After leaving Switzerland, our next week and a half was a bit different. Jessica had less scheduled work, my job-seeking madness was over, the mountains were behind us. Instead, we had three pleasant, but completely different low key stops. But, first we had to brave the drunk football fans on our train. They were in the next car, but through the open door we could hear them singing on and off for several hours of the ride through Germany. A little amusing, but also a lot annoying.
Our first stop was Cologne (or Köln), where we spent a long weekend with Jessica’s old friend Thais, her husband Christian, and their son David. You may recognize that we visited them in October as well. Our visit was, once again, lovely. They are an incredibly warm and welcoming bunch. Thais was great at helping us feel at home and connecting us with so many great people. Christian loves to talk about anything and everything–he’s just genuinely curious about the world. And David, now 8, was a lot of fun to see again, not least because his understanding of English was leaps and bounds better in just the few months since our last visit.
One of the most fun activities was a family dim sum night, making dumplings by hand. David took the lead on the cooking front and kept throwing more into the steamer while the rest of us filled our bellies. Yum. I’m all for child labor when it produces dumplings.
On a beautiful day, we had a great picnic in the park with a wide variety of folks, many of whom have connections to Brazil as Thais and Christian do (Thais is from Brazil and Christian’s mother grew up there). Not only did we have fun hanging out with this fascinating group of folks, but a couple of them turned out to be potentially interesting people for Jessica to talk with regarding her research. Small world. One of them even took her on a tour of the German Development Ministry a few days later.
While hanging out in the park, I took David out on a row boat for a while. It was a bit of a disaster until I figured out how to handle the oars without spinning in circles too much. But then when David took one of them from me, we had a whole new set of problems. Generally two strokes forward and one back from me while David paddled forward tended to keep us straightish. Not ideal…but fun! I also had fun stealing David’s hat. He got his revenge by stealing mine and everyone else’s too…
We also took a hike through the woods a bit north of Cologne near the Neanderthal Museum.
Jess taught David to play Pooh Sticks…
…and I enjoyed the giant swing on the awesome playground. (Once again, I was impressed by the insanity of German playgrounds: tons of crazy stuff to climb on and parents just chilling while their kids go explore on their own. Very cool.)
We came across a farm that is trying to breed back into existance an extinct species closely related to horses: tarpans. They are using some horse-tarpan hybrids to try to get as close as possible. Most importantly, the three tiny ones were incredibly cute on their wobbly little legs.
And we discovered that even in prehistoric times the fight against fascism was an important political movement…
After a couple more fairly chill days catching up on some work and emails, Jessica and I hopped a quick train down to Bonn where we once again visited my old friends Sam and Katie and three of our favorite kids: Simon, Max, and Audrey. (And you should recognize them too: we saw them last July, October, and December.)
Jessica and I spent most of our time in Bonn playing with one kid or another…or sometimes all of them at once. There were epic lego vs. other toy battles, some Pokemon, a light saber duel, a collection of Eiffel Towers to examine, and a volcano full of dinosaurs…
Many board games were played…
Audrey was also kind enough to provide us with a huge number of ninja bunnies to replace the ones we had accidentally left on the wall in New York…
The real highlight of the visit was going to the Haribo factory store. I’m a major gummy candy enthusiast, but I’ve never seen variety or quantity like this. Two whole floors of wall-to-wall gummy goodness. Wow. At one point I even got to become a gummy. A life dream fulfilled.
After I stocked up for our upcoming travels, we crossed the street to the much more mundane and normal-sized Lindt chocolate store, where Jessica resupplied us for our evening treats…
On the food front, we were also treated to Simon’s new invention, cinnanas. They weren actually pretty tasty.
And we also enjoyed being back in Germany, where there’s a bakery on every corner…
On the one day that the kids were at school, we took a stroll through the farmer’s market and the scenery of the cute downtown.
And we capped off the visit with an awesome high ropes adventure. The place we went to had dozens of courses ranging in difficulty from “bambino” to well beyond our capabilities. (I saw one very fit, tall, flexible woman completely stuck on one problem for like 10 minutes.)
There were a ton of zip lines (Simon’s favorite bit), partner courses that required cooperation, and some places where you had to trust auto-belays to lower you properly as you stepped off the edge of a platform with nothing else below. Feel free to enjoy the videos below, and you should be seriously impressed by Sam’s performance on the rings. I got exactly nowhere on that one.
Overall, a good time was had with the whole clan. We’re excited that we’ll cross paths again in St. Louis in July…
After our over-too-quick visits with our various German friends, we took a lengthy ride north to Copenhagen, our first time heading into Scandanavian territory. We had only a couple of days there, but it really was a lovely and relaxing couple of days.
