Sorry, we're closed

I'm in Copenhagen and I have just finished my book.

I hadn't expected to get through it so quickly, as I had cleverly
purchased a very dense 700 page novel that I had assumed would last me a
bit more than a week. But I had also assumed that Copenhagen would
actually be open on a Sunday and there would be lots of interesting things
to see and do. I had also assumed that my hotel was somewhere useful.

I made a lot of wrong assumptions

Getting into Denmark was fairly simple, once you got past the mad rumpus
that was a lot of Belgians and Danes hustling to get on the plane (orderly
queue is not in their vocabulary it seems) and I even managed to find a
train that went in the right direction and dumped me at the central
station

What wasn't so simple was that today was Sunday, on the easter weekend,
and everything was shut. Including Tourist Information.

So, unable to wrangle something as simple as a map, or even (gasp) ask
directions, I had to suck it up and jump in a taxi.

"Do you know where the hotel is ?"

"Yes."

"Is it far ?"

"Not far."

"Do you take credit cards ?"

"Yes."

As the taxi pulled out I suddenly remembered the important fourth question

"Is it close enough to walk ?"

"Probably,yes."

Damn

A very short cab ride later we pulled up at the hotel and I remembered the
other important question to ask all taxi drivers.

"Where is downtown ?"

"Back across the river where we came from ?"

"And this hotel is the closest ?"

"Mostly."

Not knowing what else I could add to the conversation I checked into the
hotel.

The room was, of course, another example of Danish design from hell that
would put an Ikea catalog to shame, so I got out of there as quickly as
possible. (Oddly enough, I've been to Sweden and all the offices looked
like hospital rooms from the 70s. Any clever design skills Ikea might
have, they are keeping for export)

So, armed with a map confirming that I needed to go back to the station,
and went for a brief walk. And brief it was.

You see, as I may have mentioned earlier, everything was closed. So while
wandering the streets looking at locked buildings may have its
architectural merits, it is not the black hole of time I was looking for.
Instead I ferreted out the cafe with the most comfortable couch, ordered a
coffee in the best Danglish I could muster and promptly finished my book.

Well, there were brief interludes where I had the adventure of navigating
a menu that seemed to consist of a lot of words that looked like 'bork'
(although 'burger' is spelled the same in every language it seems)

But even that could not detain me from getting to the last page of my less
than worthy tome sometime around sunset and leaving me in limbo for the
rest of the evening. Even if I could find a bookstore, it was now past
closing time and, as I may have mentioned earlier, it was easter Sunday so
closing time was, oh, yesterday.

Now the thought of a lazy Sunday afternoon in front of the television
loses its appeal when you add in the hotel room component and I did humour
the idea of going and checking my email for a brief second before my
sanity kicked back in and made me consider other alternatives. I thought
about measuring how long it would take to do a lap of the city and even
considered flagging down one of the boats in the canal and bribing the
owner for a tour of the islands. But I still had to fill in parts of
tomorrow so I didn't want to blow all my options on the first day

Instead I just found another cafe and spent some time watching the world
go by and taking notes about how the universe operates.

I'll give you three guesses where I wrote this.