A maremmano walks to me

I tell friends who visit Copenhagen for the first time: "The Little Mermaid is like the Mona Lisa." Meaning: it's just as underwhelming. And similar to the Mona Lisa in Louvre, the best view is not in the object in question—i.e., the famous Little Mermaid bronze statue by Edvard Eriksen, repeatedly damaged and defaced for various reasons—but the areas that surround it. Near the Mermaid is the Copenhagen Opera House at the shore of the Inner Harbor. You'll find wide pathways for humans and humans with bikes. You'll see smartphone-deprived children who play and laugh. One gets the feeling that this is how it is when the government thinks and works and fights for its citizens. The Danes pay the world's highest taxes, but they don't mind.



The breeze is cool, and my feet are tired. I avoid the long queue of tourists awaiting their turn to have a photo with the Mermaid. I sit beside the couple who have lived in the city. They ask me if it's my first time in Copenhagen. I say, no, I've been here many times. They tell me I should take the water taxi to get a better view of the city.

"It's better than these paid city tours, you know?" the wife said.

The dog—white, smiling, unafraid, almost like Appa in the Avatar—leaves his owners behind and slowly makes his way to me, asking to be recognized. I stroke his head, and he smiles.

"Hej," I say to the creature in Danish. The dog does not judge my pretentiousness and appears to play along.

"He's huge!" I say to the couple. "What breed is he?"

"He's a Maremmano."

"A what?"

"A Ma-rem-ma-no. The Italians are picky about how you pronounce it."

I look it up later: A Maremmano-Abruzzese sheepdog, a guardian to protect the sheep from wolves.

When I get back home home, I will tell Paul, our aspin, "Mas guwapo ka gihapon."