• Meeting up with Felix Petersen from [[Plazes]] again, and meeting the “Plazes Portugal” guy — Pedro Custódio who is organizing a conference called SHiFT in Portugal in September (a reason to return to Portugal presents itself as if by magic).
• A demo by the guys from The Pirate Bay. Except they had nothing to demo because their servers had been seized. And the few questions they received they had no real answers for.
• Stumbling into a late-night coven of consultants gathered in a circle far from the madding crowd discussing their craft — Ton and Elmine and Martin and others. Fascinating to eavesdrop.
• Learning that both [[Olle]] and my new acquaintance Jonas Bengtsson were both familiar with the erstwhile Canadian television drama Danger Bay (we talked about lots of others things too).
• A presentation on technology use in schools by David Smith that renewed by faith in humanity. David is a teacher who in most situations other than the one he finds himself in would be sacked for blaspheming; as it is, he is a smart, literate, and conducting an inspiring stealth of networked culture into his school. Bravo.
• Sitting between [[Rob Paterson]] and Rick Segal, two fellow Canadians at the opposite ends of several spectrums.
• Leaving my laptop at home. I bought a small black and red [[Stephen Regoczei]] style notebook at Føtex for 9 kroner on my way to the Kedelhallen; it and my four colour pen served me extremely well.
• Google Will Eat Itself.

By the time I looked at my watch for the first time, it was 10:30 p.m. By the time I got home it was midnight. I will leave reboot stickers for [[Oliver]] on the dining room table and steal off again into the morning before he gets up. Tomorrow, hell or high water, I will ride a bicycle to reboot.

Some more observations from the edge of Denmark looking in:

• Everyone obeys traffic signals. All the time. I stood on a street corner at 11:00 p.m. with no traffic around with three other swarthy looking guys for 4 minutes to wait for the pedestrian signals to change. Every other place I’ve ever been we all would have jaywalked across instantly. [[Olle]] says it’s because the whole interconnected bicycle, pedestrian, car system relies on predictability.
• A4 paper. It’s not uniquely Danish, I realize, but this is my first experience of a culture where 8-1/2 by 11 does not rule. Everything I print out seems just that little bit too tall.
• Unilingual transit. The transit systems in Bangkok, Bilbao, Dublin, Porto, Montpellier, Zagreb and Ljubljana all have instructions and announcements in the home language and English; although the automated ticket machines do have an English option, everything else is Danish-only.
• Integrated transit. One ticket gets you access to metro, buses and trains. Think “use my GO Train ticket on the TTC, VIA Rail and Orillia Transit” if you’re in Toronto (who knows, maybe you can do that now). Today for our trip to Ljere I used the same 105 kroner ($19 CAD) “24 hours of travel in Greater Copenhagen” ticket to take the bus to the train station, the train to Ljere (about 50 km away), and the bus from the Ljere station to our destination — and back.
• Dual action hand drying. Electric hot air hand dryers and paper towels in public washrooms.
• Hello? To say “Hi!” to someone in Copenhagen you say “Hej!” Which sounds just like “Hi!”
• The letter D. This is just weird. [[Olle]], for example, lives on “Prinsesse Charlottes Gade” and I’ve been saying this (to myself, mostly, in my head) as “Princess Charlotte’s Gade” (rhymes with “Gatorade”). By it’s not “Gade” rhymes with “Raid,” it’s “Gade” rhymes with “Rail.” This is called the “soft d” in this [excellent] Introduction to Danish course.
• Orange vs. Apple. The Danish word for “orange” is “appelsin.” I’m convinced this is just a joke at the expense of English speakers.
• Pull flushing. To flush the toilet you pull up on a do-hickey in the tank’s top (in Portugal you push down).
• Bicycles. Did I mention the bicycles. I know I should remember from last year, but I forgot: there are bicycles everywhere.

Want more? See Interesting Things About Denmark, Part I.

Turns out that [[reboot]] is only 12 minutes from our apartment by bicycle. So tomorrow morning will be my first bona fide bicycle commute.

