Copenhagen, Denmark
Tuesday, June 15
The sun dawned bright and early as the bus rumbled through southern Sweden, although not anywhere near as early as it had earlier in my trip as I traversed the northern fringe of Europe. Unlike my previous bus trip, I had taken the time to set a watch alarm for this particular leg, the reason being that I wanted to make sure I was awake for the last bit of this journey. This desire did not just stem from wanting to be conscious as we wound through the streets of Copenhagen, it was because of just how our bus was going to make it between Sweden and Denmark.
For hundreds of years, the Swedes and the Danes have... well, we'll just say they haven't been the best of friends. Although they're separated by a body of water called Øresund (literally, "The Sound"), at its narrowest point Øresund is only 2.5 miles across. This means that the two nations have been fighting for control of its shores ever since the mid-1400s. Well, lop off modern times since Sweden started practicing its neutrality thing, and we'll start to approach the truth.
However, in recent times, it is only natural that relations between the two nations have become a lot better. A lively system of ferries sprung up between the two coasts, allowing relatively easy access between Copenhagen on the west and Malmö on the east. In fact, by the 1980s a period of prosperity and job growth in Copenhagen coupled with a spike in real estate prices meant that a number of people were starting to seek out housing in Malmö and commute to work across the sound. That, in conjunction with the ever-growing freight and passenger traffic heading between Scandinavia and mainland Europe, meant that it was high time for a fixed link to be constructed between the two countries.
And so, after years of speculation, a decade of planning, and 4 years of construction, the Øresund Bridge finally opened in 2000. It's quite an impressive structure, even just looking at the stats: 5 miles of bridge with a 1600' wide cable-stayed span in the middle giving 190' of clear space underneath, followed by a 2.5 mile long, half mile wide manmade island, eventually connecting to a 13,000' long tunnel giving a completely unobstructed shipping lane.
What's more, the whole thing really interesting to look at from an engineering perspective. I mean, first you might wonder why not just make the whole thing a bridge? Well, the designers wanted to make sure that future ships - ones that might even be more than 200 feet above the waterline - would still be able to pass the bridge through the western channel to get to the Copenhagen port. Not only would this require really tall and REALLY expensive support towers, they'd also interfere with airplanes coming in to land at Copenhagen's Kastrup airport. So that end became a tunnel. However, building a tunnel would interfere with the Øresund's currents - the thing's not that deep to begin with - so they had to dig a big trench in which to bury the tunnel segments, and that dredged material was enough to make an island to transition between the bridge and the tunnel. The reason this transition island is so much larger than bridge-tunnel islands that we see in the Hampton Roads of Virginia is because this tunnel displaced more soil than all three of those bridge-tunnels put together. So there.
So it's safe to say that the impressive structure was one of the main reasons why I woke up on a bus instead of, say, taking a plane and getting there in a few hours: so I could actually traverse the bridge as a part of my journey. While the train was also an option - the bridge carries both rail and road traffic - the tracks pass through the substructure of the bridge, and I wanted to make sure that I had a good view as we passed over the bridge.
So I set myself an alarm to go off as we passed through Skåne län, the southernmost county (really a state in the US sense) of Sweden. However, before that could wake me up, I found myself jostled awake by a particularly raucous crowd getting off in Malmö... which was a good thing, I guess, given that the bus was running about 45 minutes ahead of schedule and I otherwise would have missed the bridge.
And so once again in this trip, I found myself glued to the windows as we wound through the streets of Malmö. Ooh, there's the Turning Torso!
OK, here's the part of the blog entry where I've got to make a confession: I've just spent 750 words describing why traveling across the top of the Øresund Bridge was so interesting, but I don't really have any interesting pictures of it. Umm... yeah. Sorry. As it turns out, it's really hard to take pictures of a bridge while you're driving across it. That's something we'll have to fix later on down the page.
So we crossed the bridge - and man, was it scenic and... um... cloudy? - and were dropped off in seemingly the middle of an industrial section of the city at 6:30am. As soon as I stepped off the bus, I was nearly run down by a speeding cyclist, setting the trend for what life would be like on the sidewalks of Copenhagen. I grabbed my stuff, wished I'd had a map, and began walking in the direction that I thought was North.
A few blocks passed, and I started to be able to hear the sound of trains. I turned right, and found myself in the middle of the swtichyard for Copenhagen's central train station. Turns out they hadn't dumped us in the middle of nowhere after all, just out behind the train sheds.
