My new pad

I got my apartment today. It’s what we’d call a 2 bedroom in the US, but here they call it a 3 room apartment. It’s about 85 square meters, or around 900 square feet, which is meager in the US but quite large for Copenhagen, especially for one person. It’s on the floor that in the US would be called the 2nd, but in Denmark the 1st floor is considered to be the first floor above the ground floor. The living room and small bedroom face out onto a beautiful and unmistakably European courtyard. The kitchen and big bedroom face out to a small, quiet street.

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Here are some shots taken in the courtyard. The building was built in 1786. That was a year before the US constitution was signed, and three years before George Washington became the first American president.

The building has all the modern features, like running water, electricity, cable television, and the Internet, but is clearly very old. The walls are visibly uneven, and the windows and latches are antiques. It even has a dishwasher, so it’s quite comfortable for a spoiled American like me. But the big perk is the bathtub. Tubs are pretty rare. This apartment was the only one out of nine that I looked at that had one.

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I’m told that the buildings in Copenhagen — at least the old ones, are subject to strict guidelines in order to preserve their original look and spirit. Everything down to the labels on the door buzzers has to meet historical and aesthetic standards. The exterior is nothing I’ve ever seen or heard of. It’s a kind of burnt orange color that you see regularly in Copenhagen, and it looks different from one day to the next. It turns out that this is because it’s actually a kind of living patina. The exterior walls are chalky, and when you touch them you get this fine powder on your hands that feels like mold. Apparently this allows the buildings to breath. That may sound silly, but my condo in Seattle is made of a completely water-tight coating, and when water eventually does get in though cracks, it eats away the structure from the inside and cannot evaporate because it’s sealed in. All kinds of lawsuits have been waged over this, so a breathing exterior definitely has it’s advantages.

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The floor is hardwood, but not the type we generally have in the US. This floor is unfinished, which is apparently fairly common throughout Scandinavia. It’s very nice looking, but it’s hard for me to believe that people use bare wood floors. The planks are actually a little rough, as in it seems like you could get splinters by walking around barefoot, and the spaces between some of the planks are surprisingly large — perhaps 1/4″, or about 6mm. My Danish friends joke that this makes cleaning up really easy — you just sweep everything into the cracks.

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