Live from Copenhagen: My dinner with an ex-CIA drunk
What do you think of when you think about Copenhagen? The Little
Mermaid? Tivoli Gardens? Danish pastry! I was on a mission -- to find
the very best cheese Danish ev-ah! Sadly, I must report that the best
cheese Danishes in the world are still only sold in California.
After diligently searching all of downtown Copenhagen, I was
returning to my sweet little hostel cubby-hole out near the airport when
I got lost. Again. "Hey, mister, can you direct me to the metro
station?" I asked some middle-aged Danish guy. He seemed friendly. And
harmless.
"I'll show you. And I'll even buy you a drink." And dinner? I'm
on a strict budget here. Never turn down free food is an unbreakable
travel rule. We had smorgasbord. And wine. And more wine. And he
started telling me stories. "I worked as a pilot. I worked for the
CIA." Of course you did.
I read somewhere that most CIA agents end up as sorry drunks, living
in sub-tropic countries with their native paramours. But here was this
guy, living in Denmark and relatively sober. But four glasses of wine
later, that all started to change. "I actually live in Vietnam, outside
of Da Nang. You remember Da Nang?" Well, yeah. The war on Vietnam.
American airbase. Tet Offensive. Fell to the Vietcong. "And I have a
Vietnamese girlfriend." Two boxes checked. The drunk part too?
Starting to look like a definite possibility.
Then the smorgasbord arrived. Delicious. Four opened-faced
sandwiches with all kinds of toppings, artistically arranged on dark rye
bread!
"I was in the CIA. Langley. Do you know Langley?" Of course.
Every third-world country on the planet is tragically acquainted with
Langley. "Air America. Mena, Arkansas. I flew Henry Kissinger. I
met Ghaddafi. I flew Richard Nixon." Two more glasses of wine later,
however, he got that mean-drunk, "now that I've told you, I'm gonna have
to kill you" look in his eye. "You! I know what you're up to. A
spy! You're a spy!"
I finished my smorgasbord quickly, gulped down the last of my wine and ran!
The next day, I climbed onto a Hop-On Hop Off bus, saw the
beautiful Rosenborg Castle, the fabulous SMK Museum and the wonderful
Tivoli Gardens where Walt Disney stole his idea for Disneyland -- but
still no cheese Danishes were involved.
PS: I still can't access my FaceBook account because they are still claiming that I'm not me. Hell, maybe Meta is right. Maybe I really am not me. Maybe the real me has been kidnapped by the CIA?
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