Copenhagen and Sweden notes
August 2021. Instagram story highlights here. Copenhagen:
Maybe the best first stop is the Danish Architecture Center; then you can visit places that you learned about there. It made me excited to see Enghaveparken, Grundtvig’s church, Superkilen and Tingbjerg. And it has a huge slide, for everyone.
Folkehuset Absalon is great! It is a communal dinner at a former church, every night, 6-10 USD. Most of the people going are Danish, I think from Copenhagen, but don’t go to Absalon often. I went on my own, which is apparently uncommon, and met a bunch of people, lots of fun.
Walking next to cyclists, all the time, you end up exchanging all kinds of looks with cyclists, all the time. It’s a rare experience. On the LA beach bike path they don’t look at you nearly as much. Collectively the cyclists look goofy, tired and uncomfortable, except for beautiful women who remain beautiful.
Copenhagen won the last Copenhagenize Index for bicycle friendliness, phew. It didn’t always. After covid they stopped updating it, sad.
Often pedestrian crossings are timed so that you only get to cross half the road per signal. This is annoying.
Freetown is cool, and like a GTA parody of itself. Weed, guitars, dreadlocks, making out, vegan food, and an unattended ripe banana on a wooden bench.
Copenhill is of course entertaining and funny, and a great view.
Train stations play opera, not just classical music.
7-Elevens are predictably wonderful, and as an aside they’re getting better in the U.S. too.
Frederiksborg Castle and the Museum of National History there is a good day trip out of Copenhagen.
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (“the name is derived from the first owner of the property, who named the estate after his three wives, all called Louise”) is also an hour out of the city. Most exhibits were uninteresting or safe, though.
As a tourist, I feel like the museums of modern art you want to see are in Asunción, Dhaka, Dushanbe, Yaoundé, etc.
Sweden (Malmö, Gothenburg, Stockholm):
I’ll start whimsically: in 2013, the Eurovision Song Contest “moved” from Copenhagen to Malmö, and the intro with the butterfly, the music and the style when it cocoons next to the Øresund bridge, is wonderful and I’ll always be nostalgic for it.
Outside of downtown, Malmö looks and feels like the outskirts of a midwest/east coast U.S. city. The faces are busy, fierce, bored. Many lines of scooters toppled over. Many head-to-toe goths. A recently crashed car on top of a car barrier leading to a park, with no one around.
A Let’s Eat Dinner Together in Malmö would be excellent, and much more interesting than in Copenhagen.
You can, and should, walk to Rosengård or similar neighborhood of mostly foreign background, and explore there.
I went up to Gothenburg by train and I walked around it for a day and a half while talking to friends on Clubhouse. The commercial area next to the port is done well, but I don’t have much else to say about the city. I think Gothenburg in sunshine feels very different from cloudy Gothenburg.
The architecture and geography of Gamla Stan makes it a genuinely interesting center of Stockholm. So rarely are cities’ centers good! Gamla Stan kind of feels like Venice. And there are military/royal marches going on, and the parliament is there, and the Nobel stuff, and affordable hostels — all on a very small island.
In 48 hours in Stockholm I ended up in Sollentuna, 10 miles north of the center, on the first night, and then near Vega, 15 miles south, on the second night, for a rave in a forest clearing.
From Sollentuna I asked my friend to drop me off in nearby Husby, another “vulnerable area” like Rosengård. Architecturally you can see the government’s money: nice building facades, park infrastructure and so on. Swedes of every race were walking around. But sadly no books at the Husby Bibliotek alcove in the metro station.
I saw a group of seven homeless people in Stockholm; did not see any in the rest of Sweden or Denmark.
Swedish women will often write first on dating apps.
At the airport back to Tbilisi, the Swedish guy at check-in said he wasn’t in the mood to do an investigation about my vaccinations (either about PCR or the fact that I got Sinovac), and let me through.
Thank you to all the wonderful people I met on the trip, including new Danish, Swedish and fellow traveling friends. The days with you are forever going to be the most memorable part.