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Copenhagen bike tour
Wednesday, September 4 2024
location: room 328, Hotel Bella Grande, Copenhagen, Denmark
Today Gretchen rented us bicycles from the hotel we were staying at. They were super-light light sage-green seven speeds with a front hand brake and a rear brake that could be activated by pedaling backwards. They came with both baskets and a rear panniers rack. Before agreeing to go biking today, I'd made Gretchen promise to obey traffic laws like Dane instead of doing her usual crap of bending the rules to as far as she thinks she can get away with. People in Denmark expect cyclists to obey the rules, and people who don't are asking for the unexpected, since others won't have included their unexpected behaviors in their calculations.
Intially we headed west into the district called Vesterbro, mostly just to see what it looked like, since we didn't have any destination there in mind. It was plenty nice, but eventually we turned north and headed up to Nørrebro, where we found a vegan café called Kaf. There we ordered a few things and sat out in a little square across the street to drink our cappuccino-like drinks and eat our bread with whipped vegan butter. Mine came with half an avocado, which I had to slice up and apply to my to my bread in whatever manner I chose. There was a sign inside Kaf telling people they weren't to use tablets or laptops inside or even outside, and at some point the woman working there told (in Danish) a couple eating at a table behind us outside that they had to put their laptops away. Phones, though, were apparently fine, since banning them in such places is probably impossible. Since our SIM card wasn't working and there was no available WiFi hotspot, our phones weren't useful for much more than seeing where we were on the map.
Next we visited the sprawling Assistens Kirkegård, a sprawling cemetary featuring the graves of Niels Bohr, Søren Kierkegaard, and Hans Christian Andersen. As we waked around, I was mostly interested in the animal life and the curation of the trees (one of which was a tuliptree, an exotic from eastern North America). There weren't many species of animals present, though the two that were were very common: extremely red red squirrels and magpies. When we got to Bohr's large family monument, was pleased to see it was topped by an owl instead of the usual Christianic iconography. (I think I'd seen photos of the this gravestone elsewhere).
From there, we biked to an art museum called the Hirschsprung, featuring mostly portrait and other non-abstract art, much of it from the 19th and 20th Centuries. I often regard visits to art museums with a certain amount of dread, but this was art I actually enjoyed looking at, which suggests to me that perhaps my main problem with art museums is having to look at pretentious abstract shit that I think we can all agree any untalented five year old could do. While we were there, there was also a tour group of teenagers present, and the boys among them were so tall that they towered over me (I'm about 70 inches tall) like trees. I'd read somewhere that young people in Holland are, on average, the tallest in the world, and evidently this also true of Denmark. (By contrast, when we're traveling in Latin America, it's not uncommon for me to be the tallest person in a crowd.)
From there, we pedalled south to Christiana, an "autonomous zone" southeast of Copenhagen where, in the early 1970s, a group of hippies took over land abandoned by the Danish military. They then built their own village using improvised materials, with a result that resembles Woodstock and other places where initiative and creativity sometimes outweighed skill. The weirdest experiments all collapsed or burned down decades ago, leaving a place that actually doesn't look all that different from the rest of Copenhagen. But it's definitely funkier and covered with more graffiti. There are a few cafés; there, including an all-vegan one that Gretchen was excited about (as she always is). The thing is, though, we weren't very hungry at that point and the place smelled like hippie food (that is, food unartfully flavored by people with more good-intentions than experience). So instead we went to a sort of brewpub called Christiania Bryghus, where I drank a mediocre IPA while Gretchen drank something alcohol-free. All the beers at the Bryghus are brewed with hemp, which seems unnecessary to me. Interestingly, though we usually think of Denmark as a socialist country where the kind of freedom us liberals prefer are unleashed, marijuana is still illegal there, even in extra-free Danish places like Christiania. After drank our drinks, we briefly ducked into some sort of welding collective called Kvindesmedien, a place that featured welding classes specifically for women, among other things.
