Dateline: 19.02 20 Aug 1996
Location: København-Malmö, Pilen ferries
Since our last episode... our amazing adventurer had his socks blown off at the "Louisiana" museum of modern art.  Why didn't he write anything about it then?  Beats me, but it's too late now.  We spot our adventurer on a boat heading out of Denmark...
Farvel København! I could've enjoyed exploring you for longer, but the tyranny of reservations made too early forced me forward. And most of the time the price was distinctly wrong. But There Ain't No Such Thing as a Free Lunch, even if Samos' 39-DKR-for-everything buffet did come pretty damn close. And I wasn't even hungry, so I only refilled three times...

If the place does deserve a thumbs-down for something in addition to extortionate pricing, it's public transport. While making the S- and Re-tog free for us Interrailers is certainly an appreciated gesture, it doesn't compensate for the fact that they both go only in two directions and both of those are the wrong ones. The bus system might have been OK, but it was way expensive and weirdly organized. Buses never beat train/tram/subway-type systems when it comes to touristic convinience anyway. Stockholm's T-Bana seemed quite nice in contrast. I wonder what Berlin's fabled U-Bahn will be like? I guess I'm about to find out. It's strange to think that I'll be entering my third country in as many days early tomorrow. I've taken precautions against travel-weariness, evidently pretty successfully as it's 19:15 and I don't feel the least bit tired, but it would be nice to plunk one's feet down for a bit longer for once. This is the price one pays for not believing the warnings of all the guides (and Juha as well). Today's visit to Louisiana and the slobber-inducing techno rooms showed all too well that I'm really in need of a rave. I might have found something yesterday had I looked hard enoug, but I was too tired... better luck tomorrow in Berlin, then, which means I'll have to sleep at least decently on tonight's couchette.

Is there any point in planning ahead? At the moment I'm struggling with three fundamentally contradictory objectives:

 

Tough, quite tough. I can already draw a few if-then conclusions though:

 

In my best Dracula voice: Vee shall see, von't vee.

Today's topic is luck. So far I've had it thrice. Time 1: when I would've lost my watch if the shower attendant hadn't warned me. Time 2: when the local train I was on spontaneously converted into an express, saving 10-15 min of time and letting me get to the harbor on time (now this I call deus ex machina!) Time 3: when I would've lost my wallet in the confusion of the supermarket if the prof-type hadn't warned me. Lesson to be learned: Haste makes waste. All 3 occurrences occurred in København, the solitary occurrence of bad luck happened as I was boarding the ferry (I presume): one clip of my clip-on sunglasses broke, rendering them useless. Thankfully I have the old extra pair that almost fits, I'll see if the opticians in Berlin can do anythin about fixing the problem. This ferry ride is bouncy and it's starting to show in my handwriting [you people reading this as HTML can thank your lucky stars]. Another conclusion to be drawn: Murphy's law is repealed in København, but active in full force (or possibly in duplicate) when leaving it...

The day's budget 
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