Copenhagen, Denmark, Country 9, Stop 24

Aug. 21

We love, love, love our Copenhagen hotel. We are staying at the Copenhagen Island Hotel. As it's my birthday in a few days, Dmitri and I splurge for a junior suite and the view is amazing.

We are famished so we head to the Fisketorvet mall next door and have a wonderful sushi meal.

This is how far apart you need to stand in Copenhagen. One baby shark.

The mall itself is gorgeous. Like the beautiful airport, (when is the last time you heard an airport described as beautiful!?) the mall has lots of greenery, clean lines, and is airy. We are a bit biased since we love Scandinavian design. Copenhagen is a favorite of Jack's and he is thrilled that we could come here. Once again, going with the theme of planning on the fly, Copenhagen is a recent decision. At the time we of our travel, you don't need a test to fly from Portugal to Denmark. Then once in Denmark, you don't need tests to travel to Sweden. Hence the decision to fly Faro to Copenhagen, then train into Sweden.

***Jack--I really could just live here; it seems like everything about this city is just perfect.***

I am happy to see people swimming in the harbour pool right outside our hotel. I want to go even though it is sure to be COLD.

Aug 22

We have a bike tour planned this morning, but get word that due to the Ironman taking place in town, it's not the best day for a bike ride around the city. Instead, the bike tour people nicely give us suggestions. We eat lunch at this outdoor market area and then walk around Christiania. Christiania is super chill and we get a beer and listen to the music and people watch. As we wander around, Dmitri is delighted to find a DJ just randomly playing tunes in a tucked away garden.

***Mia--One day in Copenhagen we visited the free town of Christiania, which is a community of about 1,000 residents. It used to be an abandoned military base, but in the 70s, a group of people broke in and started living there. Although it is inside of Denmark, it has its own rules and is recognized as an anarchy. Marijuana isn’t legal in Denmark, but you can find the famous Green Light District inside of Christiania, which the Danish Police turn a blind eye to for the most part. We walked around for a while and the vibe inside the free town walls was very chill. Residents were smoking, listening to music, and spending time in the gardens. Christiania reminded me a lot of Venice Beach, with people smoking and smiling surrounded by lots of artsy graffiti. I wasn’t sure what to expect when we visited, but I really enjoyed passing through to see how life in this “hippie” free town was. ***

The weather is amazing. I feel like a broken record saying that everywhere we go, but it's true. It's even a bit warm and there are tons of Danes out and about sunning by the river. While we are waiting for the food, Dmitri and I save space at a table. At one point, I can't see the kids Dmitri says—"it’s because people are tall here." He says if we were in Peru, you would be able to see them across a patio! But not here! So true. In Copenhagen, we are an average sized family.

We go for a short walk and have dinner at a dim sum place in the meatpacking district and as we walk home, we notice that on the road the bike lanes are even bigger than the car lanes. Mia decides she wants to find a Danish man to marry so that she can live in Copenhagen. She says that everyone here is so beautiful and well-dressed. She's not wrong.

Aug 23

Dmitri and I set off for a bike tour of the architecture of Copenhagen while the kids head to Tivoli. We love being on bikes and not having to rely on cars. There are well-maintained bike paths all over the city and frankly it's more of a hassle to ride in a car. We learn that there are more bikes than people in Copenhagen. As the tourist t shirts proclaim, Copenhagen is Biketown. Oh, and don't you just love these ramps for taking bikes up and down stairs!!!

Asser, our guide, is interesting and knowledgable and we enjoy the tour immensely. We tell him about what Mia said about wanting to marry a Danish man. He replies that he has a 17 year old son and we shake on it so there you go. Mia will get to marry her Dane and live in Copenhagen and we can visit all the time! Phew, that's settled.

We bike by the university and see what has to be the most amazing dorm set up ever. We see from the outside that there are lots and lots of common spaces for eating, living and working.

The Danes are very big into community and it shows. Asser also tells us that Danish architecture is very practical. However, when we visit Copenhill, he calls it an example of hedonistic sustainability.

