COPENHAGEN, DENMARK
2016-08-06, 03:32, JASON
BUDGET, STAY: GENERATOR HOSTEL (DAY 1), URBAN HOUSE HOSTEL (DAY 2)
Moving right along. We woke up and had a huge Danish brunch with our old friends from Jason's Master's program. Seriously, we forgot how big some portions could get. There were eggs, yogurt, bread, more eggs, sausage, bacon, and a whole slurry of other things. After we had eaten we decided that we wouldn't need to eat anymore for the rest of Denmark (which, of course we quickly overturned as soon as we got into Copenhagen). Anyway, we were done with Vejle. The wedding ceremony had passed, friends had been met, and we jumped into the car and drove all the way back to Copenhagen for a day of fun.
Part of this entry will touch on Copenhagen again which we returned to right before our flight back to Singapore via Dubai and Colombo, so it's a bit broken up. I'll date it as a separate section. To jump to the second part, please scroll down.
Unfortunately, this whole week, the weather has been horrible. We took for granted the good weather we get in Singapore, how, even though at any moment it can be a flash flood of rain, it would be warm enough to wear shorts and a tshirt. Europe is a different ball game, and if you're packing for a week through it, yes, you don't have to pack as much due to the cold weather, but you have to pack heavier individual items. A rookie mistake, but we went on with it. After returning our car, there was a small drizzle in the city. We walked for about 30 minutes into the center to find our hostel.
Another thing we really took for granted is the Asian hostel. We've traveled around Europe before plenty of times in the past, but not in the west, mostly in the east. One thing we noticed is the tendency for hostels in western Europe to 1) be expensive and 2) resemble hotels. In other parts of the world that don't get as many travelers, the hostel community is quite small and it can be a great opportunity to meet people. However, when you get to the larger hostels, they're mostly filled with families or tour groups of people that already have friends, and they're doing some sort of Eurotrip around Western Europe. This, coupled with the fact that Western Europe tends to be very popular among people who can afford to travel, creates an environment that is not very nice. It becomes a bit overbackpackery and a bit bro-y. The staff don't tend to be too friendly, they push you through like another guest, and a basic service such as holding your luggage becomes unfeasible due to the amount of people checked in -- unfeasible to the point where you have to pay for it! Also, because there are so many people as well you tend to not be able to trust people as much. Leaving your bag on your bed in some places would be considered OK, but I don't trust it in a large hostel. Point being, if you're already shelling out so much money to a hostel for a 10 bedder dorm, you might as well find a air BB or something that is slightly pricier, but you get to have your own room. Usually we travel by hostel because it's the cheaper and friendly option, but, in Western Europe, it's slightly different. We miss the chillness of the Asian hostel and how they're just happy to provide for you a room at the end of the day. The processes are a bit more simple.
That aside, we got our keys, made our way through what seemed like a jail -- many rooms each with a big room number on it -- and finally found our room. We dropped our things off, and then were on our way.
As it goes with some Scandinavian cities, we aren't ever quite sure what to do. They are relatively modern cities with large infrastructure, so we were a bit lost in terms of where to start. However, armed with a map, we wandered around and just had a relaxing day, walking around and just enjoying the environment of the place. No checkmarks of places to see, just getting a feel for Copenhagen. Well, a few checkmarks.