Regular readers may recall that I am not a huge fan of the way we educate our children. Partly (and maybe even mostly) this is because, although I was technically a “good student” throughout much of my own schooling, I didn’t actually end up learning very much. Everything I have learned, I’ve learned by doing it; while I recognize that some people are comfortable dwelling in the theoretical, I’m what you might call a “kinesthetic learner” — if I’m not mucking about inside something, I’m not learning.

While it’s too early to suss out the depths of [[Oliver]]’s learning style, all appearances are that he shares this trait with me to some degree (and with his mother, to boot).

Which explain, perhaps, why today was such a wonderful day for Oliver and I.

We were out on the streets of Copenhagen at 8:30 a.m. this morning. We caught bus 6A to the main station — about 10 minutes up the street — and from there took the 37 minute train ride to Lejre, home to the Lejre Forsøgscenter — the Lejre Experimental Centre.

From the train station in Lejre, a short ride on bus 233 took us to the door of the Centre. We were there by 10:30 a.m.

Now in this case “we” means me, Oliver, and about 100 school children who came along on the same train and bus with us. While I thought this would bode poorly for our experience, it turns out that there are a lot of acres to spread out into, and what we saw of our fellow travelers was entertaining and helpful rather than crowded:

Now we’ve all been to those “ye olde historic village” places in our youth, haven’t we? Black Creek Pioneer Village. Orwell Corner. Upper Canada Village. And so on. The usual drill sees a cast of ye olde people dressed in ye olde costumes doing ye olde things for our education and amusement.

While there is a touch of this at Lejre — a weaver weaving, a potter potting — even these are done in a “no velvet ropes” kind of way. There is nowhere “off limits” at Lejre, no “fragile antiquities” that you can’t touch. It is truly a living museum.

What’s more, the heart of the Centre is a series of experiences that focus on teaching about the stone age and the iron age. And it is in this that the kinesthetic gloves come off and Lejre comes into its own.

We started our visit with a walk along the Karpesøen (Carp Lake) to the Historiske værksteder (Historic Workshops) where we had conversations with the aforementioned potter and weaver (I believe I may have convinced the weaver to try out the “sheep to shawl” concept so popular at Canadian agricultural exhibitions; she needs to learn how to spin first, though).

The weaver was housed in a thatched roof cottage — most of the buildings have thatched roofs, at least the “post-thatch” buildings — that was having its roof re-thatched. Watching that process alone was worth the visit: it’s a complex operation conducted by two men, and appears to essentially involve weaving a roof out of straw.

Around the corner and up the hill a bit we came upon a sounder of wild boar (yes, that’s what it’s called). Other than being borderline frightening in a “we have hidden powers and could storm through the fence and eat you” kind of way, the boars, especially the frolicsome baby boars, were delightful.

Up the hill a little bit more — by this time we’d integrated ourselves into a roving band of Icelandic senior citizens — we came upon a group of Canadian young people in residence as ye olde children in Landbohusene (Rural Cottages). They looked to be doing the country proud, churning butter, gathering water and chopping onions.

Back down the hill for lunch, we passed the frolicsome boar sounder mid-feeding, with an animated Dane conducting a session for a group of students about something I have only to assume involved boars and food.

Passing the Carp Lake again, we actually saw carp. They were very majestic looking fish.

It being 11:30 a.m. by now, and with only a train station croissant in our bellies, we stopped for lunch. Right in the middle of the Centre is a “Food Stand” that sells, among other things, very tasty smoked salmon and apple sandwiches and hot chocolate.

Sated, we headed over to the Filmsal (Cinema) to watch a Danish slide show about the aforementioned “heart” of the museum — a set of experiences set in a place called Båldalen (Fire Valley).

I must say that for an educational slide-tape presentation, they did pretty well: the presentation was mostly split-screen scenes with “modern life” illustrated on the left and the iron age equivalent illustrated on the right. So on the left you have kids playing video games and on the right you have iron age kid playing the flute. And so on.

