Europe 2009: Copenhagen to Berlin (Friday, July 31)

I checked out of the hotel, but they didn’t have a locked room for baggage storage, just a roped off area in the lobby (the most unsecure storage I’ve ever seen, not where I wanted to leave my laptop or several hundred dollars of leather gear).  I found that they had lockers in the basement for 20 DKK, though, so I wandered around for a few minutes with my laptop bag until I found someone to point me to them.  They were big lockers, though, so I trekked back upstairs for my bag of leather, then back down, only to find that they took tokens.  So back upstairs and buy the token — which was 2 for 20 DKK.  But I only need one.  20 DKK.  Whatever.   Not that I was the only one to deal with this, as another guest offered me a spare token as I was heading back downstairs again, just a minute too late.  In other words: a little scam.

I went to the Men’s Shop and to X-Rated Leather to take advantage of my contest prizes.

The master’s cap arrived by post this afternoon from the Anco, before I had to leave.  Thankfully!

As opposed to Amsterdam, in Denmark I was better able to isolate both an accent and a “look” for the locals — sort of German with a little lilt to it, and of course hair that is blond to strawberry blond and good facial structure.  The Danes are a handsome people, by and large.  I ended up adopting a little bit of accent, but only a little.

The streets near the Centrum tend to have wide bicycle lanes, twice as wide as in the States.  They usually have a curb about 2 inches high between them and the auto lanes, and another 2 inch curb between that and the sidewalk.  I had much less problem with stepping off curbs by accident in Copenhagen than I did in Amsterdam, although I did find myself sometimes crossing the street and then walking in the bicycle lane for a few feet before remembering that I wasn’t on the sidewalk.

Scooters also ride in the bicycle lanes here.  There were way more scooters here than in Seattle (3 times as many, maybe), but nothing like the number in Amsterdam.

The bicycles typically are not locked up when they are parked here.  I assume this means that everyone who wants a bike has one, so theft isn’t an issue.  But it was surprising to see dozens of parked bicycles, and almost no chains.

I’ve come to despise the cobblestones commonly used here for sidewalk paving.  With all the walking (and dancing!) I’ve been doing, I have developed shin splints, and negotiating the uneven surfaces makes them hurt.

I was surprised by the amount of wood used in Denmark in outdoor, public settings.  Places such as the steps at the Copenhagen Central Station were wooden.  I wonder how often these have to be replaced?

Speaking of steps, the stairs at K3 had phantom bottom steps.  That is, the first step of several of the stairways was flush with the landing, but designed to look like the other steps, complete with edge markings and the like.  This meant that I stumbled on each of those steps for the first several stair ascents and descents, until I started to trust my memory of the staircase and not the visual.

I flew AirBerlin into Berlin-Tegel airport (the smaller and closer-in of the two Berlin airports).  From there, I hopped the 109 bus to the Uhlandstraße U-Bahn (subway), then that to Wittenbergplatz, and then three blocks walk (or drag, in the case of the luggage, getting heavier each leg!) to the Kinky Tulip hotel in Schöneberg.

After a quick nap, I went out to some of the local bars.

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Updated on February 26, 2010

Updated on May 14, 2010

Moved part of this post to the Sounds Kinky-er blog:
http://soundskinkyer.blogspot.com/2009/08/europe-2009-copenhagen-to-berlin-friday.html

Updated on June 15, 2010

Here’s a short bit about “Copenhagenisation”, heavily promoting bicycle riding in urban areas:
http://schott.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/31/copenhagenisation/

Europe 2009: Copenhagen (Thursday, July 30)

This was my day for really focusing on the competitions.  First I put things together for the Mr. Leather competition — checked the outfits, finalized the performance, and practiced the performance at the contest space.

I snagged a Champagne Brus popsicle from the Elite mini-mart — lime and mint (I think) with a chocolate shell cap on the top third.  Looked interesting, but the flavor was too weak to be really memorable.