Copenhagen is Scandinavian to the extreme. From its people to its architecture, everything just strikes me as what you think as Scandinavian. The people are all tall and Vikingish, the buildings are all modular and square, and it's pretty damn cold most of the places. There is a nice waterfront area called the Langlinie, and, across the way you can see a bunch of windmills. The air is extremely fresh - despite being cold - and there are people on bikes everywhere. Here is an example of the architecture:
The first thing we decide to go see is the Little Mermaid. This is a famous Copenhagen landmark, and it's located a bit off the map relative to the city center around Nyhavn street, so we decided to start there. It's interesting what cities will advertise as their main attraction -- what I call the Instagram Attraction. Most people will get a picture of this, post it, and you will know where they are. Belgium has the Mannekin Pis, Singapore has the Merlion, and England has Buckingham Palace. In Denmark, it's the Little Mermaid. It's a rather unassuming mermaid, just a couple of feet away from the shore and close enough to climb to, although you are not permitted to. It's not too tall either, probably something you can design in a sculpture class, and it has copper residue on it due to the oxidation of the original material. It looks out into the sea, and represents the Little Mermaid character that Hans Christian Andersen wrote about, and Disney turned into a film, appropriately about a redhead bitch who wanted legs. When you make your way to it, it in itself is everything Scandinavian. Understated but slightly profound. If you look into the history of the Mermaid, some people have defaced it, decapitated it, put burqa on it, etc. so it's been quite a central figure for protests and the like, and has situated itself quite nicely into the Danish political realm. For that, we took a few pictures, but refrained from Instagramming for fear that would be too #basic.
But, seriously, walking around Copenhagen, you begin to acquaint yourself with the architecture. We noticed this a bit in Vejle too, most of the roads don't have any building jut outs, they're built along a planar surface with windows aligned nicely on the facade of the houses. The road is relatively the same size all the way across, with two lanes on each side designated for bikes and the main street for the road. Everytime you cross the street, you look left and right twice: once for the bikes, once for the road. So, while walking down the roads, there is little variation in terms of depth of the street entrance, but there is some variation in the way that the houses display their windows, or display their colors.
After that, we strolled along to the Amalienborg palace area, which is made up of four identical buildings all surrounding a central statue. There wasn't much to see there, but the buildings were all built in the same style as the streets: same facade, duplicated four times. They had a few standing soldiers guarding the place, but these soldiers were a lot nicer than the London Palace Guards - they were smiling, walking around, and let people take selfies with them. I wanted to start a photo series of people taking selfies with people, where I take a picture of people doing selfies, but I think that kind of tanked since I couldn't really capture the right moment. Anyway, the palace was nice, with one cardinal corner anchored by a church, as you so often have in Europe.
Continuing on, we visited the famous Nyhavn canal street. Holding true to the Danish architecture, it also had the characteristic flat-faced front, but what was unique was that they painted the buildings in various bright primary and secondary colors so that when the sunlight -- what very little sunlight that was there -- hit the face, it was like this wonderful place came to life. Vibrant colors against a bustling street: super cool. Many people were sat outside enjoying themselves despite the horrid weather and sipping on some beers or coffee. Walking around, there was a great vibe to it too. Down the middle of the canal, the occasional tourist boat would sail by and be running bilingual Danish and English tours about the area. Some other people had their old school boats docked along the canal and were sitting on it sipping on some alcohol while tucked away in rain jackets. Our philosophy is that if you have any kind of canal or waterfront, you should utilize it well, and we approved of the Nyhavn waterfront. Now, only to make some friends who own boats.. that live in Copenhagen..
When you reach the end of Nyhavn, you're able to continue along the pedestrianized bridge across the river to the side of the street market as well as the opera house. At this point, the weather started clearing up a bit and traffic picked up. When we reached the waterfront, the shore on the other side wasn't this super built up area, but rather, it was low rise with only windmills and church towers peering through in the horizon. All along the shore on the other side, there were art-deco style building scattered throughout. Some street vendors selling crepes lined the bridge to get some extra business. Happy Danes biking alongside you, you know the drill.
It seems that a lot of the hipster movements have recently hit Copenhagen. Think of an open-concept Biergarten that has a bunch of international food types ranging from East Asian, to African, to European (maybe not that, because it's too close to home). Inside this huge warehouse or hangar of sorts, there are many tiny stalls each serving a food from a faraway country. Outside, weather permitting, benches set out with people drinking beers and enjoying their international cuisine. This is kind of the stuff you see in any city that has a growing hipster population, and it's hit Denmark as well. Most of the seats are set so that you can face the water and enjoy the late sun-setting summers you get in Northern Europe. Although we're bitchy critics about the whole thing, I have to say the ambience is really nice. You get to just hang out with friends, roll up in your roadie fixed-gear bicycle, and enjoy the breeze. We forgot how nice a late summer was in Europe. When you're out and it's 21:00 and the sun has just begun to set, there's something so relaxing about it. You can see why a culture of relaxation and luxury has arisen here.