After the show, it was down to the kinesthethesia.

Our first activity, ably guided by staff person Sara, was to take some wheat and turn it into flour. We did this by pounding. And pounding. And pounding. A rock against a bigger rock. As we were in a “between kindergarten classes” empty spell, we had the wheat pounding area to ourselves, and Oliver and I each had our own station. Because of my awesome strength and advanced years, I was able to best Oliver’s output; Oliver, however, had a much more entertaining style.

After wheat was turned into flour (and here I must admit that I had little idea how this process actually worked before pounding out the flour myself), we put it into a wooden bowl, added a little water, made a patty about the size of a hockey puck and placed it on an iron disk over a hot fire. In about three minutes we had ourselves a little hunk of unleavened bread. It was hot and crunchy and Oliver at the whole thing with enthusiasm.

After making bread we headed over to the “chop wood with an iron axe” section and, after assurances from Sara that Oliver was quite old enough to participate, we each grabbed an iron axe, stood behind a log (with a helpful “safety log” between our legs and the target) and hacked away. Oliver got really good at it after a while; his Grandpa Joe will be proud of his new skill.

Next it was down to the dugouts. Oliver’s “small watercraft” experience to this point had been limited to the swan boats at Rainbow Valley; dugouts were something more of a challenge, especially given the “you can figure this out on your own just like they did in the iron age” ethos at play (albeit with a modern concession to lifejackets for everyone).

We ended up at opposite ends of a dugout that was about 20 feet long — a sort of super-dugout. Obviously my iron age ancestors didn’t weigh as much as I do: once I stepped into the boat there was about an inch of space between the lip and the water. But we managed to make it go, using our primitive iron age paddles to head out in the small pond, execute a turn or two, and make it back to shore in one piece.

Undrowned, we continued on. Next stop: the iron age.

The highlight of the iron age was the blacksmith. Oliver and I were sitting in a thatched roof iron age cottage having a discussion about what exactly the iron age was — iron better than stone for cutting, things made out of iron, etc. — when Oliver mentioned that horseshoes are made out of iron. At that exact moment a barefoot blacksmith bellowed in the door and said “I make horseshoes — want to see my shop?” We followed him:

I have always found blacksmiths to be rather standoffish types. Or perhaps, because blacksmiths fall into that “type of guy to which Catherine is unnaturally attracted” category, perhaps I’m standoffish towards them. In any case, I’d never had a good one-on-one with a blacksmith until today. This guy knows his stuff and can talk and explain and hammer away and man the bellows and answer Oliver’s questions all at the same time.

You’d think, living with a metal-smith for 15 years as I have, that I would know more about how metal works. I suppose I simply forgot to ask. We sure learned a lot today. Like how you make charcoal (burn wood in an oxygen-reduced environment), where iron comes from (certain boggy situations produce rocks from which iron can be extracted), what colours iron glows with at various temperatures (white is 1200 degrees), that cast iron is very breakable, how to light a fire with flint, what bellows do. And more. We talked with the barefoot blacksmith for almost half an hour. And walked away with an intimate knowledge of his art.

There’s nothing like learning about the iron age while sitting in a thatched-roof, mud-coated blacksmith’s shop with a fire blazing at your feet and a barefoot blacksmith telling you tales.

After the iron age, we ventured on into the stone age. This era, because of its distance from the centre of the Centre, seemed lesser traveled, and we had vast expanses of pastoral stone age splendor to ourselves.

