Anna's Letter Home.

Dear Andrew,

It’s 17.00, Mike is sleeping. We are back in our smoky room at the top of the stairs of the Viking Cafe. It’s in a side street of the big walking streets area of Old Copenhagen and I can hear the east European busker play the violin in front of the Helligand Kirken. I’m trying to distinguish the Church towers you see from our part of the walking street, between the Viking house and the Irish Rover, but they’re all green copper and beautiful with the sun shining on them at 4 am. The busker is extremely good, Italian arias. There is a church nearby (I don’t know if it’s the Nicolai or the Frue or the Helligand) that plays a little tune every quarter of an hour, and it is not the Big Ben tune, same rhythm and idea, a bit more every time, the full tune on the hour, but definitely the other way around, where Big Ben goes up, it goes down.
There is another busker who sells annoying mouth whistly things, I bought some for Matai, Jazz and Madelief. I’ll send them with one of the postcards and hopefully they’ll have been swallowed by the time I pick the girls up.

I bought a book with walks in Copenhagen because we are working musicians and not here to spend enormous amounts of money on Tivoli-rides, canal tours and endless museum visits (though I really want to). And so we walk, today we did the yellow walk, past the canals to the hippy town, Christiania, with “pusher street” where you are not allowed to take pictures of the tables with drugs. And the purple walk, churches and statues, and that’s why Mike is sleeping now. The walks take us past many enticing paid entrances and this is where we have discovered the art of “foyeurism” which is a great form of poor man’s tourism. The idea is to get into the building as far as you can, up till the paying booth even. Look around, browse through the pamphlets with the photos of what is inside, ask how much it is to get in (ignoring obvious signs), maybe take a photo of the high faulted gold ceiling, and then walk out again with armfuls of pamphlets. Take a picture of the outside of the building. It’s almost as good as if you’d been there!

Actually, there is plenty to see, canals, houses, statues, people, you know. And I’ll make a choice at the end of the week to see something spectacular from the inside. Maybe that round tower I’m still looking for.

Tomorrow we might do the pink walk. (Sounds awful doesn’t it, we should just start walking and get lost.) Through the gardens, which are the “green belt” of Copenhagen, where the city walls and bastions used to be before they were torn down in 18something to allow for expansion of the city, and to the little mermaid.

We sold four cds yesterday at the gig, the Irish Rover gets a real nice crowd of Danes and travellers and they seem to like what we do, We sold one to two old North-of-Norway brothers on their way to Southern Spain where one has a cafe which the other has never seen, one to three punk muso kids from Christiania which is the hippy drug ghetto of Copenhagen, I forget who bought the other ones. There are a lot of young people wearing white captain’s hats this week, which are to show they have graduated, and yesterday was the longest day and the shortest night (you blink and it’s light again), when they light bonfires all through Denmark.




Thursday.

Didn’t get to do the pink walk, we had better things to do like laundry, showers and hairdressers and going to the bank and then meeting up with Jane Clark to have lunch and too much white wine on a terrace in Nyhavn all the long afternoon. For dessert we swaggered to the best Irish pub in Scandinavia where we had the best Irish coffee in Europe (and it was) and try play some tunes slowly but carefully. Then we had to say goodbye. It was the sunniest afternoon we’ve had yet. Jane’s awesome. I think we played in the evening too, for three hours. Lots of money in the tipjar, our punk band came back.

Oh and of course we saw Germany beat Turkey. The Euro cup has been a red thread through our gigs in Denmark. We saw Dutch beat Italy first time we played the Irish Rover in Copenhagen. We saw them being beaten by Russia in the Aalborg pub, the game against Rumania we saw on Fyn at Lone and Mikkel’s farmhouse, at Kolding we played really late because of the shootouts between Croatia-Turkey and the crowd went wild.

It’s been an awesome trip. We took the ferry from Ebeltoft back to Sealand last week. Ebeltoft is the snotty nose of Denmark, on the map. Rolling hills, poppies, cornflowers and Queen Anee’s Lace on the roadsides, waving grainfields and every now and then some 5000 year old dolmen.

Love

Anna