First morning in Copenhagen

I think my body clock is slowly adjusting. It's 3:30 am in Boston, but I just finished breakfast here. I woke up about 8:30am here, not sure whether it was noon or the middle of the night. I strolled through the lobby and saw (I believe) Ram Vaswani checking in. I think he caught the slight look of surprise on my face and concealed his own smile.

We aren't even at the tables yet and I'm getting read like the wall of a mens room. I chuckle now as I read the minds of 99% of the people reading this blog. Their thoughts go something like this:
A) Who the %$@# is Ram Vaswani?
and
B) I knew Korte was a geek, but this is ridiculous.

Being a poker geek and seeing some of these guys is a little like being an ice skating fan and running smack dab into Scott Hamilton, except in that (from my understanding) very few former pro skaters have criminal records.

The hotel is a scream. The poker players from across the world stick out like sore thumbs, anyone or all of them could be from Revere or Somerville. I checked out the tiny casino last night and the poker guys might as well have had signs tattooed to their foreheads. It was as though they were issued ill-fitting mismatched suits by design.

I have never seen so many guys looking so uncomfortable in a suit jacket outside of a Charlestown courtroom.

My favorite character to this point is this guy that kept coming back into the restaurant downstairs where I had breakfast, chatting up the waitresses and scoring- sugar. He kept returning and leaving with a handful of these sugar packets. Absolutely HAS to be here for the EPT tourney, just HAS to be. I couldn't quite make out his accent, more info to follow, I am sure.

I imagine things will get a bit friendlier today at the old Pokerstars meet and greet, but for now, the players drift around the hotel with practiced scowls, it's quite a hoot.

For me, well... I have mostly just kept to myself. As gregarious as I seem, I am not generally a walk-over-and-introduce-myself type of guy. Last night I stopped in to the Japanese restaurant downstairs and had some sushi. It was pretty good, especially the salmon, but a tad pricey and it took absolutely forever to get out of there. People don't seem to move at the pace we Americans do, something I generally appreciate, but not when I've finished my meal and have to wait ten minutes for a check. I actually threw in the towel and walked to the desk after about eight minutes of siting there wondering what to do with my hands (on table or off), legs (I can't cross them, this table is too short, but I look like a truck drivers cramped up like this).

I finally escaped, overtipping the slow (but incredibly hot) waitress.

This morning I hit the health club.

Relax- it wasn't to work out or anything crazy like that. I just wanted to schedule a massage for this afternoon. I always want to get one when I vaction and I never have, so today I went down and scheduled it.

Yay.