recent developments:
1) am indeed heading to budapest (!!) with anne. would spend the few days preceding the trip getting to know her maybe, going out for coffee, gauging, observing, but she's going to berlin tomorrow morning on a DIS fieldstudy. so i'll be with her for the first substantial length of time ever on a plane to hungary. awesome. i bought the tickets yesterday when i went into STA so check the prices. the clerk informed me it was the last day i could buy them; i hesitated a second and a half and said, let's do it. impulse shopping of the very best kind.
2) ben's still here. oh yes, hush your objections, close your fish-mouths, shade your goggling eyes. he's here, + $400 the airline compensated him for the inconvenience of spending an extra day. the kobenhavn airport is as nice a place as any to while away a saturday morning, i feel, especially when you emerge young gentleman in hand, giddy and grinning.

yesterday ben and i found jazz sufficient to redeem this whole city, a quartet playing for a grizzled upscale crowd in a cafe/record store. we nodded along from the sidelines and i got a kick out of how ferociously proud some of the female audience members looked, each as though each musician were her son and she were willing to pounce on anyone who dared defame him. afterwards, we met six others at DIS: andrea and friend #1, sarah; sam; jess; the russian princess, who reiterated to ben at the table, without me even having to ask her to, her observation that she and i alone in a room encompass the range of america; and mel, who engaged the russian princess -- she's from texas, remember -- in a debate about the south. how do they learn about the civil war (they have an optional class on the subject)? do southerners have stereotypes about northerners ("mainly that they're rude," rp replies)? rp maintained that it's silly to continue thinking of the u.s. in terms of regional divisions; also it's silly to blame the present generations for past mistakes, and slavery wasn't unique to america, and it's unfair to be biased against the south.
altogether an uncomfortable conversation. i wasn't very comfortable in general, feeling for some reason responsible for the group's internal well-being as well as the way it was perceived by others' in the restaurant. mostly i was oversensitive to our noise level and kept saying "shh" to jess.

ben and i sought refuge in the minimalism of krasnopolsky's, a blackchairs whitewalls cafe with a slender candle per table. no one ever notices the wick of a candle, i thought, as he went to get us an irish kaffe. the flame could be a magnificent headress on a manequin, or a flag tied to a pole, or a tent pegged into waxy ground, but nothing without the wick. i mellowed under the heat of his arm and the upper-downer drink; emerged happy again. even happier this morning to find paradise prolonged. as i wrote in my notebook during one of my many stretches where i was left to watch think wait in the terminal, the visit was everything i expected; the visit was great. so anything more at this point is unnecessary. and wonderful.