It turns out that Heathrow is actually London's premium airport. You don't realize that until you get to Gatwick. I left from an ugly square building lit dimly by fluorescent lights. I landed at a terminal of wooden floors and natural light and chic black chairs and sounds of espressos being sipped and newspaper pages being turned over. (When I left again, sadly, it turned out that the rest of Copenhagen airport is just as awful as every other airport in the world.)
I flew Norwegian, Scandinavia's idea of a budget carrier. It's a failure, in the sense that it's missing most of what defines budget carriers as a class: Its staff were nice, its plane was new and clean, its flight was only late because Gatwick is what Gatwick is. It shows cartoons on its short flights around Europe. Daffy Duck was homeless and Porky Pig was a policeman trying to move him off park benches and out of squats. Daffy won out in the end. After that, modern cartoons with two fish who kept illustrating the value of friendship, with no violence and no social criticism.
From an airplane window, Denmark is the same sort of green quilt as England, but smoothed flat and tidied up, with wind farms and tidal flats added.
The hotel illustrated Danish egalitarianism (which is just one of the aspects of Danish society on which, having hung out in Copenhagen for three days, I am now an authority). It's a four star hotel with a one-star annex. A short set of stairs separates them: The expensive-looking wallpaper stops and you enter a mazy, dimly-lit corridor with brightly-painted doors. The WiFi signal somehow knows to stop at this invisible border. The room's small, bright, and noisy: Anything that happens in the hotel is audible, as though it was designed as some sort of listening post. If someone walks overhead, or shuts a door, or runs a shower, or unaccountably starts imitating bird-calls in the courtyard at 11 at night, you won't miss it.
The neighbourhood is the same. Posh hotels, sex shops, hip restaurants, plump sex workers in fishnets, fashionable bars, and a needle exchange with someone smoking crack in the doorway. But all freshly scrubbed and safe and apparently harmonious, with no litter and not much visible poverty or distress.
I met my friends Karen and Jay in Copenhagen, and they brought all the ambition, energy, organization, and general effectiveness that I basically lack. My usual M.O. is to find my hotel and then sort of bum around until it's time to leave, but in Copenhagen we were all over the place.
Copenhagen: Bicycles, ranks of freshly-scrubbed 18th-century buildings, brew pubs, markets, opticians' windows full of black-rimmed glasses, canals and canal houses, a transit system about as easy to learn as the Danish language, restaurants where finding the washroom is a strange adventure. Clean streets. We saw one litterer: A huge seagull outside a market where we were eating was fishing objects out of a trash can and placing them on top of a BMW. A guard came out and waved at it. The gull watched him with mild curiosity. The guard, wary of getting drawn into a Porky Pig-Daffy Duck scenario, left it at that. The gull got on with it. After a few minutes the BMW's owner came out and looked around angrily.
Christiania: Some sort of consensus-governed free settlement established when the military moved out of some bastions near central Copenhagen and assorted hippies and free-thinkers moved in. It has a hash, t-shirt, and craft jewellery-based economy. Parks and sculptures made of old cars, repurposed brick military buildings, cottages, graffiti murals, children's playgrounds, little grocery stores and organic cafes and cottages. The tips of star-shaped bastions built to provide fields of fire are green spots with good views. On Pusher Street, where photography and running are forbidden, men with covered faces sell weed at lemonade stands.
The National Museum: Gigantic and brilliantly presented. The ground floor holds an absolute arsenal of flint axeheads and other stone age weapons. If the worst should happen and you find yourself needing to reboot human civilization, looting the National Museum of Denmark will be Stage 1. There are neolithic burials and sacrificed bog people resting under glass grubby with children's fingerprints. Lights are low and eerie bog noises are piped in. You get a jumpy feeling that they might be looking for new bog people.
A burger joint I don't remember the name of: The same as a fast food restaurant anywhere else, except you were made to feel at every moment that you were visiting a superior civilization. The spare-but-comfortable design, the cleanliness, the oustandingness of the veggie burgers and of the fries, the fact that your combo includes a beer.
Tivoli: An amusement park in central Copenhagen, across the street from the central train station. We went in. There was a short queue that stood still for a very long time: There was a large family at the head of it dithering in Danish. Annoying, but for a family that size it was a major financial decision: Shall we take the kids to Tivoli today, or bid for a controlling stake in Volkswagen? Inside Tivoli, pirate ship restaurants, old rides, classic fairground games like Galloppen, where your mechanical horse races other people's mechanical horses by moving forward as you throw a ball into holes with different point values. Ponds full of carp, two roller coasters, a park where children roll giant spools across the grass.
Rosenborg Castle: A 17th century palace built by Christian IV with a long queue stretching outside in heavy rain because each tourist, on reaching the front of it, leaned on the counter and said something like, "say, now, how did the 17th century Danish government work, anyway?". Inside, the usual palatial bric-a-brac, the shiny crown jewels of Denmark, the King's toilet, the King's art collection, a throne made partly of narwhal tusks, the King's prank chair, which clasps its victim's arms and then sprays him or her with water.