Owing to the fact that I'd actually spent most of the time on the bus sleeping, I hadn't yet been able to formulate a plan for what to do with my last two days abroad. So I tucked on into the train station and tried to come up with a detailed plan. Back in the initial planning stages of the trip, I'd thought about what I knew of in Denmark, and the only thing I was really able to come up with was Legoland. Although I'd always loved the flexibility and constructibility that Lego bricks afforded, upon doing some further research I discovered that Legoland was in Billund, which is actually quite a long way away from Copenhagen. Like, 2.5 hours long. That, and the fact that admission costs right around $50 was enough to cause me to find other plans. So a few minutes of further research later and after a bit of investigation into the local train schedules, I was ready to set off to my hotel.
By this point, an hour had passed. As I walked the 6 blocks from the central train station to my hotel, I was struck by just how much traffic there was in the city. Cars and trucks were just whizzing by on the stereotypically named Hans Christian Andersen Boulevard, presumably on their way to work or whatever. However, the most fascinating thing about the traffic in Copenhagen is just how many people choose to travel by bicycle. Seriously, just on this one short walk alone I must have been passed by 300 or 400 bicycles. At the crosswalks, I felt like I was in serious danger from the sea of two-wheeled projectiles. Interestingly enough, though, the amount of car traffic and the lightness of pedestrians on the sidewalks makes me think that the high cycling mode share is more created by drawing people away from walking than from any actual reduction in the number of vehicles on the streets.
Eventually, I reached the Danhostel Copenhagen City, which at around 15 stories and over 1000 beds is the largest hostel in all of Europe. Facilities were decent but cheap, with six beds to a room and no free breakfast. It's nothing really to write home about, so I'll speak of it no more.
Suffice to say I dropped my stuff and immediately headed back to the central train station. Why, you may ask? To catch my train.
But first I had to eat some breakfast.
Luckily for me, I was still lugging around some of the food that I had brought along from the US. You know, that stuff that I'd been subsisting on in Norway. Well, the food was still here a week and a half later, albeit a little bit worse for wear. Fortunately, even a package of s'mores Pop-Tarts that have been fused together into one crumbly mass still tastes as delicious as one that hasn't had the filling start to erupt out onto the surface like in the picture below.
Anyway, the whole reason I was back at the train station was to take a journey up to the northern mouth of Øresund, to the little town of Helsingør. While you may not have heard the name Helsingør before, you are probably familiar with it in its anglicized name, Elsinore, as the home to Kronborg castle - the setting for Shakespeare's Hamlet. Luckily for me, despite the fact that Helsingør is about an hour away by train, the trip is still covered by Copenhagen's transit system for quite a reasonable price - about $20, round trip.
From the train station in Helsingør, the walk to reach Kronborg castle is not long. In fact, the cool weather and the gorgeous skies made the experience quite relaxing, especially given the peaceful nature of the town and the fact that its small and historic buildings stood in stark contrast to the noisy, crowded streets of Copenhagen.
Eventually, I found myself across the moat and inside the perimeter walls of the castle, only to be separated from the main structure by another moat and another set of walls. Man, these guys must have been serious when they built this thing.
As I'd mentioned, the town of Helsingør is located near the northern mouth of the sound separating Denmark and Sweden. In this location, the gap between the two countries is less than 3 miles wide, so the Danish empire built Kronborg castle as a way to police shipping in Øresund. In exchange for a fairly substantial tax called the Sound Dues, the king promised to protect commerce in the straight from piracy and other nefarious forces. Oh, and he also promised to not sink your boat, which was the fate that befell most ships who refused to pay.
Inside the castle itself, there are a number of attractions. On the tour, you can see many sights, including the Grand Ballroom, which at 62 meters by 12 meters was the largest interior room in Northern Europe at the time of its construction, as well as a great many tapestries and old pieces of furniture and such. You can also see the intricately carved chapel or walk through the Danish Maritime Museum, home to "one of the world's finest collections of naval models." Seriously, they must have had 200 or 250 models of different ships from across the centuries out for viewing.
However, once again during a tour of an old castle I found the most interesting exhibit was the one where you got to wander around through the foundations of the structure. Kronborg's casemates cover an area the size of several football fields, and even though they're dark and uneven and full of things you could trip over or hit your head on, they still let you wander around just about wherever you want. I guess that's another difference between Europe and the litigious mindset we have in America.
In addition to serving as lodging for soldiers and storage space and a prison over the years, the catacombs are also home to the rather imposing statue of Holger Danske, or Ogier the Dane. According to legend, his spirit lies in wait somewhere in the castle ready to come to the nation's rescue in its darkest hour. He hasn't shown up yet, but the largest Danish resistance group during World War II was named after the guy, so I guess that's an indication of his impact.
