GREAT DANES

            

 Denmark is a bit of a Rodney Dangerfield country:  it gets no respect.  If you say you’re traveling in Europe, images of Italy, France, Germany, England come to mind.  If you say you’re traveling in Scandinavia, images of Norway or Sweden pop up.  But Denmark?  Neither European fish nor Scandinavian fowl.  I had to look it up on a map to see where exactly it was, and was surprised to find that part of it – Jutland – is actually part of the European continent, sharing a border with Germany. The other parts of Denmark are islands between the heavy-hitting Scandi countries and the heavy-hitting Euro countries.  This makes Denmark Scandi-pean.  Or Euro-navian.  Or neither.  Because Denmark is uniquely itself, and what a nice self it appears to be.

            You have to admire a country that you enter through an utterly unique form of transportation.  We approached Denmark – specifically, the island of Zealand – by train, having spent 8 hours going by train from Rennes to Cologne, Germany, and another 10 hours by train from Cologne to Copenhagen after the Germany railways, in a most uncharacteristic burst of inefficiency, were beset with delays that caused missed connections and additional travel hours.  Every second on the train was worth it, however, when we came to the end of Germany and confronted a section of the Baltic Sea separating Denmark’s Zealand Island from the European mainland.  The train slowed to a stop at the shore where a huge car ferry was anchored.  Then slowly, the train chugged onto the ferry.  There were train tracks on the lower deck of the ferry, and the train slowly made its way onto the ship.  Passengers were asked to de-train.  A very chatty German man whose company we’d been enjoying snuck us out a forbidden door into the bowels of the ship, next to the berthed train, and we marveled at the sight of it stretched out like a long metal snake.  Then we made our way to the ship’s upper deck, where we watched the sea go by for a pleasant 45 minute crossing, and then down we went again to where the train waited. We boarded it, the ship docked on the shore of Denmark, and the train slowly made its way off the boat and onto terra firma, where it slowly picked up speed and then zipped along to Copenhagen.  I wanted to applaud the entire operation.  Imagine laying train tracks in a ferry; imagine coordinating the entrance and exit of the train from the ship with such pinpoint accuracy that the train didn’t derail either coming or going; imagine coming up with the idea in the first place?  It was the ultimate mass transit moment:  taking a train onto a ship.  How many carbon offsets happened there?

            We arrived in Copenhagen at 10:00 at night and realized right away that we’d made a few errors.  One was neglecting to get Danish Kroner in advance, so we arrived with empty pockets.  It’s so easy now to travel from country to country with the common currency of the euro that it came as a shock that there were still countries proud enough to use their native coin of the realm, euro be damned.  Besides being empty-pocketed, another teeny tiny error was that we didn’t have a map of Copenhagen, nor a clear idea of how to get to our house exchange apartment other than some directions our house exchange partner had emailed me.  Hmmmm.           

But at this point in our travels, we have become adroit at adapting to entirely new cities and countries.  Jeff went off to find an ATM, and Max and I went in hunt of tickets for the Copenhagen subway.  Max tackled a ticket machine with gusto, managing to not only get us tickets for the subway and figure out the cost in kroners, but to do so in Danish!  Off we went on the subway, followed by locating the correct city bus, followed by climbing the 5 flights of stairs (with our 40 pound backpacks on) to what has turned out to be quite a lovely apartment.

            A few things about Denmark became immediately clear.  First, everyone speaks English.   People always say that:  “Oh don’t worry,” they assure you, “everyone there speaks English.”  This usually translates to people at the front desk of expensive hotels speaking English, but everyone else either doesn’t, or resents the fact that you expect them to.  In Copenhagen, not just the tourist office or Danish railway staff speak English, but the woman on the bus, the kid walking down the street, even the 7-11 employee speak beautiful English – and in the case of the 7-11 employee in the Copenhagen central train station, speak much better English than the guy in my local 7-11 in DC.   They practically answer questions in iambic pentameter, working in a Shakespearean sonnet if they can.  Or in the case of a conversation I had with a Danish guy, they intersperse sentences with allusions to arcane American geography:  the man described a small place in Denmark that we’re planning on visiting as “the Montana of Denmark:  ranches, farms, wild places, you know.”  Yes I do know, but line up a dozen people from the east coast of America and ask them to rattle off three characteristics of Montana and they’d spit at you.  Here this Dane is throwing Montana at me and I had to look up his damn country on a map to find out where the hell his country was, much less areas within it.

