We arrived just as some of the high school students were graduating -- you could tell who they were, because everyone wears these sailor hats for a few days after graduation, and occasionally big truckloads of them went hooting down the streets, shouting and waving at the crowds.
There was supposed to be WIFI in the dorm where we were staying, but although my laptop could recognize five or six networks, they all wanted a security key, and nobody knew that information, and the the only IT guy with the information was on vacation. Fortunately, all you had to do was go around the corner from the tourist office downtown (right across the street from the train station and Tivoli) to get to Boomtown, which seemed to be open all the time (all those rabid gamers, who got all the big-screen computers), and get online (crucial for me, because in addition to the essential email and news checking, I had four online classes going, three of which were the online version of the FINE101 class that I was developing for the Study Abroad class).
Our dorm was way out in Fredericksberg, a 20-minute bus ride into city central every day (and an eye-opening hello to the Dolce and Gabbana underwear ad that took up one whole panel of the bus shelter wall every morning). The buses varied -- sometimes they had displays that warned you of upcoming stops, and sometimes you just had to know from previous experience (or from watching outside or counting stops). The ads on the buses were different too -- some were for spas (using men instead of women to peddle their skincare products, which was a twist) and some listed the rockers playing at Roskilde (an annual festival -- a Danish version of Woodstock) -- the headliner band was Slayer, who Keighley knew of because they had opened for Marilyn Manson last year at Merriweather Post Pavilion and she had been right in the front.
The train station was under construction for most of the trip, but near the end, they took away the barricades and had a full brass band out in front under the arches. It was pouring rain, but I was tempted to take pictures, or even a short video despite the crowds and the hassle of the umbrellas and water, because the irony was amazing. What music do you think they chose for the momentous opening? The Danish national anthem? An internationally-recognized piece of music, Mozart, perhaps, "The Magic Flute" or something like that? No. The Village People, "The YMCA." I don't know if all those elderly people smiling and clapping in the crowds had any idea of the song's significance and history, but they loved it. If it hadn't been raining, we would have stopped in the street and made the letters ourselves, but we had a train to catch.
Those wacky Danes...!
Scenes around Town
The Black Diamond and the Opera House
Shopping
Keighley was very impressed to find Tattoo Barbie (she's famous, according to Keighley) displayed in a shop window on a sleazy street (that we made a point of finding) a block away from from Rådhusplasen.
Carlsberg Tour
You can take this tour on a Sunday morning, get your coupons, and start your day right with a couple of beers. In fact, if you fill out their questionnaire and hand it in to the bartender, you can even get an extra beer. There's even a nice quote from Abraham Lincoln right outside the bar (one of the last images in this collection below) that makes you feel like a good American for doing it.
Midsummer
Duvekulla, Sweden
The big annual holiday in Sweden is Midsummer -- equivalent to Christmas Eve for us. Which makes sense when you realize that the sun doesn't really go down in summer...it just kind of does a halfhearted bounce around midnight and then soars back up again, the birds start tweeting, and is at full blast again around 2 am, when you start looking at your watch wondering why you think it's dawn again so soon. Keighley and I took the train to Duvekulla to visit my friend Ursula and spend the holiday with her. A long train trip into the forests of Sweden, where we kept expecting to see all of the dwarves in Snow White and the woodcutters from all Grimm's fairy tales come lumbering out of the forest to say hey.
The highlight of Midsummer is the pagan celebration of the solstice, where they raise the maypole and dance around it. Ursula and I went for a walk and picked wildflowers; traditionally, you're supposed to pick seven different types of flowers, and jump over seven gates, and then you will dream of your future husband (I think there's a piece missing about drinking seven shots of seven types of whiskey, but whatever). We picked seven different types of wildflowers, but we decided against the gate-hopping. We made crowns of the flowers and wore them to the maypole festival, watched the guys raise up the phallic pole and the folks dance around it and hop like frogs.
Back at Ursula's house, there was traditional Swedish food (fish and potatoes) and some homemade snaps (giving a whole new meaning to the phrase "oh snap!"). The homemade snaps made an interesting contrast later on my last night there, when Ursula and I had our own whiskey tasting party from her personal stash in the cellar. (The Japanese one was the best.)