Copenhill. That is steam, not smoke, coming out of the top. And yes, that's a ski run with ski lift.

Climbing wall, but not for those with a fear of heights!

This is a community gym in the middle of the city. I mean, wow.

***Dmitri: We did two different bike tours in Copenhagen, and so got a couple different perspectives on the city. The first was architectural-centric, but this simply means that we went to different buildings and then learned about the areas, including the urban planning. I found it fascinating, and could blog on several of the stops for a while.

I’ll pick just a couple that are representative of the overall vibe. The first was just a simple playground area, with kids out playing concrete soccer, but there was a lot more going on. The area had been a working-class ghetto a hundred years prior, with run-down tenements and flats with no running water or bathrooms. Today it’s more hipster, but critically, not gentrified. The housing is full of rich and less rich, all side by side. This is one of the many things that makes Scandinavia different—they are capitalist, but they have serious throttles on letting capitalism run its full course. In general, they’d rather all share than have one or two people have the ability to be gazillionaires. This is a running theme, and we find ourselves very drawn to it. Yes, we’d all like to be wealthy, but there’s wealthy and then there’s uber-wealthy. If you could trade your ability to get the latter for lower crime, a solution to homelessness, universal health care, education and society-wide trust, would you? I was raised to say hell no, and there’s no way to see that this wasn’t wrong from the get-go. More on this later.

The park area is actually not attached to a school, but school and community groups come and use it, so it’s super-efficient. And, below it is a giant car garage. This is one of several “living in the future” moments in Denmark for us. The car garage is a vending machine style setup where the car is parked with robotics and conveyers and you just call it up when you’re ready. You’d never know this is below this park in this nice little area.

Speaking of cars, I hate them. That’s a rough thing for someone who lives in LA, but I think that cars are the enemy. They separate us, they ruin walking areas, they pollute, they’re expensive, and we don’t share them well. I suspect in 20+ years we’ll solve for many of these issues, but who didn’t see cars disappear in the pandemic and see walking areas flourish? And didn’t we all love this? Maybe this should tell us something. Anyway, in Denmark (and it turns out in many of our later stops), it’s all about bikes. They’re born on a bike and they get everywhere this way. How? They have bike lanes. Not like a painted line in LA that says “bikes may be here, so try not to hit them too hard.” No, they have fully dedicated separate lanes that run right through the middle of their densest areas. Many of them have their own stop signs.

Our hotel is right next to a cool bike bridge between our hotel (Copenhagen Island Hotel) and the nearby mall (Fisketorvet). It’s heavily used, bringing people in from the outer areas and islands to downtown. Parents and kids are thick on the paths. And of course this means there are few cars. In Copenhagen there are more bikes than people. Truly, this is the anti-LA.

One reason is that cars are heavily taxed. And I mean heavily. 150%. They really don’t want you to have a car, but if you must, fine and you’re gonna pay. That money is then going into the infrastructure that benefits everyone.

So that’s just musings from one of about six engrossing stops.

Briefly, we also stopped at a super-cool student housing complex, built as a circle with totally sustainable everything. Gorgeous, affordable, super hip. I’ve never seen anything like that.

The most amazing stop was a power plant. That sounds deadly boring, but this power plant is an architectural marvel, and happens to also feature the world’s largest rock-climbing wall and a ski slope. I shit thee not. Out on the edge of town is this behemoth in which they burn most of their trash and it’s about 99.5% waste-free, generating just a trickle of water vapor up top. In turn it sends hot water throughout the town, which generates local heat. So even their trash is super efficient and sustainable. Amazing. And the building itself, wow. Steel plating and a design that seems like it’s from some Japanese anime. We took the interior elevator up to the top and on the ride we could see the machinery inside the beast.

Up top, the view is the best of the city, and for kicks, off to the other side you can see Sweden. There’s a bar and eatery up top, too. It’s just so creative and interesting.

