It has been a long but wonderful day.

I woke up in Copenhagen unreasonably early and went for a walk aimlessly and maplessly; since I am so direction-impaired that I can’t even read maps, bringing a map doesn’t really help. I walked along the river and wandered down large and small streets. Because it was early on a Sunday morning, there wasn’t a lot going on. The city was quiet, empty and quite rectangular. And, as Doc pointed out last night, the streets are awfully broad given that they were created long before cars would come along to use up all that bandwidth.

By accident, I walked into a park that turned out to be the huge churchyard cemetary for notables. The “You are here” sign listed Soren Kierkegaard as one of the residents (“You are here, but these guys ain’t leaving”), so I paid him a visit:

Somehow I don’t think Kierkegaard — whose name means “church yard” — would have been tickled pink to find out that he is such a popular dead guy that he gets his own direction sign:

Then it was off to the airport for the 1.5 hour flight to London. Traveling in coach with us normals was a heavy metal band, complete with road managers and handlers. I thought someone said they were Iron Maiden, but the Maiden site says they’re traveling from Italy to Switzerland today; Copenhagen would definitely be a wrong turn. It seems not to have been Iron Butterfly either. (Man, in the photos on their site do those guys look old, i.e., my age! Who’d believe that after one hit in 1968 they’d still be touring, especially since that hit is unlistenable unless you are massively stoned.) Metallica is traveling between Austria and Germany today. (My fantasy was that one of the Metalllicans would sit next to me and I’d explain why file-sharing is good for them. Even in my daydream I lost the argument.) Motley Crue seems to be off the road, although their site tempted me to send $40 to join their fan club so I could get my own motley.crue.com email address. Anyway, whoever those folks on the plane were, they seemed to be very nice young men, albeit nice young men who aren’t so young and now are doomed to remind people initially of Spinal Tap. (By the way, here are some spare umlauts for you sprinkle appropriately over their names: …………)

I got to my hotel in London at 14:00. (Modulo 12 to get the real time.) It’s a lovely little hotel, picked by Wired’s travel agency because I’m here writing a story on the BBC. But the Internet connection at the hotel has been down for two days and they aren’t doing anything to bring it back up. That’s like having a hotel room without a telephone or a TV. Or blankets. So I asked them to find me another hotel. As a result, I’m in the Hilton across the street for precisely the same room rate. The Internet works in the Hilton…but it’s 15 pounds a day, or almost US$30. Oy veh!

I went out for a 3.5 hour walk, up through Picadilly, to Leicester Sq., then beyond, then down a little, and then some curlicues around some statute of someone on a horse, then swoop up past a very large green swath, then catch the end of a demonstration that my first reaction to is “Gosh, I hope it’s against us,” then some doglegs and a loop around the back 9, up through a really crowded bit, then a cone of soft ice cream that tastes like blackboard eraser, then a zig here and zag there, past Buckingham Palace, head in the wrong direction entirely, cross the big yard in front of the Palace waving all friendly-like to the quaint locals as they make a big show of saving the Queen, and finally back to my hotel.

I love walking in London. It’s like NYC but with elbow room and history.

Before you go bopping me upside my head for hoping the demonstration was against us, let me explain: I’m against us — at least against how we’re fighting the “war on terror.” I acknowledge, though, that seeing another nation’s people denounce the US is painful, even when you agree with them. No, you want to say as they chant, it’s more complicated than it seems from the outside. We need more of that nuance that our President so despises. [Technorati tags: copenhagen london]

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