After that, I went to DGI-byen to practice my dances.  I brought the netbook and used the webcam to record, so I could watch the videos large enough to use them.  (Clever, huh?)  While I was there, Sherwin from Copenhagen came in to practice for Beginner, and I was able to give him some coaching and webcam filming, and then others in Beginner also came in and I gave a little coaching to them, too.  I had planned to be there for 30 minutes, but it was over 60 before I left.

I had to scramble out of there, over to Yam Yam at Central Station for some Thai yellow curry to eat on the way to the hotel, and visited the ATM.  Then back to the hotel, jump in the shower, jump out of the shower, jump into pants, and hurry back to DGI-byen for the Competitor’s Meeting.  This was when I found there would only be four in my division for overall, rather than the 10 or so I anticipated; Beginner was the one with 9 competitors.  This did relieve me some, since it meant I would surely bring home a medal or two of some kind, no matter how good the other dancers were (and I didn’t know how good at this time).

For the competition, with the Beginners division, they did a preliminary heat of all 9 dancers, then brought back the top 5 from each dance at the end of the competition for a final heat.  Not much of a surprise in the results: 4 of the finalists were the same from each dance, and the third dance had 6 in the finals, the other 2 being the 5th one from each of the other dances.

The floor was very slick.  I was not able to do the full turn and the Monterrey turn in “I’m Movin’ On” very well, but I didn’t mess anything up.  After that, we used shoe brushes to rough up the soles, and I also added a little water to my suede soles to further improve the traction.

End result for me: Gold in “I’m Movin’ On”, Gold in “Working It”, and Silver in “Soakin’ Wet”.  (That last was a bit of a surprise, since I came out easily on top in it in Tampa and DC, but here I tried adding some hat action which may not have worked, and the floor slickness may have worked against me.  (And I may have just been too confident about that dance and slacked it a little.)  I also won the Overall trophy for Intermediate Line Dance, an engraved silver (aluminum) cup on a pedestal.  (There was some question whether there should have been medals for each of the three dances on the division, or just for overall; they only did overall in Montreal, I think.  They did it here like at the competition in Washington DC a few weeks before, though; on some level, that produces medal inflation, but it also enables a dancer to compete in only the dances he or she wants to and still medal for them.)

The big surprise, I think, was Marcella from Seattle, one of only two women in the competition.  She won Bronze in “Downpour”, but then took Gold in both “Bar Room Romeo” and “D.H.S.S.”, and thus the Overall trophy for her division.  (Bradley from New York took three Silvers.  We joked that they matched the hat and boots he wore for “D.H.S.S.”)

I had asked them to try to not delay the awards.  The schedule was to finish awards at 9:45 pm, and then have a performance from the Teams winner from the day before.  I guess they were having difficulty figuring the final scores for the Beginners, but they had the Team performance first (and it was Madison Street from France, I guess the women from Trip the Light Fantastic could not all be there; but more appropriate for this night, perhaps, since Madison Street is a line dance team).  They finally did the awards and finished them just after 10:00, so I had to grab my clothes and really hurry to K3 for the Mr. Leather competition.

(Frankly, this should not have been delayed as long as it was.  I think Lee, the competition director, did all the score tabulation himself.  He should have had a scoring assistant who would do the scoring tabulation for each dance while the next one was running; that’s standard procedure for tally mastering at a leather contest.  With a two song break between each trio of dances and between the Beginner finals, there would be plenty of time to do the tallying.  Even better would be to set up a spreadsheet to do it for you; enter the values and it produces the answer.  Ultimately, though, they do it how they do it and I’m not privy to what adventures Lee might have had to deal with.)

After this win, it is not clear if Marcella and I have to move up to compete at Intermediate and Advanced in the future.  A recent discussion thread said we don’t, but these were the biggest competitions we have had in a few years for line dance and probably should force the move.  (Especially for Marcella, since the competition was much larger and stronger in her division.)  I will discuss with Marcella and probably recommend a rule change) in Atlanta this fall.  (Tony, the sole competitor in Advanced, really wants me to move up, to ensure he has some competition.  We potentially could have Tony, me, Sammy, Daniel, and Chris in Advanced next summer in Austin; wouldn’t that blow them away, with more Advanced competitors than lower levels!)