Okay, so maybe that’s not stone age splendor per se. But it certainly was beautiful countryside. When we got to the Stenalderbopladsen (Stone Age dwelling) we found a pre-thatch civilization:

Having just learned about the wonders of iron, it was immediately obvious what not having iron left you without. Again, how would you ever understand this unless you’d just sat inside an iron age house and were now sitting in a more primitive skin-roofed dome with holes where the rain could get in”

From the stone age it was over a bridge to get back to the future. Why exactly it is that Oliver is afraid of mayonnaise, but not of rickety stone age bridges I do not know, but he bounded over this one like it was the most normal thing in the world:

From there it was over the hill, around the bend, over another bridge, through a sheep meadow, and we were back at the dugout milling chopping area. Oliver had a helpful conversation with Sara’s guiding partner about things like “what is harder, stone or iron?” (answer: stone) and “how do you light a fire?” (answer: “come on over here and we’ll light one together”). We took another whack or two with the axes, and then to finish final ride in the dugout (with my summer camp canoe skills coming back, we did much better):

We said our goodbyes to our helpful guides, caught the 3:49 p.m. bus back to meet the 4:07 p.m. train back to Copenhagen, and were in our apartment by 5:30 p.m.

We found an apartment to rent right in the heart of Copenhagen because we wanted to have a quintessential urban experience; as it turns out, today we got a quintessential rural one too.

Does all this kinesthetic chopping and grinding and boating actually teach kids anything? When we got home we sat down to a dinner of cheese and tomato sandwiches on croissants. Oliver, in the way he often does, asked me “what croissants made of?” Then he stopped himself, got a twinkle in his eye, and said “that place - before - today - wheat!”.

My friend G. just sent word that Brian Cudmore, one of my favourite people, died this morning at 3:00 a.m.

Brian has been almost about to die so often over the last 5 years that I sort of got to believe that perhaps he would live forever: every time he was on death’s door, he made an amazing surprise recovery, and kept living. Alas, this time not.

Brian lives on, of course, through his son Chris, and daughters Cynthia and Carolyn; indeed in each of them you can see some of him.

I know they will miss him dearly. As will I. Good-bye, Brian.

Today’s mission: get the firmware on my [[Nokia N70]] mobile phone upgraded. The “firmware” is really the software inside the phone — its guts, so to speak. And my phone guts dated back to October 2005 and many bug fixes and upgrades have been released since then, so it was time for a trip to the repair centre to have updated guts inserted.

The problem with owning a cool bleeding edge euro-phone like the N70 is that, because it hasn’t been released in Canada or the U.S. yet, you can’t actually get the firmware upgraded in North America. So this was my chance.

After some careful study of the Nokia Denmark website, I came across their locate a repair centre page and, from there, sent out a couple of email enquiries around town — “here’s what I need — can you help me?” — last night.

This morning I had two replies, and I choose one of them, from the Sonofon repair shop on Fredrikskaj, a location that appeared easy bicycle distance away.

I hitched up the bike (and figured out how to get on a bike that has a child seat attached — requires careful leaning) and headed south, rough directions printed out and in my pocket.

Fifteen minutes later I was inside the “Butik” at the gleaming Sonofon HQ (map) and found an extremely professional staff ready to help with the guts upgrade. They popped out my SIM card and my MMC card, took my name, told me it would take 30 minutes and cost me 250 kroner, and ushered me to the waiting room.

Thirty minutes later I had my phone back in hand, and the old “V 2.0539.1.2” firmware had been upgraded to “V 5.0609.2.0.1”. The tech apologized that he couldn’t install a Canadian firmware because one doesn’t exist; his compromise was to install the U.K. version, which was fine with me.

While I was there, I decided to up for a local SIM card; I’ve written a detailed guide to using a Sonofon prepaid SIM in the Rukapedia for anyone else who might want to go down the same path.

The only stumble this morning: I got really, really confused when I understood the Danish word øre to mean “euro”. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how Danes could withstand mobile telephone rates of 80 EUR/minute. Øre, as it turns out, is what the Danish kroner is divided into 100 of — think “cents.”

As to the bike ride, I again experienced that sort of transcendental feeling I got last year when I rode in Copenhagen for the first time. There’s something so life affirming about being in a community of bicycle riders in a city that’s specifically tailored for your needs (bike lanes everywhere, special bike traffic lights, etc.). My only biking challenge was to get coordinated with the new (to me) combination of hand brakes and “back pedal to brake” bike I’m borrowing; the main pinch point is at intersections where, because you can’t back-pedal, you need to made sure the pedal is in a “take off” position when the light turns green.

