We’ve been seeing Copenhagen from the inside-out. For the vast majority of our travels, we have had amazing weather. A few days here and there have been drizzly, but for the rest of the time it’s been blue skies and sunshine. Until this week in Copenhagen, where it rained off and on, in buckets or in cloudbursts, while the temperatures hovered in the 60s. This changed the way we saw the city. We have been primarily outdoors for months, exploring cities and countryside from an exterior perspective. London, Rome, Venice—we saw the buildings and monuments from the outside-in. But when it’s raining, you shift your focus indoors. This has led us to see places that we might not have otherwise experienced, while inspiring us to take advantage of every sunny moment to get on the bikes and explore.
Luckily for us, not only does Copenhagen have some interesting museums, but it is also an easy day-trip from other places of merit. We took the train north for an hour to Helsingor, otherwise known as Elsinore, in the far north of North Zealand Island, at the very tip of Denmark. From here you can see Sweden, only 2 ½ miles across a shimmering strip of sea from the Danish coast. Elsinore is the location of Hamlet’s famous castle. To be sure, there is a castle in Elsinore but it’s called the Kronborg Castle, and it is as much a palace as it is a fortification.
We joined an English-language tour of Kronborg Castle from a funny young Danish woman who didn’t appear to take the castle, herself or Danish history too seriously. She delighted in regaling us with toilet-oriented facts about the castle. Nothing apparently tickles a Danes’ funny bone more than bathroom humor. And if it involves a pooping royal, even better. The guide told us that the long, elegant banqueting hall at Kronborg hosted many popular banquets since Kronborg was regarded around Europe as a sort of party castle, a Florida-beach-at-spring-break Euro-fortress. Built in the 1590s, the castle was the equal of any in Europe and word of its beauty soon spread. The king and queen threw open the doors for parties galore. You know how it is when you’re in the middle of a great dinner party: the food is delicious, everyone’s talking, the music is just right, beverages are flowing. You hate to leave the table when nature calls. And if you were a Danish royal, you didn’t have to. The king and queen had specially made chairs with holes in the seats and buckets below that allowed them to . . . er . . . . go with the flow, one could say, without interrupting their at-table merry-making. The other male guests could go out a special door and down a few flights of stairs to use the facilities, but the women’s enormous skirts prevented them from navigating the narrow stairway. So instead, alcoves ringed the room in which hay and sweet-smelling herbs had been sprinkled on the floor, and the women would go there “which added to the enjoyment of the dinner guests,” our guide said, beaming. Evidently, nothing makes a feasting Dane happier than watching Helga pee.
While defacating royals isn’t exactly the story line of Hamlet, it is very likely that Shakespeare knew about Kronborg Castle and quite possible that he visited it and the town of Elsinore. There are years in the 1590s in which Shakespeare’s whereabouts are unclear, and it is possible that he traveled to Kronborg Castle , perhaps even acting in one of his own plays for the king’s enjoyment. There are lovely old medieval streets in Elsinore that date back to Shakespeare’s time, providing yet another example of how the past is present in Europe.
We went even further back into Denmark’s past when we did a day-trip to Rothskilde, which was the capitol of Denmark until Copenhagen rose in importance in the middle ages. During the Viking era, Rothskilde was a strategic port. During a battle against intruders, the seamen of Rothskilde sank five vessels at the mouth of the harbor to block the intruders’ warships from sailing in and taking over the city. The submerged vessels were discovered and exhumed from the harbor floor in the 1960s, and then subjected to decades of painfully slow treatment and restoration. A museum was built to house the reconstructed Viking ships, and now they are on display in an airy, bright building on the harbor’s edge, which has views of the sea on which the ships once sailed.
To help modern-day visitors imagine life as a Viking sailor, reproductions of a few of the ships have been built, and for a fee, you can don life jackets and help row and sail a Viking ship around the harbor. We of course did just that, marveling at the length and weight of the massive oars and the durability of the hand-made sail as it caught the wind and sent the boat skimming across the water.
The town of Rothskilde, where the Viking Ship Museum is located, has lovely old medieval houses lining cobblestone streets. The houses are low, with thatched roofs made from layers of tubular grasses compressed into a foot-thick roof that is held in place with carved wooden beams interlaced across the roof. The thatched roofing curves around the windows, and is a dark brown against the white-washed walls of the house. Hollyhocks grow in front of the homes, bearing pink and red blossoms, and the whole effect is so charming that you expect to see hobbits popping out the front door to go about wee-folk chores accompanied by a sprightly musical background.
Copenhagen doesn’t have many of these traditional Danish houses but it does have a few streets of half-timbered homes and hollyhocks growing in the cracks of the sidewalks before them. There are also buildings from the 1700s lining some of its canals and clustering along the long pedestrian shopping street that snakes through the center of town. The pedestrian shopping street was carved out of the old part of town in the 1970s, a combination of a few torn-down buildings and commandeered car lanes. It was hailed as the world’s longest pedestrian street and to celebrate this accomplishment, a party was held. Tables were set up along the length of the winding street, and coffee and rolls were served to the city’s residents. Yes, this was just how DC celebrated the opening of the Verizon Center: we set up a mile’s worth of tables and served coffee and buns to the District’s residents. Yah, right. The tables would have been stolen before the last one was set up, and the coffee-and-bun servers would have been mugged.
Little about Copenhagen is similar to DC or for that matter, to many American cities. When it finally quit raining and the sun came out, we took to the streets on our bikes and spent two enjoyable days biking around the city, visiting parks and side streets and enjoying the amazing network of bike lanes. But Copenhagen isn’t Shangri-La: I had a coat and sweater stolen off the rack on the back of my bike when I left it unattended for a few minutes, and Jeff was sent flying off his bike when he swerved to avoid a crazy bicyclist going by too fast. But for the most part, the bicyclists go at a reasonable pace and given the thousands of people on bikes using the bike lanes, it all works very smoothly.
The country of Denmark, for that matter, seems to work pretty smoothly and to have some things going for it that distinguish it from Amurka. For one thing, pregnant women are given a month off work before the delivery to prepare and rest. Then, after the baby comes, they receive 9 months of maternity leave – at two-thirds of their pay rate. This is so far from the norm in America that I felt like I was talking to a visitor from another planet. A full 10 months of partially paid maternity leave, with your job guaranteed upon your return. It’s almost as if the Danish government recognizes that it’s in the interest of society in general, and the mother and child in particular, that a new baby Dane has a chance to get to know his mother, and she to know him.
We stayed in Copenhagen longer than we’d originally intended, and I’m glad we did. While it offers plenty of interesting history, it’s the present and the future that’s the most interesting aspect of this city. Granted, the population of the whole country of Denmark is less than that of New York City’s: Denmark has 5 ½ million people while NYC has more than 8 million. It may be easier to implement progressive policies for a lightly populated country. On the other hand, Copenhagen has more than a million residents, which makes it larger than the city of Washington, DC. Yet Copenhagen has a subway and bus system that is brilliantly efficient, and bike lanes used by thousands in the long cold winters as well as the warm summers. Consequentially, Copenhagen has neighborhoods that are virtually car-free and therefore, incredibly quiet. It’s a city that’s put considerable thought into how people can co-exist in the most efficient, least polluting and most comfortable way. Washington, DC – and indeed, most American cities – could learn a lot from it.
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