We also took an excursion to see the glassworks at Orrefors and Kosta -- all clustered not far from Växjö, and shopped the outlets -- a great source for Marimekko, one of my favorite Finnish designers.
I went a little crazy with the Marimekko...you may recognize this flower pattern:
They had all this great stuff there at outlet prices, so Keighley and I grabbed everything we saw -- trays, napkins, dishtowels, keychains, oven mitts, placemats -- everything that had that hypnotic poppy on it. We left Mari-mecca laden down with heavy bags of home design, stoned on poppies.
Humlebæk, Denmark
Back in Denmark, we researched some more art museums and cultural activities.
The Louisiana is a modern art museum up the coast, in an area they call the Danish Riviera, so it's worth visiting just for the scenery (named Louisiana because the benefactor was married to a couple of women named Louisa). They usually have some weird stuff on display, and a few Andy Warhols. Keighley's favorite thing was the Japanese murals which she could stand against and pretend she was back in Japan.
Kronborg Castle
Helsingør, Denmark
After you walk out of the museum, you can catch a bus to Helsingør, where the Kronborg castle Shakespeare used as a setting for Hamlet is located (although they say that they doubt the Bard ever actually visited it in real life).
A couple of cool displays inside...one weird "Past, Present and Future" display of the famous "To Be or Not To Be?" quote with several depictions of Hamlet's bones (sometimes his bones were made out of cutlery, as if you were about to sit down and have a snack using Hamlet's bones as knives and forks; one had his head as a laptop screen) and another room displayed a famous rendition of a Scandinavian fisherman in a Warhol-esque repeating motif, which didn't seem to have anything to do with Hamlet, but everything to do with art.
Arken via the A-Train to Nowhere
Ishøj, Denmark
Arken is another avant-garde art museum outside Copenhagen -- you have to take one of the S-trains (a commuter train) to get to it. I figured, How hard could it be? You look at a map, you get on a train. However, after consulting the map in the train station, we got on one of the A-trains, which are very sophisticated, with an LED-display showing all the stops...only to discover that our stop (Ishøj) wasn't listed. We disembarked at the next stop to take the train the other way (which, strangely, didn't work the way we expected; we had to take another train a little further to turn around...but eventually made it back to Copenhagen). A couple of days later, I asked about this at the Visitor's Center, and the explanation I got from the nice little old lady behind the counter was that there "must have been some kind of event or special circumstances...like someone committed suicide on the tracks, so they cancelled your stop but only made the announcement in Danish...." I just stood there with my mouth open, shocked. (Suicide??? She couldn't have made up some other kind of "special circumstances???") We tried again on another day (with the E-Train) and everything worked out fine.
Really weird stuff...! Neon syringes...an incomprehensible Bill Viola video display...butterflies stuck to murals of primary colors...Damien Hirst's print of a skull covered completely in diamonds....great stuff. The building itself was interesting; even the cafeteria was something to look at.
The Viking Museum
Roskilde, Denmark
We decided to visit Roskilde right before the festival was on, so the city was overrun with teenagers and hippies dragging their sleeping bags and tents and coolers around trying to find a good place to stash their gear (and buy some stash). Amazingly, we found a goth store just steps away from the train station. Eventually, we made our way to the Cathedral, and eventually, to the Viking Ship Museum.
Karen Blixen's House
Rungsted, Denmark
The best part about being Karen Blixen probably wasn't living on the coffee plantation in Kenya, or the wild love affair with the guy who Robert Redford played in Out of Africa -- it had to be coming back to this fabulous house in Denmark overlooking the water. I wouldn't mind living out my days writing books and looking out over that view.