Our second tour was more garden-variety touristy and we brought the kids, who despite their age cannot hang with us on bikes. We saw the major sights, and our guide was an American from San Diego who married a Dane and so we got a pretty good ex pat point of view. I’ve been watching this Danish politics show called “Borgen” (you pronounce the g like a w because Danish reasons …), so I’d become somewhat familiar with Danish politics and their system, which isn’t a two-party thing like ours but has coalitions. So, it was a kick for me to see all the places from the show. So we’re on our tour across from the entrance to their parliament and it’s a courtyard full of bikes. All the politicians ride bikes there. Can you imagine that in DC? Anyway, the thing that really stuck with me was our guide talking about the Danes’ trust in politicians. It’s 78%. I mean, holy shit. Our trust in Congress in the US is what, 15-20%?

Now does that mean the Danes are all gullible “sheeple?” Uh, no, these are smart AF people. What’s different here is the general culture and the norms. They have a communal approach to everything. This doesn’t mean they aren’t entrepreneurs or capitalists. They most certainly are, and as one guide told us, they have to be because they have few natural resources. Mostly they do biopharma and tech. They have a bustling startup scene. So how do we think of them as socialist/communist people who are controlled mindlessly by their government? Fox News I suppose is a big part of the answer, but it goes deeper.

Think of the prisoner’s dilemma model: you have the option to be generous or selfish. If you pick generous and others do as well, everyone benefits. If you are selfish and others are generous, you win big and others lose. If everyone is selfish, everyone loses. If everyone is generous, everyone wins, but never as much as a super-successful titan of industry. The Scandinavians have as a group essentially decided to do the “always generous” route. Of course this varies, but the contrast to the US is so, so stark. We lionize the super-rich. They disdain them. Those people driving the 150% marked-up cars? They’re mocked.

It turns out that when people trust each other, everyone can benefit. In the US we’re the polar opposite, with libertarianism as our driving force. Our fear of government and our desire to become super-wealthy is blocking us from being like these people. And of course, they’re among the happiest in the world. They aren’t like walking around grinning, but they are satisfied and critically, not stressed about the basics. This is a big deal! It turns out that when everyone can go to college, everyone has good health care and no one is homeless that you can start to do what you want to do rather than what you have to do just to survive. All of this and they don’t give up capitalism? Yeah, this is better.

And this is why we travel—to compare what we do with what others do to see what we can learn. Also, we should have roundabouts.***

Side note. Mid September Copenhagen was recognized as the world's safest city.

***Jack--While our parents were out doing their bike tour my sister and I enjoyed Tivoli to the fullest. The happiest place on earth; it's what inspired Disneyland!***

***Mia--Jack and I really enjoyed visiting Tivoli, the amusement park in Copenhagen. Jack (easily) convinced me to get the unlimited ride package, and it was worth it. We spent 5-6 hours riding roller coasters, playing in the arcade, and eating a lot of cotton candy. They even had a haunted house and an aquarium that we went to.***

Aug 24

Happy 50th birthday to ME! What a gorgeous, sunny Danish summer's day I've been blessed with to celebrate my birthday! We start with a family bike tour. This is the one that was rescheduled due to the Ironman. We ride all over the city and it is a lot of fun.

Lunch, at Lisamarie Roed's suggestion is at Aamanns 1921 and OMG SO GOOD. We have amazing smorrebrod and have a flight of akvavit that leaves us feeling more than a little tipsy. Fun fact: when it's your birthday in Copenhagen, they put a little Danish flag on the table. Yay.

After that, I finally "take the plunge" and swim with Mia in the harbour pool. We brave it out for a little over 20 minutes and then have to climb out before we become hypothermic. How on earth do the Danes do this all year round???

All in all, it's a wonderful day and I couldn't be more pleased to spend my 50th in such a friendly and gorgeous city.

Jack gives Copenhagen 5 out of 5 golden Jacks. His highest honor. We could stay on and on in Copenhagen. It's really wonderful.

Some fun things: