This morning I flew to Copenhagen, as the first step of a short hiatus which will take me, hopefully, beyond the Arctic Circle and into the Land of the Midnight Sun - getting back to London in a week or so, all in time to get another job before I become seriously insolvent. I plan to travel Sweden to Lappland, and if I arrive before July 14th there will still be “nights” with no sunset: 24-hour daytime. I imagine that would be something like a full solar eclipse in reverse.
Copenhagen is fresh and breezy, blue sky and sunlight, temperature in the upper 20s. The city is nice enough, but somewhat unremarkable. The best thing about it is the mass of bikes, everywhere, and interestingly, almost none of them are locked up. They just sit around lining the streets, like so many mechanical vagrants, that people ride on to get from one place to another. The city council have a fleet of bikes littered around the place that you can use for free, unlocking them like a shopping trolly by inserting $2, then getting your coin back when you leave the bike somewhere. Imagine, needing to get somewhere, and finding a bike just waiting to take you there - and with wide, comfortable bike lanes all the way. I officially dare any Australian city to try a similar program.
My first impressions wlaking through the streets here were that everything is expensive and that Hitler would approve heartily. I don’t know what he would think of the bikes, but all these blond heads with their wholesome, symmetrical features would surely ring his bell. In fact I don’t know how he stayed in Germany, with such a wealth of Aryan purity awaiting him just to the north.
I asked some 18-year-olds where I should visit with just 1 day in Copenhagen and they gave me certain directions. Following these, I passed eventually under a large archway proclaiming ‘Christiania’, and thus found myself within the bounds of Copenhagen’s rebellious sister-city, its quasi-independent alternative ghetto. I don’t know what Christiania was before - perhaps a ruined or abandoned quarter - but at some point it was occupied by artists and hippies who duly put up signs declaring it a rule unto itself. Christiania has its own flag, about 1000 inhabitants, and until recent crack-downs was fairly united in refusing to pay taxes to the state of Denmark. The street I am sitting in now - everything painted, peeled, and re-painted in rainbow hodge-podge - appears to be called ‘Pusher Street’, if the street sign in front of me has any authority on the matter.
The obvious comparison for me is between Christiania and Nimbin, in norther New South Wales. The first difference is that C. is in the middle of a major city (yet at the same time, walled off and quite separate - ’straights’ barely even seem to walk through here, though the odd middle-aged tourist wanders through looking bewildered). And C. seems more light-hearted than Nimbin, without such an intense drug-culture and economy. Nimbin is freakish, fascinating, but sometimes scary in its lack of boundaries and chronic self-destructive substance abuse. Chrisitania is more like a liberal-minded, slightly stoned, dilapidated party town. But it is also more politically conscious than Nimbin: most of the inhabitants of C. have the ‘national’ flag proudly displayed on their house and their resistance to the ‘legitimate’ government is not just about getting away with their stash (though it is about that too). And I just spotted a very dark black man with his hair dyed bright blonde, down to his shoulders, half-naked and wearing a plastic red nose. He is strolling down Pusher Street like the proudest man in the world.
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