Copenhagen

It's pretty late right now. . . I'm still on weekend time, which will be great for my 9AM class tomorrow. I got back from Copenhagen last night. It was really lovely, but expensive. My friend Cara and I went for a long weekend on a whim because of a cheap flight. That morning my friends visiting from England left and I had my Consciousness final, which I hope I passed since a lot of the questions were kind of convoluted (I think the person who wrote the exam had English as their second language). The first night we stayed in a great hostel, but the area it was in was SCARY. And I live in Worcester. To get there we had to walk down a side street then 'turn left down the alley near the dumpsters' according to the hostel site directions. So we did, and it was ridiculous. Then since it was late and we hadn't eaten, we had to do the whole thing over again and search for food. Ended up taking refuge at a 7/11 strangely enough, not a place I expected to be everywhere in Scandinavia. Go globalization.

Anyway, despite the strange start to the trip, it was great. The next morning we met some really interesting people in the hostel from all over Europe before we headed to the city center to our second hostel on the metro. The area our second hostel was in was right in the middle of things. We were two minutes away from Tivoli Gardens (the huge garden/amusement park), which was unfortunately closed. We were near the Gammel Strand area that had a lot of cute cafes and shops, so we explored with the aim of finding danishes and Danish people. We stopped by the free National Museum that had an interesting exhibit on the Danish people in the 20th century by decade. I really should do more research on the countries I'm visiting, but museum trips will have to suffice for now I guess. Afterward we headed over to the Stroget Street area (one of the longest shopping streets in Europe) to of course check out the architecture. We couldn't afford anything (the Danish Kroner is even higher than the euro to the dollar) but it was really good people watching. There were so many people on bikes it really made me miss the Netherlands. You could tell who the Danes were because they were all dressed really well and were tall and beautiful. The stereotypes are true in Copenhagen.

Before a dinner of Indian food and all-you-can-eat sushi and a night of hanging out near unapproachable beautiful Danes, Cara and I hung out for a while at the Nyhaven Harbor. It was really cool with a beautiful view of all of the ships in the harbor with old colorful Danish houses with outdoor cafes under them. We learned some Danish and found that it is actually really similar to Dutch which was cool.

Saturday we went in search of more danishes, which are actually called something different. After we went to the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek (it's a museum) where I saw a lot of modern Danish sculpture and 19th and 20th century art. Pretty cool. It reminded me a lot of the National Gallery in DC because it also had a huge central inside garden with a truly ugly statue in the fountain. We wandered over to the Latin Quarter after and accidentally went through the Red Light District, which was small fries compared to Amsterdam although it was much shadier, probably because Amsterdam really exploits it. And Amsterdam has much more delicious pizza. That night was an adventure. We decided to use a tour book to decide where to hang out and ended up at this crazy Australian bar/club/thing in the city where we finally met some Danes.

We didn't stay out too late since the next morning we had to check-out and take an early train through the gorgeous countryside out to Northern Denmark. We decided on a whim to go to this great modern and contemporary museum (the Louisiana) by the sea in this picturesque town called Humbleback. The collection was pretty impressive. A highlight was this film by Pipilotti Rist projected on the ceiling in the basement- a lot of people were passed out on orange body pillows watching women on acid run through fields for a while. We spent a good amount of time by the sea completely in awe of its beauty (I'll put up pictures). Before our flight back to lovely Leiden we took the metro to Christiania, a famous commune-like Freetown that is autonomous from the Danish government. It was pretty cool. There was still a feel of the free love generation despite the general tourist feel. I'd put up pictures but because of the reputation it has for drugs you couldn't take any inside the town.

And that's it! Next weekend my friend Alicia is coming up from France to hang out in the Netherlands for a little before we go to Madrid!

Happy Spring!
Ash