First Days

Alright Roamies, buckle up (or should I say mount up) for the first long post of the trip.

The Black Diamond Annex, build in the late 1990s, connects to Denmark's oldest library.

After quite the long event to get to Copenhagen, I was greeted on my first morning by a chilly summer downpour, in summer shorts quite unfit for the Scandinavian farce known as summer. While it certainly must be warmer than winter here, summer hovers around a scintillating 20°C (68° F) and when it’s raining that number drops much lower with windchill (Well into the 10s Celsius or 40-50s Fahrenheit). Windchill and rain are the true factors. For even now, as I type this at the Black Diamond National Library Annex on the bank of the main harbor canal with fluffy clouds and sunshine, nearly ever person is wearing a jacket and long pants.

So I arrived, highly unprepared with summer shorts akin to happy Phoenician springs, freezing my legs off in the downpour. Newly accustomed to the upright bikes and wacky ways of the Copenhagen bike tracks, I was quickly soaked to the bone and ready to stop my wander. Accompanied by my friends and fellow classmates, Rachel and Aliza, we stopped off to spend my first krone on a pair of black jeans.

Now protected from the rain, I start my education in what it means to be a Copenhagener: riding a bicycle. Now, for those who haven’t been able to visit Copenhagen, let me explain a little further about the deep-rooted history of bike culture in Copenhagen.

Fully equipped, myself and my bike in one of the northern neighborhoods of Østerbro.

Bikes have been a primary form of transportation in Denmark for over 100 years. First appearing in at the turn of the 20th century, biking gained serious popularity across the city for four decades. This only intensified during WWII, when rations and German occupation made it the cheap and distinctly Danish way to travel. Before the 1950s, Copenhageners used bicycles for every purpose: transportation, cargo delivery, messages, communication, recreation, exercise... you name it, there was a bike for it in Copenhagen. Then, as the world embraced the automobile in the 20th century, Copenhagen fell prey to the same dependency as Americans and many others on this powerful new tool. Through the remainder of the century, Copenhagen became increasingly smog-filled and car-infested. Unsightly parking lots popped up in the city’s oldest squares, ringing centuries old fountains and statues. Bicycles and pedestrians abandoned streets, locking some of the cities more vulnerable communities indoors for fear of the busy roadways.[*]

A remnant of the old postal service run by bicyclists. Currently, the post is only offered once per week, as most mail has been digitized.

However in the 1990s, the city’s populace started demanding their ways of life back: a way of safety, convenience, tradition, and cost-savings. They wanted their bicycles. Two days from bankruptcy, the city council was more than happy to oblige in this model. They began the process of reforming the capital’s transit systems, re-instituting bike lanes and calming traffic by creating anti-car zones on some of the busiest streets in the city. They invested in infrastructure, including 4 separate types of street space designs for bicycles.

One of these designs, curb-separated bike tracks, ingeniously involves reclaiming the two outer lanes of 4-lane roads through the city and installing raised bike tracks. These tracks protect bikers by a small curb from cars, and in turn protect pedestrians on the sidewalk from fast-moving cyclists. The curbs are small enough to be accessible by bikes from all angles, and besides raising the lane for bikers, the original road height and sidewalk height remained the same. This saved the city money, and follows the Danish ideals of convenience and cost-savings.

Morten Kebell, our guide and former mayor of Copenhagen puts it, “We began designing cities around people, and not metal boxes. And when you make it easy for people to choose the right decision, it’s easy to create change.” This was evident jaunting around the city over the last 3 days.

From my first morning without a map and permanently dead cellphone, I realized that I was going to need to learn quickly to succeed in navigating this most ancient and ofttimes confusing city. I began concentrating hard, trying to look for street-signs to guide my path. And was met with absolutely nothing.

Now in Copenhagen, the city is intentionally designed with minimal signage. The system is the most intuitive in the entire world for a reason. All one needs to successfully navigate Copenhagen’s streets is a general sense of direction, knowledge and spatial awareness of the major canals and waterways, and enough wherewithal to move over to the right if someone rings a bell at you. Common sense is, in fact, highly common in the bikers here, with thousands of commuters moving in unison like a great choreographed dance. The general tenants of safety and simplicity are always in effect.

A prime example of this is the Copenhagen left. While in the United States we move into the left-hand turning lane for cars to perform a left, crossing in front of oncoming traffic to just scoot to the edge of the car lane, Copenhageners perform a much simpler and safer maneuver. Designed to never cross into the line of oncoming traffic, Copenhageners simply hold up their left hand to indicate a stop as the come into the intersection. Then the slow down, stop at the corner, and simply wait for the light to change. In Copenhagen, this never takes longer than 30 seconds. Subsequently, on the yellow light (yes, there’s a yellow light both before and after red lights!), bikers prepare to proceed as normal into the blue bike lane and onwards down the street. You never have to worry about a bike lane ending abruptly: every single one of Copenhagen’s thousands of streets, alleys, and tunnels has designated space for its main transit mode: bicycles.

I mentioned earlier that Copenhagen designed four types of bike spaces. Another beautiful example of bicycle infrastructure (and my personal favorite) is the shared space design. On my second day in Copenhagen, myself and a fellow student traveler Kelsey shared the day scavenger hunting around the city. Along the way, we kept wandering off the main track in search of beautiful backroads and stumbled onto a street up in Østerbro that mimicked the beautiful colors of Ny Havn, without a single tourist to be seen. Empty as we rode down it, we stopped to marvel at the beautiful green-space with picnic benches set in the street, and beautiful bicycles leaning on the walls. Well-maintained stoops led to homes where children obviously lived, evidenced by tiny trikes strewn about. Quiet as we rode about on a rainy Sunday afternoon in summer, I could easily imagine the neighborhood sharing a pleasant evening in the fall out under the metal streetlamps hanging from wires over the center of the road.

