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Published: June 20th 2007
The little mermaid
We read that she has been decapitated twice Chas is going to bookend this blog with our travelling stories. I know that Father Steven would not stoop to cursing us with his sermon at our wedding ceremony, but his sermon contained many prophesies. The first being simply that Chas and Ana make or find their lives inordinately complicated and rarely simple. After one night in Bombay (where we attended Lol’s house-warming party, a wonderful coincidence) we had to get up early and battle Bombay rush hour to get to the airport. But we got there, checked in with our three bags and 52 kilos without a problem. Fly to London, waited two hours in transit and then flew to Paris. By this point we had been awake/travelling for 21 hours and it was midnight in Paris. We had to fly to Copenhagen at 10am that morning and so did not really want to travel to a cheap hotel. So we spent an incredibly uncomfortable night in Charles de Gaulle on a metal bench, and every now and then the german shepard security dog graced us with his deafening bark that echoed down the empty terminal. So we woke at 5am exhausted and decided to find our terminal. Found
The bench in CDG
This looks far more comfortable than it is, plus it is minus one occupant it, checked in and were charged for 20 kilos excess baggage. Not impressed after carrying those bags from Oz to India, Sri Lanka and now France. Asked whether there was a locker where we could leave our luggage. Nup. Flew slightly depressed to Copenhagen. When picking up our luggage my new back pack shoulder strap broke. And so did the camel’s back.
And so we arrived in Denmark in an awful frame of mind... and yet the city still won us over. We arrived in time for a three day heat wave, blazing sunshine and 30 degrees. The beautiful architecture glowing from every corner, everyone cycling around cheerfully, sunbathing topless on canal banks and in parks, swimming in the freezing river... It was so uplifiting. Did I mention the
topless sunbathing? One of the first things we noticed was that everyone rides (the government even has free bikes dotted across the city for anyone’s use). When we rented bikes and cruised around it was so liberating. Due to so many people riding all the drivers are bike conscious and so you feel incredibly safe. Great big wide bike lanes, often as wide as a traffic lanes, make for extremely
wide roads and very open feeling to the whole city; geat expanses of sky visible at all times.
The second thing was the babies. I (Ana) wondered whether this was because Copenhagen just has more babies in the city, but have come to the conclusion that they just take their babies with them everywhere. Having a child did not affect anyone’s social lives here; they rode with their babies, took them everywhere, and went out at night. It was wonderful. We even saw a woman come out of a movie with a crying baby, which she settled in the pram and then she left the baby with a baby monitor and went back into the movie. As she walked away from the pram, she just mentioned to the guy behind the drinks counter that her baby was in the pram, and that she would just be inside the cinema. Pretty amazing attitude I think.
So we spent the next five days investigating Copenhagen with Steve and Licenia (Ana’s parents who kindly brought us to Copenhagen as they had a medical conference on at the same time). We rented bikes, went on walking tours, went to
free museums (are
Copenhagen's canal
And the view from our hostel. Sadly you cannot make out the scores of sunbathers you reading this India and Sri Lanka!?) and ate wonderfully fatty food with lots of beer. They have on tap beer in every cafe, little sidewalk eatery, even (I imagine) in kindergarten canteens. You just could not escape the beer. The national dishes consisted mostly of pickled or raw fish so we after sampling we mainly kept to meat with fries. So fattening with the beer but as we were walking or riding all the time we felt entitled.
The best day we spent was on a Monday when Steve rented a car and we went exploring the north eastern coast of Zealand (the island where Copenhagen is). We visited
Karen Blixen’s house and bird sanctuary (the author of ‘Out of Africa’), which is where we had our breakfast of bakery goods under the eaves of an enormous tree. Her native forest made for a beautiful walk (where we came up close to a bright orange squirrel), as did the drive up the coast which consisted either of temperate forest or lovely views of Sweden over the Baltic Sea.
Next stop was the
Lousiana modern art museum, best museum Chas has ever gone to, period. Hard to talk about
what art you like and why, but the main expo was on Chinese art which was fascinating. It was a great insight into counter-discourse and Chinese culture and most of the artists had been exiled and then allowed to return to China. It was wonderful to be constantly refreshed, inspired and have your perspective turned on its head.
Then onto
Kronenburg Castle. It was allegedly the palace that Shakespeare set his unfortunate Dane, but there is ample evidence that Shakespeare never went to Denmark and only set it there on hearsay (the King liked to blast canons at any ship that did not hoist a flag to say hello). While the building was stunning, the funny thing was that in all the carefully reconstructed medieval rooms were pieces of modern art. The best was the bag of foreign pillaged bounty that was the foundation for the Danish empire; it bore a passing resemblance to a giant, golden, glittery scrotum.
But the best part was the underground bit, which was freezing cold and pitch black. You had to buy a torch to see. There is this Danish legend of this hero/god (Holger Danske) who is buried under the castle
Modern art at its best
The glittering testicles of the Danish Empire and will rise in times of trial. But they had written all these facts about the legend on the walls in reflective paint so you could only see then when you shined the light on them. So we spent a merry time reading about this guy (the Dalai Lama has said he is an incarnation of Buddha, and Frodo Baggins is apparently an example too) waving our flashlight around and exploring these dank dungeons.
