Where are Ron and Ellen?
Summer 2002
Copenhagen (and return to Munich)
Photos: Copenhagen and vicinity
We are now in Copenhagen, staying at one of the biggest hostels in Europe (space for about 450 people). There are people coming and going all the time, and it is a very international group.
Our first afternoon we went (at the recommendation of the hostel people) to a huge 3-level shopping mall, which had every kind of store you can imagine. Our destination was one of the two large grocery stores, since we had eaten most of our remaining food. It was an amazing place, combining the kind of general merchandise you would find in a department store with a bakery and a very complete grocery store. Not only was there a parking garage for cars, there was a parking garage for bikes.
Yesterday we (and our bikes) took the train from Copenhagen up the coast to Helsingør, where we toured the castle (this is the castle that is the setting for Hamlet). It is gigantic, and sits out on a finger of land at the narrowest part of the Øresund, where the ferries take only 20 minutes to go across to Sweden. It was originally built not for defense, but so the king could charge (extort?) tolls from all passing ships. Then we biked south along the coast, stopping to visit Louisiana, a modern art museum with a big and beautifully landscaped sculpture garden overlooking the water. Continuing down the coast, we bought cherries (from France) from a roadside stand, and then a smoked mackeral from another roadside stand. We pedaled through part of Dyrehaven, now a park but in the 1600s a big royal hunting preserve. There are still lots of deer there, as well as hiking and cycling paths and an old amusement part (what our guidebook says is the "blue-collar version of Tivoli". From there, Ellen took the train back to the Copenhagen central station and biked back to the hostel, and Ron biked the rest of the way. Ellen beat Ron by 30 minutes, but logged about 20 less kilometers. Then we had mackeral and cherries for dinner!
Love to all,
Dear Family and Friends,
We are back in Munich at our friend Uta´s flat, our home away from home, preparing to leave for Prague tomorrow on the midday train.
We enjoyed our time in Copenhagan, a city that is small enough so that we began to know our way around (at least around the central areas and the area south of the city where our hostel was), but large enough to be continually fascinating. It suffered very little damage in World War II, so there are many beautiful old buildings, lots of waterfront, and lots of canals.
We visited the Danish Design Museum, which we found fascinating. There was an exhibit of student projects from the design school, an exhibit of all the prize-winning Danish design items from the last 20 years or so -- everything from the famous Danish chairs to Lego and Duplo to the official Danish post boxes to various kinds of hardware and industrial design items. And there was a really interesting exhibit of everyday items that a group of Japanese designers had been asked to re-design, showing the new design and a brief explanation from the designer about the idea behind their new design. There were perhaps 40 items, including a large variety of things like matches, toilet paper rolls, playing cards, tea bags, school notebooks.
We spent an afternoon in Tivoli, where we watched a pantomime, listened to a concert, enjoyed the gardens and watching people, but didn´t have any desire to go on any of the rides.
We spent part of one day going to various bike association offices and transportation office where Ron tried unsuccessfully to talk to people about Danish biking laws and policy. He finally decided to give up on that quest, since it seemed he would only have been able to talk to people if he had made appointments well in advance.
We visited a colleague of Ellen´s, the astronomy librarian at Copenhagen University, and enjoyed touring her library, then had lunch with her and her daughter, an architecture student. From her we learned that all Danes are entitled to free education, including 6 years at university, during which they get a stipend to live on, as well as housing assistance and medical coverage.
One day we biked south of the city through a big nature preserve. It is amazing to us that a many kilometers square area with farm pastures and bird preserves can be just on the edge of the city. We talked to a man who was there with binoculars and a large telescope-like lens mounted on a tripod who was bird-watching. He says he comes several times a week all year long to watch the birds, and was very pleased because he had just seen a white egret, which he said was rare in that area. We eventually reached Dragør, an old fishing village where we had fine fish sandwiches for lunch before biking back to the hostel.
In the hostel on Langeland we had met a Danish couple living in Copenhagen. He is an artist and she works for the transportation ministry in the traffic safety department. Ron and I were both reading a book on Afganistan, and he had traveled there many years ago and was very interested in the book. We said we would try to finish it before leaving Copenhagen, and we did, so we met them for dinner and handed off that book and another to them. We really enjoyed our evening with them, talking about a wide range of topics. We hope they will visit us in the U.S. sometime in the future.
We ate our dinner with them in a wonderful vegetarian restaurant in an area of the city called Christiana, once an abandoned military complex with many buildings, which had been taken over in the late 1960s and early 1970s by squatters (hippies at the time). The government finally gave up on trying to evict them, and there is now a thriving alternative community there, with a variety of business enterprises and many interesting self-built houses in addition to the original brick buildings. It reminded us of a cross between Eugene, Oregon, where our son lives, and the early years of Shannon Farm, the alternative community that brought us to Virginia in 1973.
Yesterday from Munich we took a day trip to Garmisch, in the Bavarian Alps, and hiked up an impressive river gorge cut many meters deep in the rock, where tons of water go crashing through at an amazing speed. Very impressive, and, with the typical Alpine houses in the town, quite different from anything we have seen so far on this trip.
We have spent much of today leisurely repacking and reorganizing and getting ready to leave tomorrow for Ellen´s conference in Prague, from which she will return to Munich and then home, and from which Ron will go on to further adventures in the Ukraine and who knows where else.
Love to all,
Photos: Copenhagen and vicinity
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Last updated: 20 July 2002