waiting for lunch...

Today I am going to eat a real danish lunch buffet. Its hard to find a real danish restaurant here, it seems like everyone just eats pizza. Thats all I have planned. Maybe a visit to christiania. I think tomorrow I will have the chance to visit Roskilde, where a good friend of Mikaels grew up in a co-housing community. I am finding it hard to "study architecture." It is difficult to find specific places, but it is everywhere at the same time. I find that it is not the buildings alone that make Copenhagen such a beautiful place, but the overall attention to detail. Every street has so many layers and textures. Buildings are old and new at the same time. No one can design this sort of diversity in a day, it is a standard of beauty and function that everybody here is born with, then learns to cultivate and support. It is the product of a culture, a public awareness, a unanimous understanding that ambience is never cheap, but worth every effort, and the effort has to be made every time at every step. Its not just a one time deal. I guess the question still remains: at home, can we teach our community to embrace good design? To expect it, pay for it, and to see far enough into the future to realize that we must demand it? Are we too thrifty? Too used to praising our disposable culture? Are we too far gone?