The only thing that is true about these markets is that the food is priced high. Although, to be honest, we weren't sure if it was just a Northern European thing. We could only appreciate from afar.
Walking back, we passed by Nyhavn again and took some more pictures. The sun was now shining brighter and hitting the street at an even more photographic angle, so #instagram as it goes. From here, we looped around and took a walk along more of the outskirts of the city. We passed by some old churches as well as old bulidings. We honestly can't tell you what exactly the buildings were as we were just strolling, but I think one of them was the old stock exchange. The church we passed had an exhibit of a polar bear stuck on an exponential curve-shaped spear in protest of global warming, with the spear resembling the exponential rate at which global warming has occurred in the past decade. It was great to see this art in front of the church. A bit of politics amidst religious institutions always is a great juxtaposition.
Anyway, afterwards we were a bit tired so we returned back to the hostel to cash in for the night. There was some street parting happening across the way with lovely white-people style dancing to German house music. The music faded quickly into the background as we closed our eyes.
The next day, we wanted to keep walking around to explore the city. We went to Rosendahl (check) Castle to check out some of the old castle grounds, but then realized that we had to pay a lot of krone to get in so promptly abandoned the idea. We swear, we weren't trying to be cheap but they were charging upwards of 20 Singapore Dollars (15 USD, 10 GBP) to get in, so we decided it wasn't worth what little money we had brought in. The surrounding garden area was great though, and we watched some of the Danish military do practice drills in one section of the garden. Far more worth it than those 20 SGDs.
We also walked back across to the main theater that was opposite of the hipster market we had visited yesterday. We wanted to cross over the river (check) to go visit a church with a spiral tower that we had seen in the distance. After walking for about 30 minutes along a smaller canal offshoot of the river, then slightly into the city, we finally made it there before it started raining and took a few pictures of the place. The location was random, not much else around it but the church, but the tower had looked so much like a helter skelter we knew we had to go.
Heading back into the main part of town, we came across the Town Hall which had free entry inside. At first, when we arrived to the building we had no idea what it was as we were aimlessly wandering, but when we saw many foreigners gathered around it we looked up on the map what the exactly building was. The coolest part of their building was that there was absolutely no security getting into the place, they just let you walk in without checking your bag.There is a security guard standing around the ground floor that patrols slightly, but it's not intimidating at all. This highlights another interesting part of Scandinavian culture for us: the amount of trust they have in their citizens to 'do the right thing.' By extension, tourists also benefit from this passive trust. While you walk around the town hall, you run into both tourists as well as civil servants who gladly embrace tourists walking around the building. Very few parts are roped off, and you are able to wander around the entire building and peer into some of their offices. I think it's a part of the civil servants' working life that they have embraced; that people wander around their office and are curious and occasionally peeping in and being nosy. I liked that about Copenhagen a lot, the belief that a good society can be self breeding and that continuous policing doesn't need to be necessary to be a safe place. In Norway which I've been in the past as well as Sweden, you have a similar system in which most people will spend money on the tickets for transportation, but rarely will they inspect passengers for tickets. It's a completely -- for lack of a better word -- Scandinavian way of governing things, but I guess in smaller homogeneous countries it works. I can never imagine that in the United States, as we have defined safety through our military, heavy policing, and use of guns.
The view inside the main foyer of the town hall is great, since it captures all the sunlight without the beaming rays, creating a lit effect without feeling overheated. Much of the office space and stairs have maintained that old-style European wooden architecture, with occasional carpet lining the central floor portion where people walk. Down in the basement, the staff enjoying their lunch, and, up a few floors, the main offices that have very few tourists and the occasional Danish two people chatting about business. We feel slightly awkward walking past, but they pay us no attention and just smile. We are guests, but welcome in their house.
Simply walking through the town hall was a great glimpse into Danish life, beliefs, and culture. Without much time to spare, we had to catch a train ride back into Copenhagen airport to catch a connecting flight to Cologne to go see our old high school friends. With that, we simply hopped on the Metro line that linked directly to the airport, and were on our way. We would come back to Copenhagen after doing our Germany tour.
