raw lunch and artistic globes

yesterday, i spent the day wandering around copenhagen with miss buckle, who is in town, attending events surrounding the COP 15 UN meeting on climate change that's happening in copenhagen right now. copenhagen is full of people speaking other languages and even the danes (which are few, since all of the people in shops and restaurants are swedes these days) in all of the shops in copenhagen seem to have forgotten to speak danish.

in the interest of kindness to the environment (and of course being healthy), we started off our wander with lunch (as one does) at a new raw food restaurant in the heart of copenhagen. it's called 42°RAW. i'd been wanting to try a raw restaurant since buying charlie trotter's raw "cook"book several years ago, but could never convince anyone to go to one with me. to my knowledge, there wasn't a raw restaurant in copenhagen before this one opened anyway. we really enjoyed the food. i had a brilliant salad with beets, seaweed and a horseradish dressing and miss buckle's pumpkin salad was loaded with pumpkin seeds and salty olives (we did wonder how raw they were, but we were cool with being eased into the concept). and the pumpkin on her salad was just a gorgeous, vibrant orange. we ordered fresh juices to go with our salads - mine was carrot, apple and ginger and hers was beet apple and ginger and they were just great. the restaurant also serves coffee (not that raw, i think), but we waited to get coffees later. we really loved the experience and i will definitely be dragging husband back there to show him that the occasional raw meal can be a good thing. after our tummies were filled, we began to wander in search of interesting people and things.

some of my favorites were these art globes displayed around kongs nytorv.

this one was my favorite.

i'm a sucker for colors, what can i say?

i liked how graffiti-style writing was used on this one.

this one highlighted the butterflies.

check out the police and uniformed military in the background.

this one advocated wearing a sweater rather than turning up the heat.

this one wanted us to drive less.

there were many more and they were all thought provoking. but my favorite was that at the base of each one was this sign:

it was pretty surprising to me that the shops didn't seem to have taken the opportunity to have an environmental theme to their window displays. they just seemed to be selling the same old christmas excess. i found that a little disappointing. but at least in this shot, you can see a bit of me and miss buckle.

at least the posh illum's bolighus had a bit of a nature theme going on, even if it was mostly just stumps on which to display the expensive designer items:

we saw quite a lot of police around on the streets, usually standing together with members of the home guards (hjemmeværn) in military uniform. we even overheard one conversation where they were calling in a report of a homemade sign on the side of a building. as miss buckle said, "if only they'd had their sign professionally done..." apparently the danes' aesthetic sensibilities are quite insulted by hand lettered signs and the public had to be protected.

i've got much more to share, but i'll leave it for another post.

a brilliant bird

the turkey was, in the end, completely worth the second mortgage we had to take out in order to acquire it. a veritable triumph of a turkey. tender, juicy, really the best one ever. but i'm a bit exhausted, so i'll have to tell stories about it tomorrow.

so for now i'll just say that i'm thankful for such interesting, funny, erudite, well-traveled, intellectual friends and family. it was indeed a privilege to share a bit of my cultural imperialism tradition with them. and i was really impressed with how much they ate. and drank. brilliant.