J Day!

The two largest brands of beer in Denmark are Carlsberg and Tuborg. Much like Budweiser and Coors, you will find these brands on tap at every single bar in the country. They are actually both owned by the Carlsberg Group after they acquired Tuborg in the 70s.

Tuborg has a couple of different versions of their beer: green, red, gold, Christmas, and Easter. In 1990, the company had the brilliant idea of turning the day they release the Christmas beer into Julebryg (Christmas brew) Day or J-day for short. They also have P-day for their Easter brew (Påskebrug), but I obviously wont be here to experience that.

Anyway, enough of the history lesson. Our apartment complex threw a J-day/late Halloween party which we started our night at. We didn't dress up since we were going downtown afterward and didn't want to look like idiots. Here's a picture of Nicole and Anna who were working behind the bar in their Halloween costumes.

They did a costume change later into the Tuborg J-day costumes since they were heading to a party to get paid to hand out free beer. Here they are with Kenny in his J-day outfit (complete with blinking hat).

It was also good to start here since they had the Christmas beers and were selling them for way cheaper than the real bars downtown. To be honest, the taste of the holiday beer is not that different from regular Tuborg, but any reason to throw a country-wide party is good enough for the Danes. Here are some more picture from the bar (I am really horrible at remembering to use my camera so most of the pictures are taken by Derv or Megan).

The guy on the right of the second picture is Derv's friend Craig who was visiting from Ireland. He had just spend almost 9 hours on trains that day since he was vacationing around Europe and stopped to see Derv and thought it was going to be a quiet night in. Unfortunately for him, his timing is horrible (or awesome).

We took the bus downtown and spent the rest of the night bar-hopping. The place was a mess. I would liken it to being in downtown Portland on New Years Eve but with even more alcohol. The first bar we went to was along the canal and happened to be the most expensive fucking bar in the city. That is a slight exaggeration but it still wasn't cheap. We decided not to spend a thousand dollars on shitty beer so we left and met up with Derv's German friend Ellen outside another bar closer to the cathedral square (packed with even more people).

One of the greatest things about Denmark is that they don't have any laws against drinking in public so if you buy a bottle of beer at one bar, you don't have to finish it before you head to the next. You just take it with you. This makes for a really fun downtown scene since there are always a bunch of people just hanging out on the pedestrian streets, drinking (and smoking since almost everyone here smokes). It's just really unique and fun, especially when everyone is in good spirits about the holiday. Here's a failed attempt at taking a picture of everyone near the canal.

After a couple more bars, we spent about 20 minutes trying to hail a cab since there were so many people downtown and not nearly enough cabs. We ended up just waiting for one to drop some people off at a really common area in town and then jumping in the back once they got out. It's expensive as fuck to take cabs on the weekend but if you split it between enough people, it's cheaper than the night buses and is way faster. Plus I'd rather be driven home in a Mercedes with leather seats and heat than sit on a freezing plastic bus seat that has to stop 20 times before I get home.

All in all, it was a really fun night. I was surprised at first by how many people actually participated in it since Danes usually keep to themselves. Most of the Danish students living in my complex rarely come to the bar on Thursdays so it is mostly exchange students, but most of the people downtown were Danish. I guess if you lure them out with promises of beer and skimpy blue holiday outfits, they can't say no.