Again, thanks to Chris for his hospitality and for risking his reputation as an upstanding young man by introducting me to some of his friends on my day off in Kopenhagen.
We started the day by foraging for food. Although not many restaurants in the area, we walked on down by the canal till we reached the old city and went in to have some of the best pastries I've had on my trip so far. I recommend the Rhubarb thingy. I developed a thing for Rhubarb in england, not neccesarily the texture...like snot...but the tangy taste. I do like tangy. Once we got past wondering if this attractive young lady standing by the side of the street with a questioning look on her face was in distress....I really wanted to help.....we went and bought way too much sugar. We sat on the walls of the canal and ate our spoils, preparing ourselves for the trek into Christiana. I think that's how it is spellt.
Chris did not have a very high opinon of this place due to his last visit here, but after finding beer for the price of what would be a lonestar or PB in a little convenience store, his heart softened. Christriana is a "self governing" part of Kopenhagen. I think the history goes back to squatters setting up in an old army barracks area in the 50s and 60s and making a go of it. You might recall the recent police and protester clashes as reported on the news throughout Europe when the community was up in arms over the demolition of one of these buildings within the little Sovereign nation. Like most things outside the norm of mainstream society, it is both the best and worst of worlds. It attracts your punkers, hippies, tourists or locals who want to go and smoke pot and have fun and other people who are making an honest go of living outside the norm of mass consumerism and impersonal politics. Not that punkers and hippies suck. Well hippies do....but I'm not much for hypocrits. The problem seems that in any place where you are the bastion of your own idea surrounded by people that at best ridicule you, and at worst try to wipe you off the face of the map, be that new developments or active government suppresion, is that you end up spending all your energy in an Us against Them dogfight. And that's what half of Christiana seems. Selling t-shirst and pot-brownies, making money off of tourists while you fight the good fight against consumerism. The other half if quite cool. Buildings and homes that have been adapted by their owners or dwellers to suit their needs without as much adherance to accepted and legal building codes, making for an interesting variety of pads. There's a bunch of families living there in great houses, what looks to be like a townhall for meetings and a school house for the locals and some other public amenity buildings. This is the working part of Christiana. I wonder how you end up becoming a part of it?
After this we worked our way around to downtown. The old part, through the office sections and financial districts till we got through the bustle of shopping time and to a plaza where we sat down and had some beer. An interesting thing about Kopenhagen is that either by design or culture, their zoning is very strict. For a city as old as this, and certainly one as untouched by WWII as this, (ask Chris or any Dane to tell you about the "phone call from Germany"--as an aside, one of the coolest things about DK history is the fact that the night before the Gestapo was meant to round up all the Danish Jews, they were secreted out of the country by a vertible armada of small boats and fishing vessels.) there is very little mixed use. Usually, taking Paris or Berlin again as an example, there is ground floor retail, shops or markets and upper offices and maybe still higher, living quarters. This seems not to be the case here. When its an office building....it's office...when it's government....it's government....(you can tell by the anti G8 graffiti on them). So the feeling is a kind of segmented, divisive downtown. Pretty, but it doesn't feel that lively. But this also might be due to the fact that the infrastruce of DK is massive. They've built their nation and city for an expected population 20 years in the future..and they have the cash to do it, which is totally different than the states where we are crammed into an apocalyptic infrastructure that reached its capacity and stopped working 20 years ago. So at times, it feels a bit empty.
I could talk about the little mermaid, but to compete with CK's comments would be a travesty, as mine could hardle compare. Let's move on to when John and Chris get schooled by 2 Danish shysters.
For dinner and entertainment that night, we walk to the new BoBo neighborhood of Chris's friends. I am a bad person so I don't remember their names, but I do remember loosing money, eating good pizza, having a great non-alcoholic beer, and generally having one of the best nights of my 10 week trip in Europe. We each odered a pizza from the local dudes down the street, stopped at the paki for brews, picked up the pies and sat down for dinner. Chris' friends, a couple, had just bought their pad and were renovating it. They had the largest bathroom I have yet to see in Europe, about the size of one in an American efficiency..(due mostly to the fact that these buildings are all so old that they originally had shared bathrooms on each floor)...and they accomplished this by knocking out a wall and doing a fine job of the finish... nice tile work guys. They both work in the archi-world...the lady friend as an architect....and the boy friend as a drafter / surveyor / project manager. They have a degree in Denmark which is much like an architectural degree, but is not as involved and focuses on the practical side of developement, drafting and project management. Chris Kahanek is very impressed.
After dinner, we sat down to a friendly game of poker. I was unaware that this is one of CK's least enjoyable activites. Mostly he says cause he has resigned himself to always loosing. I dig it cause I'm an excitement junkie. But I suck too. And it wasn't but half an hour till I was out and that I realized that my friends and hosts...1) spoke better english than I did, 2) must watch ESPN poker tournaments every moment they are on, 3) quoted more 80's and 90's pop culture references than you would run across at an over the hill Silverlake hipster party on Saturday night. I advocated a 2nd round, (shouldn't have) and for double the stakes this time. Cause what fun is playing if you are just gonna break even. Better to go out in a blaze of glory yo! I tried not to bluff so much this time, cause I suck and I'm bluffing hands that I couldn't possibly have with the cards that are face up, and I managed to hang in for a while longer, even beating Chris and watching it come down to the two friends duking it out(the boyfriend and another male friend--lady friend is asleep on the couch while we blast Faith no More), on their 11th beer each, the one repeating to the other , "you're such a bad poker player man....you know that....I mean...you suck....how do you live with yourself.....you're a fuckin' liar..." Now they are speaking english mind you...because we are playing poker or for the benefit of their guests I don't know. I suspect that speaking english while playing poker is de-riggeur, all the slang is english anyway. Imagine them having these conversations with Danish accents and the night is complete.
I got home, busted out some more renderings, packed my stuff the next day, cooked CK a breakfast that might make him rethink this marital ( or martial?) plans and then took the train, massive as always, to the airport where they charged me more for my over the weight limit luggage than my flight. When I saw the tiny little turbo-prop non-stop flight to Stuttgart that they were going to cram my shit into, I didn't feel so bad, except that I was worried that it would still fly.
Much thanks to all in DK who showed me a good time. Especially my Louisianna museum tour-guide who met us for dinner and drove us an hour to the DK countryside to look at modern art. I owe you a beer girl.
Toodles
John Zapf
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