Ryan Turner

I bike the few blocks up to Nordre-Frihavnsgade in Osterbro to the bakery and then onto the little corner grocer for red wine. Strangely the bottle of Spanish wine costs less than a cappuccino.

Our first day on bikes we went to Sankt Hans Torv, a square in Norrebro full of outdoor cafes encircling a granite monument that’s also a fountain. On the way along Norrebrogade we veered off into Assistens Cemetery which reminded me a bit of the cemetery across from where I once lived near the Kingsway in Toronto except this one is much older with cast-iron gates and grand monuments of stone and trimmed hedges at each burial site. Weeping elms and weeping willows. Hans Christian Andersen was there somewhere but we found Soren Kierkegaard instead.

To the north, we stopped for a drink on Jaegersborggade, a side street that looks more residential but has been taken over by small shops for everything from antiques to pastel bowls and cutting boards made of African bamboo. The street was covered with young people sitting on picnic tables and front stoops as though the owners had awoken one morning to find cafes had sprouted up without their knowledge, a dozen people standing in their kitchens, eating chocolate-centered croissants, filling the space at their front doors.

Now back on our own apartment balcony, the rain is falling. I’m reading the last few pages of Jane Jacobs’ incredible The Death and Life of Great American Cities. A blanket around me. When I first came out, I noticed a woman set a sleeping baby into a black pram on an opposite balcony, and every so often now a man comes out and rocks it back and forth as he watches the sky.