Copenhagen is a beautiful city, and much of the central area is quite easily walkable. In fact, we only took the subway once in our time there. But WTF?!?!?! The subways have no drivers! Whereas most cities seem to have subway trains that are a block or more in length that run every 5-10 minutes, Copenhagen has short two-car trains. They come to the station every minute or two and then jet right off. Because they’re smaller, they accelerate faster and move at a pretty zippy pace. But, because they’re so small and frequent, having a driver on each would be costly. Solution: it’s all on auto-pilot. Freaky, but cool.
Also, the Copenhagen underground map is quite aesthetically pleasing in its simplicity…
But, as I said, we hardly used transit. We mostly did we what we always do: walked a ton. Sadly, despite walking by it two or three times a day, I couldn’t convince Jessica that we should go to Tivoli Gardens, one of the oldest and most popular amusement parks in Europe. Oh well. I just had to imagine the joy of the rides from outside…
Back to my point: Copenhagen was seriously lovely and made for some of the most pleasant big-city strolling we’ve had recently. It’s way less hectic than London. There are fewer bikes than Amsterdam (despite serious limits on car access to the central city). The buildings are more uniformly attractive than Brussels. Its more compact and manageable than Paris. Really, just a great place to wander…
- There were a ton of great public squares, many connected by streets restricted largely to pedestrians.
- There were tons of beautiful old buildings, but Copenhagen does a particularly nice job with corners (curves, towers, cupolas, etc.).
- A few of my other favorite streets and buildings…
- There were also a ton of great fountains…
- And lots more water everywhere, with canals, rivers, pools, and more…
- And we wandered through some gorgeously maintained parks…
We also learned a tiny bit about the history and culture of Denmark and Copenhagen, as usual, on a walking tour and then in a museum. Our tour guide was a real odd duck–a retired man who was born in the US, but lived his life around the world in 23 different countries. His wife was Danish, so upon retirement…well, there they were. Anyhow, he was quite knowledgeable and had a funny way of telling stories.
The history of modern Denmark seems to start with Abasalon, a king who was also a bishop.
After visiting the palace that houses the parliament, we ended our tour at the modern-day home of the Danish royal family. Our guide assured us that they’re really a quite informal and well-beloved family. Evidently his dachsunds are friends with the Queen’s dachsunds.
We also learned more about Danish history at the National Museum. The museum had a number of distinct sections, some of which had gorgeous recently-updated displays, and others looked like they hadn’t been touched since the 1980s.
The best section, with the most up-to-date contextualization of its contents was the prehistoric displays which took up most of the first floor. While learning about the growth and changes in Danish culture in the pre-Viking era, we saw all sorts of interesting stuff:
- harpoons made of animal bones
- amber pendants
- highly-decorated brass objects like belt plates, bracelets, and combs
- some crazy horns (lurs) from c. 1000 BCE
- and some lovely containers made of gold
One of the most fascinating objects was this large cauldron. It evidently is made with materials and techniques typical of Thrace (modern Romania/Bulgaria), but with motifs related more to Celtic beliefs. And how it got from being made elsewhere 2000 years ago to Denmark is a mystery as well.
As the displays brought us up to the Vikings, there were some really fascinating objects, including entire ships in various states of preservation. But, the coolest bit were the runestones, some of which were larger than Jess or I. They evidently began to be made in the pre-Christian era, but some later ones also reflect Christian beliefs. They were erected to honor and preserve the memory of fallen leaders. Mostly, they were very beautiful.
Upstairs, the newest room was dedicated to taking visitors on a Viking raid…
This room was goregously laid out, but lacked a clear flow. There were tons of objects that made it to Denmark as the result of Viking raids, but sometimes the information provided was a bit thin. It did provide some intersting insights into the widespread influence and contacts that the Vikings had, from Nova Scotia to Russia and down to the Mediterranean Sea.
Ultimately, the room ended with an odd video sequence where we followed a Viking on an unsuccessful raid of the Mediterannean. (They failed to find Rome and mostly got bombed with Greek fire off the coast of Spain.) An odd choice for an exhibit that otherwise focused on Viking wealth.
In the worst displays, the museum had basically no contextualizing information for room after room of medieval and renaissance objects. We ran through those, but did enjoy this set of drinking horns.
Maybe even weirder than the failed Viking raid video were these “portraits” of Kings who talked and blinked a lot at us. If you didn’t notice, every King since Christian I has been named Fredrik or Christian in an alternating pattern.
There were some interesting displays on Denmark’s role in slavery and colonialism. I’ve appreciated that a lot of museums around Europe seem to be engaging with such issues, even if not perfectly.