The second thing that leaps right out at you is that people in Copenhagen are extraordinarily nice.  Not just “oops, you dropped your scarf” nice but “here are three bikes you can use for free for a week” nice.  We walked a few blocks from where we’re staying to a small corner bike shop and were immediately greeted by the hard-working owner, up to his greasy elbows in bicycle repairs, who chatted animatedly with us:  where are we from, what are we doing in Copenhagen, etc.  After about 3 minutes, he declares that we are nice people “because he can tell from people’s eyes” and when we ask about renting bikes, he goes out to the group of bikes parked outside his shop and spends the next 30 minutes picking out and adjusting 3 bikes for us.  When Jeff asks how much it is to rent them for a week, he waves Jeff off and says, “that’s okay, bring ‘em back in a week, I’m too busy now to deal with it.”  That’s it.  No deposit required, no imprint of our credit card, no exorbitant weekly rental fees, nothing.  We have honest eyes: here are the bikes. 

So off on the bikes we went.  To have a true Copenhagen experience, you have to bike.  On any given day, more than one-third of the Copenhagen population bikes somewhere: to work, to school, to the grocery store, somewhere.  I have never seen so many people on bikes in my life.  Copenhagen prides itself as being the biggest biking capital in Europe, even more so than Amsterdam.  The city information website has a link to a video about how you can be well-dressed and bike.  The clear message is that you can still look elegant or appropriate for work and ride a bike.  And it’s true.  Today we saw a woman biking, in the pouring rain, wearing heels and a fetching black business suit with a color-coordinated rain poncho.  The city is laced with bike lanes, and these aren’t the piss-ant bike lanes in DC, which are basically bull’s eyes drawn on the pavement so the hostile motorists can get a cleaner shot at you.  The Copenhagen streets have demarcated car traffic lanes, then on both sides of the street, coming and going, bike lanes that are on raised pavement above the street level and indicated with broad white stripes.  Next to the bike lanes are wide sidewalks for the pedestrians.  So as you bike, your lane is slightly raised above the street traffic and is adjacent, but separate, from the pedestrians.  This is an urban biker’s dream come true.

The bike lanes are everywhere, and they are PACKED.  We made the mistake of biking back to our apartment from downtown yesterday during rush hour, and it was intense. The bike lanes were filled with commuters.  One woman pulled up short to take a cell phone call and there was nearly a 10-biker pile-up.  But it’s not like the C&O Canal Path in DC where biking becomes an adventure in risk-taking because the bikers are treating the path like a speedway.  People ride their bikes at a respectful rate – and they obey the traffic signals.  When it’s a red light for cars, it’s a red light for bikes, and everyone stops, waits for the light to change, and then starts up again.  It’s not like DC where bicyclists speed through red lights, zip through intersections, run up on the sidewalks to take short-cuts.  Bikes are real modes of transportation, and are viewed as such.  The bicycle parking lots at the subway and train stations are filled to the brim, with several stations having installed double-decker bike parking devices to accommodate the crush.

Copenhagen is a fascinating city for its modern-ness.  Where we’ve been immersed in the grand dame old cities steeped in history, Copenhagen is a model for what we could and should be now and in the future.  From the dining room window of our house exchange apartment, I can see a windmill rotating in the harbor, not a cutesy wooden throw-back but a sleek white generator of energy.  Windmills line the coast, clustering in groups of five or six, sometimes more.  The streets are quiet at night, even in the area where we are staying, which is marked by apartment blocks.  In our own apartment quadrangle of four buildings facing each other over a common outdoor space of playground, barbeque and –yes – a covered shed for bicycles, there are probably 100 apartments.  Yet by 10:00 at night, it’s quiet.  There’s no music blaring from apartments, no honking horns, in fact, no cars driving down the street.  Yet up and down this same street are hundreds of parked bicycles, leaning against the walls of the apartment buildings.  There seems to be a spirit of communal living that is almost palpable, an awareness of being in close proximity to others and being okay about it.  Whether it’s lines of bicycle riders waiting patiently for the red light to change, not running it in the interest of mutual safety, or people offering to help, or the general feel of relaxed friendliness, Copenhagen feels like something we urban dwellers should be clamoring for.   Viva Denmark!  It’s not just a breed of dogs that are Great Danes!