Maybe it's just because I'm so damn wonderful, but everyone in Copenhagen was lovely. And equally so whether you were ordering an expensive meal or walking into a hotel lobby looking like you'd been fished out of a bog because you were queueing in the rain for half an hour.
I flew Norwegian, Scandinavia's idea of a budget carrier. It's a failure, in the sense that it's missing most of what defines budget carriers as a class: Its staff were nice, its plane was new and clean, its flight was only late because Gatwick is what Gatwick is. It shows cartoons on its short flights around Europe. Daffy Duck was homeless and Porky Pig was a policeman trying to move him off park benches and out of squats. Daffy won out in the end. After that, modern cartoons with two fish who kept illustrating the value of friendship, with no violence and no social criticism.
From an airplane window, Denmark is the same sort of green quilt as England, but smoothed flat and tidied up, with wind farms and tidal flats added.
The hotel illustrated Danish egalitarianism (which is just one of the aspects of Danish society on which, having hung out in Copenhagen for three days, I am now an authority). It's a four star hotel with a one-star annex. A short set of stairs separates them: The expensive-looking wallpaper stops and you enter a mazy, dimly-lit corridor with brightly-painted doors. The WiFi signal somehow knows to stop at this invisible border. The room's small, bright, and noisy: Anything that happens in the hotel is audible, as though it was designed as some sort of listening post. If someone walks overhead, or shuts a door, or runs a shower, or unaccountably starts imitating bird-calls in the courtyard at 11 at night, you won't miss it.
The neighbourhood is the same. Posh hotels, sex shops, hip restaurants, plump sex workers in fishnets, fashionable bars, and a needle exchange with someone smoking crack in the doorway. But all freshly scrubbed and safe and apparently harmonious, with no litter and not much visible poverty or distress.
I met my friends Karen and Jay in Copenhagen, and they brought all the ambition, energy, organization, and general effectiveness that I basically lack. My usual M.O. is to find my hotel and then sort of bum around until it's time to leave, but in Copenhagen we were all over the place.
Copenhagen: Bicycles, ranks of freshly-scrubbed 18th-century buildings, brew pubs, markets, opticians' windows full of black-rimmed glasses, canals and canal houses, a transit system about as easy to learn as the Danish language, restaurants where finding the washroom is a strange adventure. Clean streets. We saw one litterer: A huge seagull outside a market where we were eating was fishing objects out of a trash can and placing them on top of a BMW. A guard came out and waved at it. The gull watched him with mild curiosity. The guard, wary of getting drawn into a Porky Pig-Daffy Duck scenario, left it at that. The gull got on with it. After a few minutes the BMW's owner came out and looked around angrily.
Christiania: Some sort of consensus-governed free settlement established when the military moved out of some bastions near central Copenhagen and assorted hippies and free-thinkers moved in. It has a hash, t-shirt, and craft jewellery-based economy. Parks and sculptures made of old cars, repurposed brick military buildings, cottages, graffiti murals, children's playgrounds, little grocery stores and organic cafes and cottages. The tips of star-shaped bastions built to provide fields of fire are green spots with good views. On Pusher Street, where photography and running are forbidden, men with covered faces sell weed at lemonade stands.
The National Museum: Gigantic and brilliantly presented. The ground floor holds an absolute arsenal of flint axeheads and other stone age weapons. If the worst should happen and you find yourself needing to reboot human civilization, looting the National Museum of Denmark will be Stage 1. There are neolithic burials and sacrificed bog people resting under glass grubby with children's fingerprints. Lights are low and eerie bog noises are piped in. You get a jumpy feeling that they might be looking for new bog people.
A burger joint I don't remember the name of: The same as a fast food restaurant anywhere else, except you were made to feel at every moment that you were visiting a superior civilization. The spare-but-comfortable design, the cleanliness, the oustandingness of the veggie burgers and of the fries, the fact that your combo includes a beer.
Tivoli: An amusement park in central Copenhagen, across the street from the central train station. We went in. There was a short queue that stood still for a very long time: There was a large family at the head of it dithering in Danish. Annoying, but for a family that size it was a major financial decision: Shall we take the kids to Tivoli today, or bid for a controlling stake in Volkswagen? Inside Tivoli, pirate ship restaurants, old rides, classic fairground games like Galloppen, where your mechanical horse races other people's mechanical horses by moving forward as you throw a ball into holes with different point values. Ponds full of carp, two roller coasters, a park where children roll giant spools across the grass.
Rosenborg Castle: A 17th century palace built by Christian IV with a long queue stretching outside in heavy rain because each tourist, on reaching the front of it, leaned on the counter and said something like, "say, now, how did the 17th century Danish government work, anyway?". Inside, the usual palatial bric-a-brac, the shiny crown jewels of Denmark, the King's toilet, the King's art collection, a throne made partly of narwhal tusks, the King's prank chair, which clasps its victim's arms and then sprays him or her with water.
Maybe it's just because I'm so damn wonderful, but everyone in Copenhagen was lovely. And equally so whether you were ordering an expensive meal or walking into a hotel lobby looking like you'd been fished out of a bog because you were queueing in the rain for half an hour.
