Denmark Trip

So I went to Denmark.

I was pretty drugged when I got there having taken 1 and 3/4 Ativan pills. The flight was over night and about 7 hours long and I was in a middle seat.

I was sick and dizzy and disoriented with a nearly untouchable base of panic underneath it all.

I threw up after we landed and felt so car sick that I thought I might be pregnant (long time readers of the blog may remember that carsickness is how I experience early pregnancy).

My friend and co-worker Krishna went on this trip too and I worried about being a burden to her due to my flying problems and anxiety but mostly she slept and I dazed and huddled so I think that was OK.

The first thing I noticed about Denmark was that the airport smells like Ikea.

True story.

Once we landed we went straight to the car rental place were I learned to my joy (bleary draggy joy but joy none the less) that not only do they drive on the same side of the car but they drive on the same side of the read. It was exactly the same. I was too drugged to drive that day but we took turns thereafter and I felt more like a grown up and free.

We went right to work from the hotel. We were there for work and worked a shortened day each day of the week an so stayed in and around Copenhagen for most of the trip. There is a 6 hour time difference and so we got up at what felt like 3 in the morning and then got out of work in time for our 2nd wind. We took full advantage of each 2nd wind and spent every day exploring.

My favorite things about Denmark: they have chocolate and cheese and potatoes for every meal, they play electronica on nearly every radio station, the bike thing (more on that later), the people are very friendly and speak great English, Copenhagen is the most beautiful city I have ever seen (it is also the 2nd safest city in Europe and there is despite warning plenty of good vegetarian food)

The place I most want to go back to and the place I want my family to see is Roskilde. It is the ancient capitol and it has a beautiful Cathedral and a viking ship museum.

I have a thing for vikings and a major thing for the pre-renaissance christian church..for its music and its art and it philosophical leanings.

When looking in the guide book that I bought for this trip I was not particularly impressed with it. The guidebook lied.

What a beautiful place. It is where the Kings and Queens of Denmark are buried and is pretty old (12th C.) and I took a billion pictures there until my phone died. We got in for free because even driving straight from work it was pretty late when we arrived.

The viking ship museum was my favorite kind of museum with lots of models and rebuilt scale examples and a good story about the main exhibition. There were outbuildings in which carpenters were working wood using period technologies to create new ships for sailors to sail period style. There were iron age tools everywhere and there were helpful signs (in Danish and English and German on all sorts of things). My favorite part of this museum is that they offer a viking ship tour. It is a 1 hour circuit of the bay in front of the museum. Because this is Denmark when you climb aboard they hand you an oar and expect you to take yourself (viking style) right round they bay. HA!

We made one big excursion on the weekend out to Sweden. Krishna found a great looking hiking spot and changed the arrangements on our rental car (4 bucks more) so that we could take it out of hte country. We drove by Elsinore (think Hamlet) and onto a ferry then up the coast and to the cliffs and hills of Kullaburg. We hiked and found caves and chased Swedish sheep.

Special observations of Scandinavia and especially Denmark

The Bikes

Copenhagen is a deeply bike-able city. It is small it is flat and it is full of intentional bicycle infrastructure. I was impressed by the intentionality. It feels like the choice to slow the pace of commute and to bring outdoors and to not coincidentally diminish the rates of obesity and the concurrent sedentary ailments the populous would be an easy one. It is also an expensive and inconvenient one. It seems to me to be one that is completely worth while. I wish so much that the US were willing to make the kind of investment in people and their well being that I saw in Denmark.

Of course people love their cars in Denmark and the loss of a traffic lane and of downtown parking (to be transformed into playgrounds and art installations) are met with protest. 

On the other hand the people of the city are so happy and so much healthier and generally so proud of their bike culture that it all seems worth while.

The bikes are not fancy and the bikers are not pretending to be in the peloton of the Tour de France. The money spent on the bikes is not generally much (there is too much bike theft for one thing) and the biking outfit is nearly unseen. People bike to work or to school in their normal work or school clothes. There is no leaving for work with 5 minutes to spare when you must bike for 15 minutes to get there. and when you leave for the day you don't peel out in your own cell of reality, you must join your coworkers for a bike ride. You don't take your kids to the park, you bike with your kids to the park.

The Work

The work in Denmark (my work) is nearly the same because we are doing nearly the same thing. The work environment on the other hand is entirely different.

On the good side the people all have lunch together and seem genuinely friendly with one another. 

On the bad side I find the European class based (guild based) stratification intolerable. I expect a great deal of regulation in my work, it is Biotech after all. I do not expect the active stifling of individual intuitive that I saw there. 

Much of the time I could envision myself living in Copenhagen and being very happy there. I lean more socialist than anything else but the work environment would make me crazy.

If you want to talk about any of this please email me I am still in post trip babble mode and you have but to drop the merest hint of interest and I will chew your ear off.