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2016-08-05 to 2016-08-06: The second portion of our trip happened after coming back from our Germany tour, with a random detour to Malmo in Sweden. Our train from Malmo, Sweden drove directly into Copenhagen main station (Kobenhavn H), and so our hostel was located right nearby.
Most of the town we explored before our Germany portion in our trip was in a different part of the city, just northeast of the main station. However, this time, little to our knowledge, we were staying southwest of the railroad tracks, a region known as Vesterbro, which translates to "West of the Bridge." We had no idea about anything in this area. Checking into the hostel was interesting. As is procedure -- we have discovered -- in Western Europe, they even cut out the middleman for checkin. All we had to do was use a machine to find our booking, and they would print out a code that let us into the door leading to the hostel rooms, as well as the door leading to our room. During checkout as well, all you would have to do is leave the room by the specified time. Funnily enough, I didn't see a single staff member the time we were there, but I guess they had been busy and quietly working in the background.
Turns out, Vesterbro is the old prostitution area of the city, as well as the area where people would get their drugs. It came with all of the fragrance of prostitution area with slightly run down buildings and shady characters on the street. All along one street called Ingestadt (check), there were sex shops selling anything for anyone with any particular fetish. Occasionally, we would come across small rooms sunk slightly below floor level, but clearly within eye level that had windows advertising the various women you could choose to be with for a night. Yes, brothels that were open for people too see, a Copenhagen version of Amsterdam's famous red light district. These women had to work as well.
Denmark was one of the first countries to legalize pornography back in the 60s, and so you can understand that body liberalism has dominated sexual ideology for a while (despite their current conservative party). I find it interesting that for some social issues involving race, they may tend to take a more conservative approach given the recent threats of terrorism on continental Europe, but for sexual issues, they are open as can be. As such, most people didn't make too big of a deal that there were tits and ass hanging out, whereas if you took a more sexually conservative country like the U.S. or, to a lighter degree, the U.K., they would look on this disfavorably, even with a hint of elitism. In this backdrop of liberal history, the area that was the 'dirty' area of the city, where crime was higher, was not a big thing, at least not noticeably so to the tourist perpsective. If anything, they embraced and were proud of the fact that they have a very socially liberal society.
However, as society modernizes, so do historical areas, sometimes at the cost of culture. Recall what I had said earlier about the open-air market that they had established across the river. Much of the gentrification happening there was also happening in Vesterbro. A lot of the crime was supposed to be cleaned up and tourism made way for. This is a shame, but that only comes from the tourist perspective. If you imagine that we (tourists) wanted to preserve crimeareas for the culture, it brings really no value to the city other than exploitation of impoverished areas at our expense. It seems the only way to go about development is to retain the history of the area, but still contribute money into developing (read: cleaning up crime, reducing prostitution) certain areas.
This trend was particular noticeable for the Vesterbro area that was previously the meat packing area. Words cannot express how I felt walking into that area, but I am going to try. To do so requires a bit of backstory:
I grew up in suburban California, in Silicon Valley in the 90s (yes, this backstory is going to go way back). Growing up, I would go to the local Dairy Queen that was in a dingy, run-down building with a flat roof, all inclusive with acrid fast-food odor and an outdoor seating area with striped sea-green and white umbrellas covering benches made up of pebble stone. The Diary Queen was nested in a larger shopping center that was also the same low-rise cream/pastel building color, and would contain various ma and pa shops for photographing families, cutting hair, and selling fabrics. There was a laundromat as well nested in the cluster, and inside would be various washing machines arranged in a basic presentation, tiles on the floor, and an outdated vending machine selling various candies. You can say that this upbringing was pretty suburban at heart. Compared to the Cupertino I grew up in until now, it's modernized a lot and has built up into taller, modern buildings with interiors that are decorated only in an IKEA-chic manner. Most of the low-rise old buildings that were built in Cupertino's orchard age have been replaced by younger, sexier models of development. The old M & M department store has moved into a shopping complex, the old UNO's pizza -- a one-off restaurant -- has been demolished and built into some new Greek food place, and the old dingy 90s mall complex, Vallco, is now getting revamped to be a part of the whole image of "modern Cupertino." For those who grew up in Cupertino, you will understand that our upbringing was a nice little bubble, and we -- I believe -- all have some humble roots there. It is home, both in the past and present no matter where we go.
How then, was the meatpacking district in Copenhagen so sentimental for me? The area resembled my hometown very closely. There were off-white buildings with blue lining along the edges, clustered together and surrounding a parking lot. Most of the walls hadn't been touched up and showed a certain amount of decay or graffit, as you would expect to see in an old packing town. Think Pier 39 in San Francisco, with that gritty quality of a fishing district along the Bay with that quintessential seaside smell. And, what was even better was this strong sense of community you felt when you walked in: friends hanging out together on rotten wooden benches, sitting on lawn chairs strewn out in the parking lot, all with a chilly air as the sun began to set (remember, that being about 21:00) around you. Even better, people hadn't rolled up into the area on their old school Buicks or Station Wagons, they had done so on bicycles, and they clearly outnumbered the cars in the parking lot. Although my childhood was never that glamorous or happening, there was something nostalgic about walking there. The lights strung over a wire hanging overhead bringing sporadic light, replacing the sun, to a dim area. The names of the restaurants without much of a banner, but just being painted onto the building against a white backdrop. The area really captured my childhood. What was even weirder was the fact that I was in Copenhagen and not suburban America. The flat-faced buildings characteristic of Danish architecture near Nyhavn and the 'cleaner' parts of town contrasted so much from what I was seeing in front of me. And, that in turn contrasted from the sharp gentrification I was seeing of the area: the fact that the outside maintained that image of America I remember, but the inside was decked out in posh dimly lit interior with candles, all regalia necessary for that 'fancy restaurant' vibe; the fact that there were many ethnic restaurants clearly attaining appropriation status; the fact that the meat packing district was still operating right beside it, a traditionally blue collar job that has now received slight gentrification status as a profession, too. It was like a supermix of all things I had known so well, but also all things I had hated about rich yuppies mixed into one.
So, that was the internal dialogue for myself. But, before ethe dialogue comes an initial reaction towards the place, and I have to say I loved it. Forget for a moment that it was being gentrified in a country that already enjoys nice social welfare and developed status (can we call this gentrification?). My initial observation was that it reminded me of home, and people were enjoying themselves, and I think when it comes down to it sometimes that's what matters. Maybe people know it's being built up quickly, that they're trying to get rid of the prostition crime and drug criem. These are all developments for a city that are actually good things. To be able to offer citizens a happy living standard and cool areas like Vesterbro is a privilege in itself, and I have to say the government did a good job. On a personal level, I thank them for giving me back a slice of that suburban hood life that was almost washed out be development in my own hometown. I choose to focus on the fact that these are all signs of progress in some way.
The rest of the trip just involved us walking more around the meat packing area, and then heading back to the hostel. Along the way, we saw the occasional prozzy soliciting sex from old Danish men, as well as some shady looking figures trying to sell drugs. There was one street with a bunch of people lying alongside the road and doing what I perceived was shooting up, although I could be wrong (insert my plug here about why we need clean needle programs). This was all within one or two blocks of our hostel, which we hadn't realized was such a vibrant area during the day, but really came alive at night. The next day, we did another stroll around the city and back towards the town hall and Nyhavn area before catching our train back to the airport, en route to Dubai and then Colombo, then Singapore.
Copenhagen as a city was diverse. Within a 10 km radius you were able to go from nice, posh upscale stores and restaurants to grungier areas like Vesterbro. All throughout, you could see why this place was so liveable. It really is a modern city in Scandinavia, and people generally seem happy on the outside. These are all great achievements of a city and country. Oh, and I almost forgot, there's generally just a lot more space in this city and country, especially coming from the Southeast Asian plate. God bless the Danes for their beautiful cities and, of course, men.