The upcoming trip is finally coming together, to Copenhagen for the Performance Studies International (PSi) conference in August. I really wanted to go somewhere else first, reasoning that I wasn't going to endure crossing the ocean for a lousy 4 days. But since the 4 days would be work days, it made sense to stay a week in order to have a few days to see the place. I'm sure I'll like Copenhagen, but it has never really been on the list of places I'm yearning to see--all of this added up to deciding to go to France for a week first, settling on Normandy, researching it and finding that I really couldn't afford it and it was late to be planning, transportation wouldn't be as easy as I thought, etc. The friends who were coming too backed out, and that was that. I'm disappointed but now I've got a leg up on planning for when I do go to Normandy. And I will, some day.
So I started looking into Copenhagen a bit more, and found plenty to do and see. For one, I have a hankering to see the island of Ven in the strait between Denmark and Sweden, mostly for the Tycho Brahe museum since I got interested in him way back in college, and later when I was in Prague. Looks like a nice boat ride there and back, and you can rent bikes on the tiny island. I like that there are very few cars. I guess I also want to see Hamlet's castle in Elsinore and of course Tivoli. Then I stumbled on an episode of an HGTV guilty pleasure, House Hunters International, set in Malmo Sweden, and decided I wanted to see that town too--there's a train from Copenhagen that goes over the very long Oresund Bridge. That's at least 3 days worth right there, and I'm just warming up. For a mad day or so I started looking at cruises from Copenhagen up to the fjords in Norway, which I've always wanted to see. But the logistics were off--no cruises under 7 days, and times weren't matching up, etc. So I put that aside for another trip (one I will, will do--see the fjords, and also go to the Baltics, but one thing at a time, and Antarctica trumps all of the above) and I compromised and extended Copenhagen to 9 nights.
Booking an apartment was a real ordeal. It's not like Italy or France, with so many gites and apartments and villas from which to choose; it was pretty slim pickings. After tons of searches I found several, but nothing was working out--here's the ST message board thread about my search. We finally got a list of half a dozen places from Hay4You, an agency that rents out Copenhageners apartments when they're out of town. We went back and forth with how many in our party (eventually 3) and where each was etc., finally settled on a 3 bedroom in the center which I confirmed today. It's a great deal--a huge place for around 1600 USD for the 9 nights, split 3 ways. I'm pretty amazed we got anything,considering how late this all came together, but that's apparently how Hay4You works. I had my doubts, since they took so long and I felt like I pestered them to death, but they came through. They've been very pleasant in email, if a bit slow. Perhaps that comes from the Danes being the happiest people on earth.
Not discussing work here (First Rule of this Blog) but I'm very pleased our panel got accepted at PSi. They even gave us 2 slots: one to show our video ("Revisiting Flaherty's Louisiana Story"--a very intense kind of experiment in documentary and pedagogy that consumed my life for a whole year) and another to read papers about it and discuss.