Finally, on the top floor, the museum’s exhibits on the past few centuries were reasonably updated, but clearly not exactly new. Towards the end, there was a really nice focus on labor, working class movements, socialism, and the like. And one of the last things we saw was this giant bird puppet, “Aeroflot,” which the group War and Peace used at anti-war protests throughout the 1980s and 90s.
Besides historical curiosities, Copenhagen had more than a couple of days’ visit worth of oddities. Here’s a few that stood out…
Let’s start with Børsen, the stock exchange built in the 1600s as trade with various parts of Asia picked up. Since the sailors brought back tales of dragons, the king asked that the spire have dragons on it. But no one knew what a dragon looked like, so instead it looks like four oddly shaped dogs twined together.
We neglected to go see the Little Mermaid statue which is a long walk out a long pier and evidently underwhelming, but we did see the underwater statue of the Mermaid with Seven Sons, which is unsurprisingly more related to the original story than Disney’s version is.
Jessica and I both really enjoyed these odd structures. Know what they are?
No? They’re old telephone booths from the early days of the technology. Each neighborhood had one. When it rang, whoever answered would go find the person who was being called, who had to run down to get on the phone. Now they hold miniature cafes and such. Each one was different, but all nicely decorated.
One of the other odd and interesting spots we visited was Superkilen. This is a new park area recently designed by a group of artists/architects. What makes it so interesting is the intentional manner that the artists used to try to reflect the diversity of the neighborhood (home to a large percentage of Copehagen’s immigrant and refugee population). Throughout the park are signs, play structures, hammocks, fountains, benches, and other objects (even manhole covers) imported from dozens of countries around the world. It was fun to wander around and see where everything came from.
But, far far weirded than that was Freetown Christiania. While most of Copenhagen is incredibly neat, orderly, clean, and controlled, Christiania is exactly the opposite of all that. This area is a commune of about a thousand people with all sorts of hippy-ness going on. A free bookstore, lots of art and artists, some crazy housing set-ups, and lots of gardening. It was fun to wander through and get lost in the weirdness.
The only downside in Christiania came as a result of all the fun things you see above. Photos. Because Christiania basically keeps the cops out, it is also Copenhagen’s main marketplace for marijuana (though, I believe, not harder drugs). As we were walking through “Pusher Street,” I had my phone out and was told “No photos!” and that I should shove my phone…somewhere uncomfortable. Oops. But, other than that incident, a pretty cool little area.
Speaking of odd political stuff, as with many places we visited, Denmark was coming up on an election. I eventually learned that one of the major considerations was whether they would increase their defense spending in order to have a greater say in EU miltary decisions. (They voted yes by a 2/3rds majority the day after we left.) Regardless, I enjoyed being completely baffled by the Danish political signs, and particularly by the seemingly regular practice of defacing the signs of opponents. I also liked the pop culture references of the signs below on the right.
More understandable and forceful was this piece of protest art calling out Copenhagen’s leaders for saying they are working to reduce the number of cars in the city while planning to build a large parking garage on this square. The titles of the piece: “Fuck Double Standards.”
But, let’s finish with something more positive, shall we? We also ate very well in Copenhagen. Besides a surprisingly good visit to a little taqueria, we enjoyed trying the local open-faced sandwiches. They’re called smörrebröd, which literally means buttered-bread, but they’re usually piled with fish, pork, veggies, etc. They’re basically the only thing available at most places for lunch. The ones we had at this upscaled food hall were particularly impressive. (And, we got to sit at the counter and watch them make more, which was quite fun.)
So, that’s the news from Germany and Denmark. We’re in Stockholm now and off to Oslo shortly. More on those soon.
Oh, and just to keep y’all up to date…Space Station Phoenix is finally getting into people’s hands. Initial response has been pretty positive. I even got an email from a publisher considering reprinting it in another language who said, “This is for sure my contender for the game of the year for me and it is one of the best games I played this year. Congratulations.” From someone who publishes some pretty great games, that made me happy. Of course, I’m obsessively checking boardgamegeek.com, twitter, and the web in general for news about the game. It’s a little unhealthy, but kinda fun. As of this morning, SSP is #17 on “the hotness” on BGG, meaning it had the 17th most page views in the past 24 hours. Most of those are probably just me, but it’s still nice to see my game on the list! And, based on the current BGG ratings (where both level and number of ratings are taken into account), SSP is the 10,272nd best game in the world. Only 10,172 spots to go to break into the top 100!
Sadly, I have yet to see SSP in a game store myself. I know it’s in various places in the US and I’ve seen that some people have got hold of it in Belgium, but so far none found in Germany or Sweden. Oh well…
Anyhow, until next time…
Nice to be able to enjoy it all.
You looked like you had so much fun with Sam and Katie’s kids at the Ropes course! I regret that I never tried a zipline but not sure I could manage it now.