A little bit more Danish stuff

Here are a couple things that I may have not mentioned yet:

1. The population of the entire country consists of roughly 5 million people.

2. Basically everybody in Copenhagen speaks English. (I think I did mention that.) I think I only spoke to 4 people who didn't speak extremely good English, and two of them were cab drivers. I was told that this dates back to World War II, although I'm not clear on how/why this arose. It's apparently related to the size of the population, as their small size was cited as part of the reasoning.

3. There are tons and tons of bakeries in Copenhagen and good bread is plentiful (all the meals include plentiful fresh bread that go far beyond butter repositories). I didn't actually try the specialized bakeries, as I instead went for the baked goods at coffee places, but they smelled really good.

4. On the second night there, one of the locals who I know took my roommate and I to dinner at a local Italian place where they make their own pasta. The menu was only in Danish and Italian, so I thankfully remembered correctly (well, I wasn't sure, but it was confirmed when my meal came) that bolognese pasta nets me meat sauce. That was possibly the best pasta I've ever had, and I had a huge plate of it for the equivalent of $5 (including the massive sales tax).

5. The sales tax is a whopping 25% (because of all the social services). Food was a bit on the expensive side (with notable exceptions) even without this, but the higher prices across the board were quite noticeable.

6. The unfortunate shower setup my hotel had is apparently a very common one in Denmark. That's too bad, as I found it very annoying.

7. While overwhelmingly blond, Denmark is slightly less overwhelmingly blond than I thought it would be.

8. I found several good coffee places---4 different ones, where 1 of them really means several locations of the same franchise (but it's a franchise with high-quality stuff). It was unexpectedly easy to get iced espresso drinks. (That proved difficult in both England and Australia. Cambridge suffered from a dearth of good coffee and the Australian coffee places just didn't have ice machines.) I didn't see a single Starbucks during my visit (not even in the Copenhagen airport), but I did have coffee and a burger at a place called Pussy Galore's Flying Circus. (I mentioned this in the comments earlier.)



I should be able to find my way back there in a few years, as there has been prior discussion of a couple week invited from Niels Bohr Institute. It's hard to say if/when that will happen, but it would be nice to stay there for a while when I'm actually awake.