Visiting Ida in Odense
Odense, Denmark
Arriving at Ida Borch's house in Odense was like knock-knock-knocking on heaven's door....because Ida had everything -- clean sheets, showers with steady water pressure, friends nearby who were Keighley's age, even access to things via Facebook and Netto parking lots that the average citizen couldn't scrounge together without knowing the right people and how to operate a box of Knorrs Ox Tail Soup mix :) She put a glass of wine in my hand as soon as I arrived which she kept filling until the moment I left. There was a recent Vanity Fair with a spread on Alfred Hitchcock movies on it in the guest room. Her son's room was covered with the most amazing graffiti I've ever seen. Her refrigerator magnets were hilarious. We bought stuff the first night I arrived to figure out how to make fried chicken -- in Odense...! -- because I was craving it. Ida is the only person I know who can drive a car at 100 kpm while simultaneously smoking a cigarette, consulting a GPS unit, text-messaging someone, and singing along to Sargeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. She is probably the coolest person on the planet.
She was even able to put together a decent July 4th celebration with a few fireworks fired from her Weber grill (I believe her exact words were "I think I still have three sad f**** in the basement"), and we regaled the neighbors with explosives set off from her backyard as we blasted ABBA music and old vintage Queen and other 1970s chestnuts from her Iphone (although we weren't able to get Barry Manilow's "Mandy" to successfully play from YouTube, sad to say). I kept waiting for the cops to show up and tell us to shut up, or keep it down, or to please stop blowing things up in the yard, but they never did.
We took a walk in Odense at 10 pm, when the sun still stubbornly insists on hovering in the sky....we walked through a lovely park and a beautiful ritzy area without passing a single discarded beer can, Dorito wrapper, homeless person, or mugger looking to relieve us of our purses or our lives. It was a little strange, not having to look over your shoulder for instances of crime and for trash...in the back of my mind I was thinking that in the States, the have-nots would have crept up to the edges of all this and would have scuzzed it up.
Legoland
Billund, Denmark
Legoland is like Disney, but everything is made out of Legos. There's even a Pirates of the Caribbean type ride, where everything -- pirates, hookers, giant turtles, buried treasure -- everything -- is made out of Legos. They even had an aquarium feature at the end -- the Lost World of Atlantis -- where everything was made out of Legos. That's Hans Christian Anderson at the end. Out of Legos, of course.
The Beach in Western Denmark
Blåvand, Denmark
Drove out to the West Coast of Denmark to visit Ida's friend Marianne and her
family at the beach. Ida went into the water -- in a bikini no less. I sat on
the sand and dug my pigs into the sand.
Ida's Summer House in Funen
Dyreborg, Denmark
This is Ida's summer house in Funen, right on the water. Back in the day, you'd have a place like this where you'd duck into to change into your swimsuit. You could stay here for a couple of days if you like roughing it. Karen Blixen, eat your heart out.
Faaborg, Denmark
A nice little town on the trip back -- and a stop for wild strawberries
(paying by the honor system -- this would never work back home...you'd be
stripped of your berries and your cash box before you even walked back to the
house) for an
Ingmar Bergman moment.
Slayer at Copenhagen Airport
We ran into Slayer at Copenhagen airport. We knew it was them because (a) they had just headlined at the Roskilde Festival and (b) Keighley saw them open for Marilyn Manson last year and she was right up front in the mosh pit so she knew who they were, so she went up to the guys and very nicely and politely said she didn't want to bother them, but weren't they the guys from Slayer? And the lead singer acted like a total dick and said, no they weren't they guys from Slayer. (Right...because everyone looks like this guy and hangs around with a dude with a tattooed head....)
I tried to tell her for the rest of the day that maybe their fans were terrible at Roskilde, or maybe they were afraid of being mobbed, or maybe they were in a hurry to catch their flight, or maybe they were hung over, or maybe they were having a bad day, etc. etc., but I was secretly just thinking: God, what a major tool. He'd never been 15? He'd never admired anybody? All she wanted was to ask the guy for an autograph for a friend of hers who idolizes them. There was nobody else around paying any attention to them, so it wasn't like if they gave her the time of day it was going to make a scene. The guys made her feel really bad for even speaking to them.
So those three charming gents went off to drown puppies or slap ice cream cones out of toddlers' hands, or swindle pensions from little old ladies or whatever it is that they do in their time off, and we went to catch our plane back to the States :)
The only thing rotten in Denmark...was Slayer.