The quiet street of Olufsvej, deeper into the Østerbro. Picnic tables and open space underneath the white flags seem to call us to stop and relax a while.

An example of the painted lanes near Ny Havn. You can see one of the few signs in the city, still minimalist in nature.

Copenhagen also as the traditional painted bike lanes, more often on roads less heavily traveled. Still frequented, I returned to watch this space this afternoon down in Sydhavden. I found in my own forays down these streets I was constantly looking over my shoulder to see if a car was coming (old habits die hard). I feel they can be a bit of hassle to maneuver in, as many are not wide enough to facilitate conversations and still allow room for passing effectively with a car. Traveling in pairs as I often have, I’ve found these to be a bit more cumbersome. But Danes rode with ease down these streets, fully trusting and believing that a car would not come, and if it did, it would be slow enough to not pose a threat. Low and behold, this held true. By the time I returned north to write here at Black Diamond, I tried my hand at comfortably riding these painted tracks without looking back. I even managed to swerve down into the middle and “meditate” a little bit.

That line is going to make no sense without the context of explaining Bike Mike. In my chronological tale of Copenhagen, I mentioned my rather disastrous first attempts biking in this system, mainly due to my nerves and over-desire to complicate the intuitive system the Danes have built. Without being too harsh on myself, I can report that I performed well after my clothing swap. I spent Saturday afternoon achieving proficiency at not only the unique biking style of the city, but it’s many neighborhoods and locations. After riding to Timbuktu and beyond looking for a phone store, I decided to start asking the locals for help. Always eager to be kind, they pointed me on my way to a brand-new secondhand Galaxy to replace my broke hunk of junk, but not before I visited nearly every major neighborhood surrounding the city center.

With new phone in hand, I joined the rest of my study group at the HQ of one of Copenhagen’s most intrepid and interesting bike tour leaders: Bike Mike. A Copenhagen native, this eccentric gentlemen in his 60s prepped us for our ride by bringing out his favorite bobblehead of President Trump, teasing the group about everything under the sun. A true trickster at heart, he embodied hygge. Pronounced HEW-geh, Mike explained that this unique way of living emphasis feelings of comfort, happiness, and inner joy, expressed across the society. He believed in biking as a form of playful mediation and further explained,

“As Americans, you come home from school and your parents ask, ‘How did you perform today?’ Brits, they come home and their parents ask, ‘How did you behave today?’ Danish children come home, and we ask them, ‘How did you feel today?’ This is hygge, strong in the hearts of all Danes.”

During our tour, we saw the highs and lows of Copenhagen and hygge in all its many forms. From the rambunctious playgrounds of the ghetto[†] districts to the opulent Amalienborg palaces (4 identical structures for the queen, crown price, younger price, and guests). In the ghetto, parents watched serenely as their children played all of the grey and brick squares, while at the palace, Royal Guards broke strict discipline to pose for photos with excited tourists walking up the palace doors themselves. This relaxed atmosphere is pervasive through the city, which sits mainly empty as nearly half of it’s 2 million residents have left the city for their summer houses along Denmark’s never-ending coastlines.

Nearly 20 Americans biked through the quiet Saturday night streets of Denmark, riding by the little mermaid, Copenhagen’s newest pharmaceutical research facility, the Russian embassy, the harbor and the docks, and Copenhagen’s own alternative commune community: Christiania. Born from a combination of opportunity and government’s unwillingness to remove them, this community of nearly 800 Danes live in the heart of the city. A mere 10-minute bike ride from most anything, this paradise of old army barracks and hand-constructed tiny homes houses a nearly completely autonomous socialist community. All members equally participate, a neighborhood council sees to local governance, and decisions and life are fully communal. A paradise of greenspace and sustainable living, these Danes have allowed to live illegally and untouched for over fifty years. While most Danes consider them illegal freeloaders, most Danes also see the practicality of them staying in their homes and allowing them to live their lives in the way that best represents hygge. I suppose it doesn’t hurt that most of the city’s cannabis supply is available freely on its streets.

Thus Christiania flows on, and as we flowed through it, I couldn’t help but be awestruck by full experience approach to life that courses through this city. The most remarkable element of Copenhagen’s system is not the strength of its transportation, but the myriad of other systems that support the lifestyle of a Copenhagener. It’s a holistic interconnected system, in which the government structure supports the tax system which supports the infrastructure which support convenience and happiness for the people, who spend only about 60% of their time working and the other 40% traveling, pursuing interests, or just taking the air. With universal healthcare and education, Danes aren’t kept awake by the debt-crippling worries that plague American and other families around the world. Their system is so well-designed to support not only the individual, but the community, that truly all I have managed to find fault with so far is the climate. And as a Scandinavian would say, “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes.”

With this small recount, I’ll leave off for now, but I’ll return to the blog tomorrow to recount the remaining adventures of Kelsey and I’s scavenger hunt around the city (riding and driving a cargo bike, being told off by the Danish military police, etc.), the Women’s World Cup final and a conversation with the Dutch, and my first experience painting graffiti with some Swedes and a Chilean. There’s still much more to tell, but there’s also a bed calling and your attention to pique. Onwards to tomorrow, Roamies!

[*] Historical information taken from interviews with Morten Kabell, former Mayor of Copenhagen from 2014-2017 and Wikipedia Commons.

[†] American Roamies, don’t balk at the terminology. It’s the local word choice for the poorer districts, and not the same connotation as American or even former European ghettos