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Updated on February 25, 2010

At the IAGLCWDC convention in Atlanta in October, we updated the rules to have “international scope” competitions (like the OutGames and the Gay Games) qualify for level advancement for wins with an appropriate number of competitors, and made it retroactive to cover this year (since Marcella and I were the ones affected and we both agreed that we should move up after our wins).

Updated on May 14, 2010

Moved part of this post to the Sounds Kinky-er blog:
http://soundskinkyer.blogspot.com/2009/07/europe-2009-copenhagen-thursday-july-30.html

Europe 2009: Copenhagen (Wednesday, July 29)

I got up too late for breakfast at the hotel, so I popped to the nearby mini-mart, Elite, and bought orange juice, pastries, yogurt, instant coffee (shudder!), cream, and cheese wedges.

No sightseeing today.  Ironed my shirts for the competition.  Went to DGI-byen, the Danish gymnastic center (and bowling, apparently) and took two hours of line dance workshops by Niels B. Poulsen (a yummy instructor, woof!): Cha Cha With Me, My Next Love, and I’m Yours.  The third of these was fairly advanced; the second was a Viennese waltz.  I’m always of a mixed mind with line dance workshops: it’s rare that I’ll ever do the dance again after that workshop, and I’ve pretty much got the dance vocabulary down, so what am I actually getting out of the workshop?  Just mental and physical exercise?  Is that enough?  (Sometimes, yes, but not for more than a couple hours at a shot.)

Afterward, I talked for a while to Kurt from the Munich L.A.D.s dance team — he will be competing against me tomorrow — and to his mother, Karen.  We talked about line dance, IAGLCWDC competitions, and stuff like that.

Back at the hotel, I practiced my dances out in the courtyard and videotaped them, but I can’t get the video camera to connect to the laptop to upload them to YouTube where I can watch them on a screen bigger than one inch.  Grrr.

After dinner, went back to DGI-byen for the Couples/Teams competition.  Four couples competed — one Novice, two Beginner, one Intermediate — so very little real competition there.  Likewise with teams — Trip the Light Fantastic, a women’s team from the Bay Area competed in couples, and Madison Street from France competed in line, with the women’s team winning the Overall award.

I’m guessing that there will be as many as a dozen or more of us for the Intermediate Line Dance competition tomorrow, which means at least two heats.  That means it will be a significant competition.  It’s a problem not just with country dancing, but with other disciplines that I’ve seen records of at the OutGames: there are many sports with only a handful of competitors.  Of course, having several actually competing also means (a) I may not win and (b) the overall winner could be a challenge to identify, if different people win each of the three dances.  Could be interesting!

As with Amsterdam, the humidity seems to be getting thick here in Copenhagen.  I have sweated through all my t-shirts, at nearly two per day.  I’m going to put a few of them in the bathroom and turn on the shower very hot to hopefully steam a little life back into them.

Tuesday night was another at the SLM clubhouse.

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Updated on February 24, 2010

Updated on May 12, 2010:

Moved part of this post to the Sounds Kinky-er blog:
http://soundskinkyer.blogspot.com/2009/07/europe-2009-copenhagen-wednesday-july.html

Europe 2009: Amsterdam and Copenhagen (Tuesday, July 28)

I had to be up by 8:00 am to catch the train to Schilpol airport, but it turned out the Anco’s breakfast isn’t served until 9:00 am, and indeed the hotel bar are was locked and I didn’t know how to do checkout.  (Much less recover my key deposit.)  Turns out details for that were on a guide in my room that I didn’t read; I have no idea where the guide was, didn’t see it at all.  So I wrote a note with the key and pushed it under the bar door.

