I think this sun is curing my polio.
Copenhagen is such a wonderful, magical place. It's fitting that the first appearance of the sun in the entirety of this trip was on our train ride here, and it hasn't left since. Literally. The sky is light about twenty hours a day, and it never actually gets black. Just a bit dusky. Also, it's blindingly bright and, since it's up for so long, takes a long time to rise and set, leaving you with even more low-angle blindness. But it's made for some wonderful weather, which has been around seventy fahrenheit the entire week with not a single cloud anywhere in the sky. It's enough to convince me to move here, but I haven't experienced the winter. It must be the polar opposite. When I'm not making bad puns, we're sitting in parks and walking castle grounds and eating spandauers (the Danish danish!)
There are lots of things to do here, so it looks like we're spending a little over a week. Mostly we've walked around and people-watched, which is the most popular public activity according to History of Landscape Architecture. Lots of plads all around (plazas for you Anglos) and beautiful streets and people and public art installations. We've been doing a cultural activity or two a day. The Fotografisk Center had selections from a contest they held in which photographers submitted images taken any time of day and anywhere in Denmark on August 18, 2005, giving a wide overview of the variety of life in this small country. I wanted to buy the book, but didn't want to carry it for six weeks. The Nationalmuseet is all historical artifacts of Denmark. It´s huge, but it's also free and in the center of the city, so we can go for an hour or two whenever we want. We saw an Australian film, Look Both Ways, and tried to see The King with Gael Garcia Bernal but instead had to settle for the international landfill of the Da Vinci Mysteriet. A word to filmloving travellers: you can ignore the Danish subtitles during the English dialogue, but you'll find no help when integral scenes are spoken entirely in French. What's the local word for "lame albino priest killer"?
The Louisiana modern art museum is in this small town, Humlebaek, an hour from Copenhagen. Humlebaek looks almost like an East Hamptons village, with one main one-lane road running through it and little restaurants and ice cream shops along it. The museum is set back from the road in a one-level modern building, with sculpture gardens and clifftop views of the bay and other Denmark islands. The main exhibition was a collection of video pieces, which were for the most part very interesting and kept me from seeing any of the permanent galleries. It´s hard to describe any of them here, except to say that the extremely critical film teacher may actually have liked one or two. We walked around the residential areas and looked at all the beautiful old houses and the Alfa Romeos and decided that, if anything, Denmark should've taken control of Germany.
Today is the Danish Design Center and possibly the Architecture Museum, both of which I'm sure the l'architect library folk would love to see, and some exciting laundry time to combat the dirty-sock feeling I'm getting right now. Tomorrow Samara shops while I spend a giddy day at the Dansk Film Institute
There are lots of things to do here, so it looks like we're spending a little over a week. Mostly we've walked around and people-watched, which is the most popular public activity according to History of Landscape Architecture. Lots of plads all around (plazas for you Anglos) and beautiful streets and people and public art installations. We've been doing a cultural activity or two a day. The Fotografisk Center had selections from a contest they held in which photographers submitted images taken any time of day and anywhere in Denmark on August 18, 2005, giving a wide overview of the variety of life in this small country. I wanted to buy the book, but didn't want to carry it for six weeks. The Nationalmuseet is all historical artifacts of Denmark. It´s huge, but it's also free and in the center of the city, so we can go for an hour or two whenever we want. We saw an Australian film, Look Both Ways, and tried to see The King with Gael Garcia Bernal but instead had to settle for the international landfill of the Da Vinci Mysteriet. A word to filmloving travellers: you can ignore the Danish subtitles during the English dialogue, but you'll find no help when integral scenes are spoken entirely in French. What's the local word for "lame albino priest killer"?
The Louisiana modern art museum is in this small town, Humlebaek, an hour from Copenhagen. Humlebaek looks almost like an East Hamptons village, with one main one-lane road running through it and little restaurants and ice cream shops along it. The museum is set back from the road in a one-level modern building, with sculpture gardens and clifftop views of the bay and other Denmark islands. The main exhibition was a collection of video pieces, which were for the most part very interesting and kept me from seeing any of the permanent galleries. It´s hard to describe any of them here, except to say that the extremely critical film teacher may actually have liked one or two. We walked around the residential areas and looked at all the beautiful old houses and the Alfa Romeos and decided that, if anything, Denmark should've taken control of Germany.
Today is the Danish Design Center and possibly the Architecture Museum, both of which I'm sure the l'architect library folk would love to see, and some exciting laundry time to combat the dirty-sock feeling I'm getting right now. Tomorrow Samara shops while I spend a giddy day at the Dansk Film Institute