Streaming video, Tiktok, Vine, Vimeo, video games, Youtube, audiobooks; with so many different forms of media available nowadays, it might seem amazing that people still go to bookstores, but recently I've been to a few and....business still seems booming. The caveat is that the ones I went to were the Barnes and Nobles in the middle of campus on a prestigious national university, and also Strand Bookstore in the heart of Manhattan in downtown New York City, but still, I'm sure booksellers aren't complaining that people are still walking through the doors. The biggest draw for some might be the ambience and quaintness of a bookstore; people like MJ don't necessarily want to read or looking for any specific book, they just like being NEAR the books and feeling intellectual, feeding off the energy emanating from the books. There's also the organization of different titles from "fantasy/fiction" to "new bestsellers" to "all-time classics" and the visual effect of seeing all the books grouped into those categories, with all the fancy covers and colors to marvel at and just pick up a book and leaf through. There are actually nonfiction books that show different colors of books that have the same effect: you see the physical image of the book with its spines, as well as advising on all the cool bookstores around the country (some with cats walking around in them, which you can't go wrong with, cats just make everything better apparently).
On this particular New York trip, it was also a great sanctuary to wait for awhile to let the heavy rain let up; there's of course museums, restaurants, and other indoor venues but a bookstore gives you something to do without necessarily having to BUY anything. It was one of those New York City days that made me realize New York is great for a day or two here and there, but not a place to for me to live all seasons of the year. Walking through New York on rainy days just highlights the messiness of the city and introduces various variables like walking into puddles, being squeezed on city sidewalks, having to slide wet umbrellas into umbrella bags, diving into the damp stungy tunnels of the New York City subway system. Sorry NYC, you're not yourself when it rains. (This might of course be the aforementioned effect of having gone to NYC so many times that nothing is new anymore, so I might just need a change of scenery for awhile).
Some lasting thoughts about Denmark: there's a lot of smoking outside in Copenhagen, so you'll undoubtedly encouner second hand smoke in the city and cigarette butts just lying around, but the homeless population seemed very limited; not as many people just loitering around, whereas I can't walk a few blocks in an urban area in American cities and not be asked for change, etc. MJ mentioned that Danish people "take their dinners very seriously," which I scoffed at, but apparently, yes, there's a designated dinner hour where many go to restaurants and then start drinking alcohol, with a noticeable dip in the population outside in the streets, not to ghost town levels but enough to be noticeable. The dollar didn't apparently go as far as we thought, neither... I don't think we were going at a particularly bad time for the dollar/krone exchange rate (in fact, a five-year chart showed that the dollar has actually increased in value as compared to the krone, but seemed prices were pretty hefty......MJ and I were so hungry one day we went into a Chinese restaurant and sat down and almost ordered what would have been a $30 dish of Mapo Tofu, but luckily the service was bad, our seats were near the exit, the door was open, I made an executive decision and we skedaddled out of there. I'm still not sure whether we've even had any "traditional Danish cuisine," as it's not very well known in the U.S., outside of "smorreboad" (smorgasboard). There's a bunch of meat plates that are considered Danish like meatballs or sausages, so MJ's vegan preferences held us back from those, but we did find the local market's pre-packaged sushi selection surprisngly fresh compared to the U.S. selections.
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