Ok, so I went to Copenhagen, Denmark for a few days. To celebrate George Bush’s birthday of course. The thing is that my Copenhagen trips have gotten a whol e tradtion to them. The first element is the “de-Norwegination” of my thought process. It’s not something I want to do, but it just always ends up happening no matter how long I have stayed in Norway. This time I hadn’t been outside the country sicne February, but it still somhow happened… luckily I seem to slide back into the Norwegian way once I return.

The first element is trying to buy the ticket from the bus driver. Now in Norwegian you can call Copenhagen “Kjøpen” – which is a nick name that simply doesn’t exist in Danish. SO I do that, trying to hold on loking just a tiny bit Norwegian. Then during the trip, I usually get to speak to a few Norwegians, and hey, I’m still all with them and understand their whole way of thinking… but then I’m suddenly at the main train station inCopenhagen after one nights travel and I see those crowds of Danishes in all ages rushing by on their bikes. I try to look at them with foreign and exotifying eyes, but for some reason it just doesn’t work. I usually manage to buy a tea in Norwegian so I won’t arrive at my grandmother too early, but already then does it sound akward to hear myself. And when they ask me to repeat my order, I switch over to Danish…. however, this is often the greatest moment of embarrasment cause several times, including this time, they ask me to repeat again, which indictaes that my Danish is incomprehensible to them as well. And so here I sit,no longer Norwegian, but still not Danish enough. The thrid time I order in English, which usually works fine.

My British grandmother announced that “Danish? That is the last thing I would want to be,” to me, “and now it’s probably too late to become Danish anyways” (she’s been living in Copenhagen since about 1950). Hmm, well as internationalists, I mainly just record all this, but I can’t take any of it very serious, including my own situation.

My grandmother and me watched Danish TV on the Bush visit, and it was disgusting! On the evening of his arrival, both the main channels had a multi hour program covering how he would arrive at the airport! And as if this wasn’t bad enough, his arrival was to be him exiting from his airplane in order to embark a helicopter to fly of again again, about 30 sec. after touching Danish ground. The whole thing was topped off by the style them f*** heads from Danish TV used. They had like several minute conversations on whether Bush would bring his own pillow with an embrodered “White Hosue”, or whther the strawberries they were to eat were Danish or not. Urgh! All political criticism was simply tuned out, and instead “we” (the Danish nation) could celebrate that our prime minister was allowed to walk on board of Air Force One! (like the lap dog he is, he was too eager to meet hos master and so when Bush didn’t appear immediately, the whole welcoming commision walked inside the airplane). Uff, I must sya that in a certain way, I haven’t seen any media quite as bad anywhere else…

Well, but then there was the demonstration and all the stuff surrounding it. I visited Bjarke Friborg at the Enhedslisten on Tuesday and went to the evening concert for about 2 hours, although I was tired and just had to sleep. early that night. On Wednesday then I showed up at the pre-demonstration of Enhedsliten. I walked over to one guy I had seen the day before at the Enhedsliusten office and started helping him prepare some posters. That’s when one guy from their youth organization SUF came over saying something like “the people that were supposed to wear the Guantanamo suits haven’t shown up, I need some others.” I immediately voluntered, and thereby got myself chained together with about five other youngsters for most of the rest of the say. And we got press coverage like you wouldn’t believe…. oh well, but those youngsters were really nice, and it was funny that I had to tell them that I’m living in Oslo for them to realize that I’m not one of the usuals. Oh well, and the day after that I went to Schuby, the Autobahn-exit which my parents have called their hometown for tha past twenty years. Lots of traffic in all directs, trains as well as heavy duty trucks, at the same time as one is stuck in the middle of nowhere. So since yesterday I have been living IN the net, with small breaks of visiting my grandmother and doing other small socializing operations that I can’t do from anywhere else.