We are settled into our canal-side apartment (more pics to come) and have begun to stock up on essentials for the long run: salt, soap, coffee, herring, buying only as much as we can carry home on foot- no car, no supermarkets that we can find. No problem- fruit stands and wine shops and bakeries abound. The yogurt is amazing.

This morning I took a walk up to the statue of the Little Mermaid, the city’s beloved icon. Hans Christian Anderson is much on the mind as we are living in his old digs in Nyhavn. On my Kindle are his collected stories- 168 of them. They make me weep. I have to read with a hankie in hand. The statue is life-sized (assuming mermaids are the same size as humans) and bronze; she is perched on a softly rounded boulder. There were tidy piles of kelp lined up all along the water’s edge, spaced exactly 20 feet apart, some sort of neatness campaign, I supposed.

As I sketched, a British man asked, “Is she hard to capture?” I said, “Not at all, she holds completely still”, and got a laugh.

A moment later the kelp-cleanup crew arrived, dropping the boom, so to speak, on my drawing session.

Happy Friday.