Grabbed an orange juice and a pastry of some sort at the HEMA at Centraal Station.  Made it to the airport without incident.  Oh, look!  Starbucks!  Yay, familiar coffee!  But I bypassed it in favor of getting checked in, just in case.  Only checked the one suitcase, so when the big carry-on with my leather in it went through the scanner, they pulled out my chainmail harness and asked what it was.  On the other side of security, there was another Starbucks.  Yay!

Customs in Denmark, was it smooth like in the Netherlands?  Not at all.  By which I mean: not at all.  None.  Didn’t even have to show my passport, other than getting on the plane in Amsterdam.

Fewer signs in Denmark are bilingual than in Amsterdam, even at the airport.  After a few minutes fiddling with the iPhone to figure out what train I might need to take, I had to stand in line at the train ticket counter to get help.  Turned out I wanted Copenhagen Central Station.  Figures.

Long walk on tile and cobblestone paths to the hotel.  I’m getting blisters on my hands from this luggage.  I think it gets heavier each leg.

The hotel room at Cabinn City is… small isn’t the word for it.  It’s about 10–12 foot deep and 8 foot wide; about half-size is how it feels, rather cramped — a walk-in closet.  Two single beds (which I pushed together to make a double.  Modular desk, storage, and closet space.  Bathroom has the shower head in the middle of the ceiling; you pull the curtain around and flip a lever on the sink, and then deal with a wet bathroom floor until it drains/dries.  The whole thing feels very IKEA (although that’s actually in the next country over).

You have to put your room key in a slot by the door to work the lights and outlets; they go out after about 15 seconds if you remove the card.  Took me a while to figure that out, and my laptop ran out of power once despite being plugged in.  Also seems like a great way to leave your card in the room, although it also does prevent big electric bills from lights left on.  (But it also prevents you from leaving a small light on to greet you when you return).

I took a quick shower and booted up the laptop to check out the Scandinavian Leather Men site.  Oh look, that leather club sightseeing tour starts at 14:00, and its now… 1:50 pm (13:50).  Quick, scramble into shorts and shirt and jog over there.  (I chose this hotel because it’s only 10 minutes from both the SLM clubhouse and DGI-byen where the dance competition is being held.)

We then spent about 90 minutes walking through Copenhagen: past the oldest gay bar in the city, by the original Carlsberg brewery location, through the King’s Garden, past the royal palace, down to the water across from the Opera House, and to the new Royal Theatre where we had beer and cider.  There, the rest of the group left for a ferry ride, while I headed back to the Hans Christian Andersen castle at Tivoli to check-in for the OutGames.  Along the way, I bought a basket of blackberries from a street vendor, the only food I had eaten since a pastry about 8 hours earlier.  And then back to the hotel for a nap.

I wanted to get a t-shirt from the OutGames, but they made the (poor, to me) decision to limit different colors to different styles.  The general OutGames design is very loud and busy — dancing silhouettes in front of the multi-colored “bubbles” logo — and I didn’t want it.  I preferred just the single color “bubbles” version (“preferred” meaning “would settle for”; still didn’t like it much), but it was only available in blue or yellow on a black shirt for men; women had two other colors, and another two were only on tanks.  I could have lived with the yellow design, but then the price: 150 DKK ($30) for a t-shirt which I didn’t really like a lot to start with?  No way.

All registered attendees get a participation medal, which they decided to make do double duty as a luggage tag.  This strikes me as very odd: it makes for a pretty heavy luggage tag, and not one that I would want to risk getting yanked off my bag in transit (having had other tags broken, ripped, or lost over the years).  I hope they got a price break by doing this, rather than it costing extra for a nifty but dumb idea.

After the nap, dinner was an egg and tomato sandwich and a creme cheese danish from Upper Crust at the train station.  Cheap and quick.

Tuesday evening was a party at the SLM clubhouse.

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Updated on February 23, 2010

Updated on May 12, 2010:

Moved part of this post to the Sounds Kinky-er blog:
http://soundskinkyer.blogspot.com/2009/07/europe-2009-amsterdam-and-copenhagen.html