Next we rode our bikes mostly along the canal, away from the usual busy streets of Copenhagen, up to a cape called Refshaleøen that used to be an island. There, at a mostly open-air café called La Banchina, Gretchen had reserved us time in a sauna on the side of the canal. There is only one sauna at La Banchina, which seems like not nearly enough considering all the people we could see on the nearby docks drinking La Banchina beers. It was a gorgeous day in Copenhagen, and the Danish evidently treat such precious summer days as rare opportunities that should be dedicated to summer pursuits. When the staffer showed us into our sauna (which was like a large oak barrel lying on its side), I was immediately struck by the intense heat, but that was just in the little dressing room before the sauna proper. When we got into the sauna itself, it was almost unbearably hot. The thermometer on the wall was showing the temperature to be in the low 70s celsius, which is about 160 F. I wouldn't normally think such temperatures could be endured for more than a few seconds. But so long as it's just the air and insulating surfaces that are that hot, the body can take it for ten minutes or perhaps more. Eventually, of course, the body would reach the temperature of the surrounding air, and well before that the person with that body would be dead. While we sat there in the sweltering heat, we had a circular glass window where we could watch people on the docks and swimming in the canal. Periodically people would jump off a high concrete pier into the water. I can barely swim as it is, so the prospect of swimming in a place where the water is so deep that I must swim to reach air is not appealing. Gretchen, of course, loves such places and, since I built the dock, never touches the bottom of Woodworth Lake. So she could use the sauna as intended, heating herself up and then diving into the canal. For me, though, the best use I could get out of the canal was to sit on the dock and dangle my feet into the water. The dock was so crowded that I couldn't monopolize the couple ladders into the water, where I might've slowly lowered myself in. (The water was too cold for me to plunge in.) Since I couldn't really enjoy the sauna without also plunging into the cold water, I made do by spraying myself occasionally with a hose supplying lukewarm water.
Eventually a couple people stretched a woven strap across the water and a guy did some balancing tricks on it. Evidently the strap was there for the use of the public, and couple other people climbed up onto it as well. But of the hundred or more people there, only one or two other guys who spend any time balanced on it. There was also a woman who managed to get to feet briefly on the strap as well. Soon a second strap was also stretched, but the number of people skilled at walking on it did not increase.
I started enjoying myself a bit more once we'd gotten drinks at the La Banchina bar. (My IPA was another mediocre one, and Gretchen got the kind of beer she likes, the kind that tastes like vinegar.) An indication of how little use I made of the water in the canal was that, when I had to piss, I used a nearby public urinal. (It was out in the open, with little sidewalls to keep passersby from seeing my penis.)
After the sauna, we continued north up to an area called Reffen featuring a festive open-air area with lots of food trucks. We checked out the options (an Aghan place, a West African place, and a Persion place whose letters had been cut out of a carpet) and finally settled on Ibiza Bowls, where I ordered the miso mushroom burger and Gretchen ordered some sort of bowl. We also had a side of fries that we shared. We ate these under a roofed pavilion nearby, watching Danes spread out along the harbor and ships coming and going out on the water. (One of these was a large naval ship flying the Danish flag.) The food we'd ordered was amazing, but I found at least two long black human hairs in it that I decided not to allow to ruin my experience.
To get back to our hotel, we had to ride our backs south along the canal and then east through the heart of Copenhagen, passing many beautiful views along the way, all of which were crowded with the unusually white bodies of happy summertime Danes.
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Runes on the back of a gravestone in Assistens Kirkegård. Click to enlarge.
A red squirrel and a grave in Assistens Kirkegård. Click to enlarge.
A mural in the middle of Christiania. Click to enlarge.
Gretchen looks at a public map in Christiania featuring a not-too-funny "pot is illegal" cartoon. Click to enlarge.
White people enjoying the canal (with tightrope strap) near La Banchina. Click to enlarge.
The view of the mouth of the canal from where we ate vegan street food in Reffen. Click to enlarge.
A beautiful view of one of Copenhagen's canals on our bike ride back to the hotel. Click to enlarge.
Gretchen on a sidewalk-level trampoline installed near the canal closer to Copenhagen's city center. Click to enlarge.
Me on a sidewalk-level trampoline installed near the canal closer to Copenhagen's city center. Click to enlarge.
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