After covering pretty much the entire castle and wandering along the adjacent sea wall, it became time to get back to the train station and back to downtown Copenhagen. I mean, I've got places to go and things to see, so I might as well get a move on.
Oh, well, let's get a picture with the castle first. Yeah, that's the stuff.
However, I did have other reasons for getting off in Østerport. I guess I misspoke when I said that Legoland was the only place I knew about in Denmark, since Copenhagen's most famous landmark has got to be the statue of Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid, sitting on a rock in an inlet near one of the city's ports. So I wandered around through what I later found out was a historic fort, down several staircases, and finally out onto the boardwalk by the water's edge to where the statue sits.
Or, I should say, where the statue usually sits. I just so happened to decide to visit the statue one month after the Copenhagen City Council agreed to lend the statue - with her rock and all - to the Danish Pavilion at Expo 2010 in Shanghai. So what I saw when I got there was not an iconic statue but a really big television screen sticking out of the water a few feet from shore. Sure, it was a live feed of the statue in her temporary lagoon in China, but it was all a bit surprising. I'm just glad that wasn't the point of my whole visit to Copenhagen.
I've got to say, the next few hours kind of sucked. It rained a lot - including a decent amount of hail - but at least I had my jacket. However, most annoyingly, my glasses - which had been slowly loosening through a weak spot in a weld of one of the nose piece supports - finally broke. Granted, I did happen to have tucked a spare pair of glasses in my luggage back at the hotel, but that was still 5 miles away. So I had to walk back to the subway and eventually find my way back to the hotel with a jagged piece of metal anchoring the right side of my glasses into my nose. At least they didn't slide down anymore, which they'd been doing so rapidly for the last week that I had to adjust them every 2 or 3 minutes. As you can see below, I was not a happy camper.
They say that you've always got to have one major catastrophe in any big trip that you take. I'm not particularly superstitious, but the relatively smooth nature of the trip so far had taken me a bit by surprised. My checked bag made it through three connecting flights, I hadn't forgotten anything at home, nothing had fallen out of my backpack in over 1,900 miles of traveling throughout Scandinavia, I hadn't run out of money, I hadn't gotten food poisoning, I didn't make a fool of myself at the conference, and aside from that one interaction with those sketchy kids in Oslo I hadn't run into any pickpockets. Up until that point, I'd been figuring that I was going to oversleep and miss my flight home or something. So it was actually quite a relief when my glasses finally broke.
In fact, things really started looking up after that. The big rainstorm was over, I was nearly done with the trip, and the skies cleared up and became even more blue and spectacular than it was before.
Equipped with my spare glasses that I'd fortunately had stowed away deep in my luggage all this time, I set back out into the city. However, by this point it was just about getting to be 6pm, which if I'd learned anything from my time in Scandinavia is the time that all museums close around these parts. Or, I should say, nearly all of the museums close. Luckily for me, my trusty Let's Go Europe guidebook told me that there was still one attraction open in the city: the Round Tower.
The round tower? It's the one towards the left that looks like an observatory. You know... because it is.
I wound past the parliament building and into a narrow, pedestrian area to get to the tower itself. The Rundetårn, as it's called in Danish, was started in 1637 and is about 40m tall. The building houses offices, a university library, an observatory, and, perhaps most surprisingly, a church.
The cool thing about the ascent of the tower itself is that you have to climb up 7.5 revolutions of a spiral ramp. Now, lest you think this is some Guggenheim-esque gentle spiral, I should point out that in the center the ramp tips upwards at a whopping 33% grade, so the trek upwards was actually quite tiring. And to think that they have an annual race up to the top every spring... on unicycles.
However, no matter how tired I was from wandering around all day and from hiking up the ramp of doom and no matter how many times this trip I'd looked out across a Scandinavian city from some high vantage point, the view from the top of the Round Tower was still quite breathtaking. Fortunately, there were benches.
Off in the distance, I got my first good view of the Øresund bridge in profile. Man, is that thing spectacular or what?
By this point, it was about 7pm. However, even at this most southerly point of my European expedition, the sun was still high in the sky for such a late time of night. So I sat up there for probably 30 or 45 minutes, just soaking up some sun and savoring the densely packed and generally historic architecture before I had myself an idea.
