A Friend Visits, and a Field Study

Exciting post today!  We've got a visiting home-slice, a few classy beers, and a field study!  Yay!

First, a very special place!  I think I posted about this once before, but this time... it's at night!  October 21st, by the way.   You'll note, it looks pretty excellent.  Anyways, I figured that as one of those city livability enthusiasts, Alex would appreciate seeing this.  He'd been in the city for a few days with his class, and I'd been writing a paper, so as a break from that, we went for sightseeing and some classy brews! 

We met a guy while we were climbing, an amateur photographer from England.  He's living in Copenhagen now, and he's into a thing called BlipFoto -- if you're at all interested in photoblogging, look it up.  Alex made one, and he seems to be enjoying it quite a lot.  It seems to be a really cool community, too, all commenting on each others' travels.  At any rate, I ended up as the guy's subject for the day!  Pretty cool shot, I thought.  Kinda nerve-wracking though, as it required about 10 seconds with no hands on the ropes. 

I'd gotten some recommendations for Danish micro-brews from Prof. Patrick (I think I just might start calling him that...  Love the alliteration), so we went and tried out his top recommendation -- a place called Mikkeller.  The one above, it's called 'Vesterbro', after a tenement neighborhood of the city.  A light beer, it did indeed taste pretty great. 

I liked this second one even better, though.   It's a very dark brew, as you can see.  And I'm no expert, but I felt it had a somewhat fruity start, and a 'charred' aftertaste to it -- not conducive to quick drinking, at all.  I think they call these sipping beers.  Either way, it was quite good.  Expensive, though -- at most bars, a beer twice this size would cost around 25 kr, or $5.  These were half pints, and were 30kr each, or $6.  Worth it.

Alex!  He's got a fancy brew in his hands, himself.  The bar is located pretty near the central station, in one of Copenhagen's few 'sketchy' areas.  Sketchy for Scandinavia generally implies a couple of drug addicts and a relatively high percentage of minority residents -- which is to say, not all that sketchy at all.  I wouldn't take kids there after dark, since there's always the risk of seeing someone shooting up in the street, but the thing about drug addicts (except for those on meth or krokodil) is that they're generally pretty caught up in their own thing, and couldn't care less that you're there. 

...turns out one of the objectives of the blog is to open the readers to some new viewpoints!  Number one: most drug addicts aren't dangerous, except to themselves.

Central station!  It's a pretty big operation, with 13 platforms.  It connects 4 regional lines, 5 S-tog lines, and a host of inter-city services.  And, in 2018, it'll connect the new Metro line, too!  Lovely transit.

TRAIN!  In case you didn't know, I'm a train nerd.  This one's a regional, one of the ones I rode twice daily. 

On to the field study, October 24th!  For the livability class, we tried to get out and tour some successful interventions throughout the city -- this one's in Vesterbro.  Like I mentioned earlier, this was originally a tenement development, with pretty squalid conditions.  Oddly and unfortunately, it and some of the other tenement neighborhoods weren't really renewed until the 1970's.  But I'll talk a bit more about that in a later post, I think.  This field study wasn't really about the past, it was about the future! 

The above picture has a few really innovative things.  First, there's a graffiti problem in the city, like in most.  But instead of devoting a few hundred officers to do nothing but track down and arrest the artists (cough, cough, NYC), the city has been trying to bring their activities to the legal side of things.  Of course, 'tagging' is still rather frowned upon, and should be.  But that dragon up there... that's art!  Why criminalize it?  So they've actually commissioned some of the better artists out there to do murals in public spaces.  Looks great, it's incredibly cheap, and saves all sorts of police time.  Win-win-win? 

Oh, and they've taken steps to accommodate a marginalized city group -- skaters.  Most cities, and Copenhagen is still often guilty of this, push them off to the side and provide nothing for them, or otherwise a small park in a rather undesirable or useless area of the city, forcing them to improvise.  They're also rather fond of using inferior materials, such that they wear down under skating use, thus providing the city with an excuse to kick them out.  No so, here.  These concrete steps are incredibly strong, and can take as much grinding as anyone's willing to throw at them.  Great progress!

Look!  The rock!  But seriously, there's just a random rock chillin' in the sidewalk.  Pretty cool stuff.

Finally, the inside of one of Copenhagen's famous institutions -- the courtyard.  Much of this bright, green inner space was tenement housing prior to ~1970, making this a major improvement.  It's a really cool fusion of public and private space, since it's open to the roughly 140 families that live in the surrounding buildings, but generally gated to everyone else.  Really helps to negate the primary argument against raising kids in the city, too -- it's an incredibly safe community where you know most of your neighbors, and it's at least as awesome as a suburban backyard.  Shame we haven't got any in the States, yet.