On the way to the town with reconstructed viking ships, we stopped to have a look at the palace where Princess Mary from Tassie and Prince Frederick live (
Fredensborg Castle I think). The palace itself looked quite ordinary as palaces go, but the walk you can do around the grounds is pretty spectacular. We saw beautiful avenues of trees, lakeside views, a deer with her fawn, a pagan-looking circle of giant tall trees with a small pile of kindling in the middle and an ampitheatre of stone statues. Very, very Narnia-esque.
We arrived just 10 minutes after the
viking museum closed (we had a little trouble working out where to get on and off the freeways!), but we could still wander through the jetty
area where they had replicas of viking ships, which I thought was impressive enough. I certainly would not have wanted to spend weeks at a time on those boats, they had no shelter onboard.
Whilst in Copenhagen we went to visit
Christiania, the last remanents of the hippie culture. Some hippies took over a condemned military barracks and the government allowed them to stay as an often-dubbed ‘social experiment’. I guess I expected more of the last bastion of a revolutionary politico-sexual movement than dirty buildings and people selling weed, eating burgers and painting some pretty cool graffiti. Maybe it was a movement for a time and a place which has now passed, but that also saddened me. One of our party suggested we were not ‘getting into the spirit’ of the movement.
Our last two evenings were spent at the
Tivoli Gardens, which is the amuesment park in the middle of the city centre. And I (Ana) went on the two scariest rides, the first one I refused to open my eyes as I went rocketing upside down because I felt I was about to fall through the harness at any second. The second one I went
on with Dad, and even though it had a fantastic view of the city at sunset, it was a little disconcerting to be swung by small thin chains well above the sky scrapers! Steve was not just concerned about losing his glasses, but it has to be said he coped extremely well! The Tivoli rocks, live jazz and classical music every night; two ballet/commedia performances every day; concerts and that is ignoring all the rides and junk food abounding.
Oh, and Sof you’d be excited about this (not quite sure about anyone else, but you’ll hear about it anyway). During the week we were there, they had a
cow sculpture exhibition. Lots and lots of brightly painted cows, some with patterns, some with flippers and flowers, some with braille, one with grass all over and a football, and so on. We didn’t get to the exhibition, but afterwards they were placed all over the city, so as we were strolling around we sometimes came passed an odd looking cow all of a sudden!
So our time in Wonderful Wonderful Copenhagen, was indeed very wonderful. Dad tells us that there is a song called Wonderful Wonderful Copenhagen, but other
than the title we know little else. We have decided we will return again one day, maybe even to live and work! Who knows...
To the bookend: Steve and Licenia decided to take our camping gear (you should have seen Licenia’s face at the thought of camping in Scandinavia! We just got an email from them telling us the one night they used the tent it rained all night and, as it is so far north, the sun did not set all night) which put us back under the luggage limit! Our international check-in took 45 seconds. Put our passports in a scanner which gave us our boarding passes and then dumped our bags. India, are you still listening? No ten people have to look at your passport and you need to be searched/X-rayed only once! We thought our complication curse was over. But oh no. We arrived in Charles de Gaulle and caught a train to Montparnasse where we had to catch a train at 6am the following morning. We put our bags in luggage lockers and found a frightfully expensive hotel (they were all expensive in the area and Ana and I had made the decision that
airports and train stations were not for sleeping except in emergencies).
So we woke up the following morning in time to go to the train station, rocked up and saw that the luggage locker area was locked up until 7am, ½ hour after our non-refundable, non-exchangeable, super-cheap TGV tickets. Oh the curse! Much shaking of fists towards the heavens. Chas ran off to a help desk to beg and a kindly gentlemen opened it for us (I suspect only because we were foreigners and were by extension slightly stupid). Ana tells me that he looked very surprised when I kissed him as we ran for our train, luggage and all.
And so we arrived at Chas’ favourite place on Earth... but that is a tale for another time.
PS We put so many photos that they go onto a second page, so if you want to see more of Copenhagen (especially the cool cows) go to the bottom and go to
page 2. Lots of love, Ana and Chas
PPS I have felt a little hurt by my parent’s description of me as bitter and twisted. My cynical outlook is perhaps protection from my idealism and
naivety. I am very fond of India. The people are extremely kind to strangers and foreigners, the food and culture are larger than life, aggressive and extremely involving. So this is my apology to India and hope that I have not put anyone off.
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CANI
non-member comment
Yes, I'm definitevely the first to comment this one
I never really thought of denmark as ever being an extremely hot country..... maybe thats just because I've never really been there..!! Hey, did you plant yourself in front of the guards and make silly faces, hoping that they would not retaliate!!?? that's an experience nobody should skip....!!! Anyway, Cheers to everybody..!!! and cheers to the others that will be commenting this blog too..!!!