Throughout the trip, I'd generally become more confident in Europe's transit systems. Whereas initially I'd allow something like 2 hours extra when taking a train or a bus, by this point in the trip I trusted the schedule adherence of these transit operators enough to be getting to my train with perhaps only 5 or 10 minutes to spare. However, when it came to my flight home on Thursday, I wasn't willing to take any chances. I mean, the Copenhagen airport is way off on the Øresund shores on the outskirts of town, and I was still a bit concerned that I might not allow enough time to catch my flight or I might misuse the train system and find myself back at Elsinore.
So I figured that I might as well use my bonus hours of daylight to take a trip on down to the airport. I mean, who doesn't like airports? Certainly not me.
So I descended down the corkscrew ramp from the top of the tower and within a few blocks found myself at one of the main stations of Copenhagen's new metro system. In contrast to their seasoned network of commuter trains, the Metro is only 8 years old. They only finished building the thing all the way out to the airport in September of 2007. Needless to say, the whole system is pretty slick.
Probably the most interesting thing, at least from a transportation engineering standpoint, is the fact that the whole of the 13 mile long system is automated. From the ticket machines to the entry gates to the trains themselves, I only saw one staff member (in a SECURITY jacket) during all my uses of the Metro system. It really is kind of weird to be sitting in the front of one of the trains, hurtling down the tracks, with nothing in front of you but a big glass window. It certainly is a far cry from the reassuring human presence in the Washington Metro and most of the other systems I've ever used.
Fortunately for me, I'd picked up a couple of brochures to read on the 14 minute trip. As I was flipping through one of them, I stumbled across a map and had to pause for a moment. The last station we had just passed was named "Øresund," and the next one was called "Amager Strand". From my brief time taking German in high school, I remembered that the word "strand" means "beach." So I quickly gathered my things and managed to get off of the train just in the nick of time in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, I might find myself at a beach with a view.
The sun was getting noticeably lower in the sky as I exited the station and found myself in a quiet little neighborhood south of downtown. However, I knew I must be on the right track because not only did the quaint little houses come to an abrupt end about two blocks away, there was just a hint of sea breeze wafting down the road towards me.
So I worked my way down the road and took a skinny bridge across a narrow inlet to find myself in the Amager Strandpark (the Amager Beach Park). I later found out that the whole of the 2km long island containing the park was manmade, and only in 2005. Turns out the city has been investing a lot of money into improving the southern edge of the city - both in terms of services, property values, and quality of life - in light of the success of the Øresund Bridge and the newly expanded international airport.
The effect of the finished product is quite stunning. Not only are there numerous paths for jogging and bike riding as well as a sizable artificial lagoon for swimming (including a 1000m swimming course), the whole of the island has been sculpted and planted in such a way that the thing seems like a peaceful sanctuary. Grasses and dunes abound in the northern section of the island, and as I crested one of the dunes and looked across the sound towards Sweden I could see that the sea was just littered with dozens and dozens of graceful wind turbines.
Needless to say, I was very glad I'd decided to make the trip out this way.
However, the best was still yet to come. As I walked south along the island, I rounded a curve and was presented with one of the best sights I'd seen in the entire trip: a simply stunning bridge. I think I'm always going to have a weak spot for cable-stayed bridges, and given the length and grace of the Øresund Bridge, this has got to be one of the most gorgeous ones I'd ever seen.
After probably a half dozen attempts at framing, I finally even got a picture of myself with the thing. Mmm. Just look at that.
I had originally planned to take my shoes off and wander around barefoot on the beach, but apparently foot comfort wasn't one of the things the designers were concerned about as they piled up dredging material to create the island. Especially in the more commericialized southern half of the island (they have a pier, restrooms, a cafe, and even a dive shop), the top few inches of sand are composed of very pointy shell fragments. So after failing to walk barefoot on the beach in Norway (the temperature was 44 degrees), Sweden (no beaches, just sea walls), and Finland (high winds caused crashing waves that would have mashed Donny and I up against jagged rocks), I had to let go of that one goal.
However, with the sun shining down on my shoulders, seagulls honking overhead and seashells crunching satisfactorily under my feet, and the everpresent and stately bridge off to my left, I once again found myself thinking that this would be the best possible way to end my trip. However, for the third time in four days, I had to remind myself that things were not yet over, and that there was still more to be seen tomorrow.
Eventually, the sun sank down to the tree line and I returned to the Metro - unlike in Washington, they run theirs all day and all night here - to continue on down to the airport. I familiarized myself with the impressive and modern structure before returning to the central train station, making a few phone calls home since by now it was about 5:30 eastern time, and returning home to my oversized hostel.
In our next exciting installment, I promise I'll finally finish this thing up. Seriously.
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