When traveling in Europe, I’ve found ViaMichelin.com is the best site to use for web-based maps and routing. I’ve never given it an address it couldn’t find, in France, Portugal and Denmark. And it does route planning for car, walking and travel by bicycle.

When I saw people walking around the spire of Vor Frelsers Kirke — The Church of Our Saviour — this afternoon, I just knew that [[Oliver]] and I had to climb up.

[[Catherine]] made it clear, back in 1998 when we were in Prague, that she would opt out of all “climb tall structure” travel activities — her knees just can’t take it — and this was the first time that a tall structure presented itself with Oliver old enough to climb it with me.

So we scrounged up 30 kroners from the bottom of the knapsack, paid the man at the bottom, and headed off up towards God.

God, I must tell you, lives very, very high up in the sky. Many, many stairs must be climbed. And some of the stairs have that precarious “scenario plan me tumbling to my death while Oliver looks on in horror” quality to them — windy stairs, steep stairs, cramped stairs.

Now for a guy so ready and willing to drag himself up tall structures, you would think I’d be pretty free of fear of heights. But, oddly (even to me), I am not.

So when, after 15 minutes of stair climbing, we reached the outdoor platform, I could feel the vertigo coursing through my veins. Fortunately I had Oliver to calm me — he would have happily continued on the additional slippery outdoor stairs to the very top of the spire if I’d let him, and was completely unaware of the whole “we’re up really, really high” quality of the expedition.

As it was we spent about 15 minutes at the top marveling at the view — as it turns out some of the only rain-free minutes of the day — and then made our way back down the stairs.

I’d do it again in a heartbeat — the stairs may have seemed precarious, but the church was build like a rock, and there was never any danger of everything going to hell (as it were).

I’m sure it will be the first of many tall structures that Oliver and I drag each other up.

One final image from Portugal. The public transit system around Porto is very integrated: under the andante brand name, metro, bus, tram and train are all part of the same RFID-based payment system. You purchase an andante card from an automated machine, and then “validate it” before you ride; it’s good for a certain amount of time for a certain number of zones (see this post to learn how we didn’t quite figure this out properly).

Another interesting aspect of the transit system is that every bus stop has a code printed on its sign, along with a telephone number. You send the code as an SMS text message with your mobile phone to the number, and a few seconds later you get back a return SMS with a list of the times the next buses stop there:

It works, and turned out to be really useful a couple of times.

Looked at from one perspective, our time here living in a little apartment in downtown Copenhagen is a sort of anthropological dig through modern day urban life. Yes, it’s only two weeks, but it’s amazing what you find out:

• When purchasing milk, the lighter the colour blue of the packaging, the lower the fat content.
• In France and Portugal I was (at 6 feet) always bumping my head when passing through doorways; I have no such problems here: Danes know how to make their doorways nice and tall.
• The showers here (assuming our apartment’s setup is common) have a “flow” dial and a “heat” dial. This makes so much practical sense: you just set your preferred heat level and leave it there, just turning on the “flow” every day when you want a shower.
• We’re learning a lot about living vertically. We’re on the fourth floor, and so getting in an out is all about stairs (lots of stairs), and looking out is all about your across the street neighbours — people you might never meet but otherwise have an intimate relationship with. Oh, and the rain passes by on it’s way down to the street. Neato.
• Food packaging is all Danish, all the time; while Danes speak impeccable English, they package in their native language. So as a unilingual English speaker, you might be buying sugar. Or perhaps it’s salt? Or freeze-dried hydrochloric acid?
• The hydrochloric acid problem is somewhat mitigated by the wonderful typography on the packaging; this place loves the sans serif.
• There is something called “DAB” radio here that appears to be digitally-transmitted radio over the air; the radio in the kitchen lists the “kbps” of stations it’s tuned to.

More as we dig further down.