The Beauty and the Beast

This post covers my time in Amsterdam and The Hague. 

Amsterdam

Stop Two on my trip was Amsterdam: the city with a reputation for friendliness, liberalism, and hedonism. While I knew all about the Coffee Shops where marijuana is available for customers’ enjoyment, and a red-light district famous the world over, I wanted to find what else was here that makes Amsterdam special.

I stayed at a really nice hostel called CocoMama, which was a converted brothel. The staff were super-friendly and the location was really nice. Out of the city centre but in an ideal spot for doing a circuit walk through all the cool districts that make up the city. The one downer with that hostel: really small rooms, and even smaller bathrooms. I read a review where someone commented they had to sit on the toilet sideways. I’m not at all surprised.

I did a big walk right round the city, through the museum and Jewish districts, the “9 Streets” district which had a lot of alternative shops, the Central city then out along the harbour a wee way to find a windmill.  I whipped through the Albert Cuyps street market for breakfast: satay chicken skewers, a blueberry smoothie and sausage roll (unhealthy I know) before heading to the Van Gogh museum, which had some nice pieces, but the crowds just kept pouring in making it hard to appreciate what I was looking at. What made it worse were these big tour groups that just moved like a school of sardines: all together now, and God forbid you stray 4 feet from your companions… (insert image of me shaking my fist angrily).

I was going to go to Anne Frank’s House but the crowds for that were huge as well. The line went down the street and around the corner. An Australian guy I met at the Hostel said he went past at 8.30am and there were about 60 people waiting for it to open. So I skipped that. If it hadn’t been blowing a gale, cold as a frog’s tit, and raining, I may have deigned to wait in line for 30-45 minutes to get in.

Walking through the central city I saw the abundant Coffee Shops with bongs on all the tables. I may have been tempted to pop into one but the tourists going in were very much the lower rungs of society, which was quite off-putting (so I’m a bit of a snob, so sue me, though bear in mind you’ll lose). I also find weed smoke rather sweet and sickly. There were also lots of shops selling various strains of weed and seeds as well. I read that the Dutch are quite adept at mixing varieties to get a range of effects for the user. I also skirted the red light district. I was warned it was dodgy security-wise, but the abundant “Live Sex Show” signs were enough of an introduction. At this point, you are probably saying: Man, what a PRUDE! My reply, read the first paragraph again.

I eventually found my windmill, which was nice. You can’t go to the Netherlands and not get a windmill photo!!!

The things I loved about Amsterdam were the beautiful canals, many lined with houseboats and the amazing old architecture. Some of the buildings were literally one room wide, and a few were leaning on each other for support. It was everything I wanted Europe to be in that respect. There were lots of bikes everywhere as well including my fave, the cargo bike. I so wish you could get those in NZ.

Alas, my time here was short and I had to get to stop number three: The Hague, a 10 Euro, 50-minute train ride away.

The Hague

A few words: dull, dull, and even duller still. Whereas Amsterdam is the capital of The Netherlands, The Hague is the seat of Government. It is a city devoid of life and culture. Let’s face it; I’m sitting here in my hotel room writing this, as there is nothing better to do.

Mardurodam miniature

OK, not totally devoid of culture. They do have this one museum called Mauritshuis with a bunch of Dutch Masters like Vermeer and Rembrandt including Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring. And the Queen lives here. Oh, and there is Mardurodam which has a bunch of famous Dutch towns and famous buildings done at 1:25 scale. I did enjoy that one.

Finally, there is Scheveningnen, a sea-side village (more a suburb) with a really tacky, over-developed beach. I did learn one interesting thing. They are building a dyke along this beach as it is the weak point in the system of barriers against the sea that threatens to swamp most of Holland. Given that it is the North Sea which is pretty rough on a good day, I can see why.

Tomorrow I depart for Antwerp. I can safely say that I will likely never return to The Hague for leisure purposes. 

Being Berlin

Berlin Central

Stop One: Berlin!

I had limited time in this destination so I went for breadth rather than depth in terms of stuff I did. This post will be a something of a chronology for two days exploring. Please note that around all this stuff I was also engaging in copious amounts of people watching and window shopping. Mainly the latter.

I decided to catch the train from Copenhagen to Berlin, which took me 7 hours. I took the train because I wanted to see the countryside rather than the inside of an airport. The most surprising part of the journey was that we went on a ferry between Denmark and Germany. I couldn’t understand why we were told to get off the train but I followed everyone anyway, and despite it taking me a while, it finally clicked that we were motoring over the Baltic. I saw lots of cute country villages and a couple of big cities, including one with lots of Churches in its skyline. There are also heaps of wind turbines again, but on a much grander scale than Denmark. I also noticed heaps of houses with roofs covered in solar panels. Government subsidies perhaps?

One weird thing was that despite me booking a train that went direct to Berlin Central, I had to get off at Berlin Spandau (which is on the outskirts of Berlin) and use the local S-train to go the rest of the way.  No matter, it was pretty easy to get to where I needed to go.

Holocaust Memorial

Berlin itself is really cool. Very busy, lots of people and with a really interesting mix of old and new buildings. The public transport network is really well run with trains, busses, trams, and subway all working in with each other.

I stayed in a hostel called EastSeven in Prenzlauer Berg which is in East Berlin and just on the edge of the main CBD area called Mitte. The hostel was fantastic. Friendly staff, clean, and safe. They cooked vegetarian dinner (free) two of the nights I was there, and offered a really cheap breakfast of toast and cereal if you wanted it. They also had a selection of beers available for 2Euro. I also found this really amazing café down the street and around the corner that had the best scrambled eggs I have ever had.

Some of the obvious touristy things I did included the Holocaust memorial and museum underneath it. It was pretty appalling what happened back then, but the memorial itself was so amazing. It is a square of about 200 stelae (upright concrete blocks) of varying heights, standing on an undulating ground so that the light kept changing as you walked through. The blocks were tallest in the centre. At least, I think so…

Brandenburg Gate

I also saw the Brandenburg Gate (with Star Wars characters posing for photos in front: so bizarre), Berlin Wall, and Eastside Memorial. This last one is the longest stretch of wall left and is covered in really amazing artwork. I followed the hoards of tourists to Checkpoint Charlie (the Yankee gateway to Soviet East Germany) and couldn’t help but appreciate the irony of there being a McD’s right beside it. Fun fact with the McD’s, and something I have noticed in The Netherlands, is self-service kiosks. I tried using one somewhere (can’t remember where) and found them a bit hard to use. They are best for ordering your basic combos rather than a custom order

Got lost but eventually found Ku-Damm, the billion-euro street, so named as that is how much is spent along here each year, and visited the most amazing department store Kaufhaus de Westin (KaDeWe). It was amazing to see watches and diamond earrings selling for E50,000.

Finally, I wandered through Kreuzberg, a big up-and-coming area that is undergoing a lot of redevelopment.

 

Less touristy things included finding a Mercedes showroom (Heaven On Earth for me, such a delight of modern engineering. One day a Mercedes and I will be together, one day...), a Mini showroom where I discovered that you can actually customize them a bit to suit your individual style, and a Bugatti Showroom where I locked eyes on the Bugatti Veyron: a 1000hp beast that sets the hearts racing of hot-blooded males the world over.

I also found Deutsch Bank’s Bank of the Future: a bank branch with a (non bank-related) general merchandise shop, educational centre (also not related to the bank and money) and restaurant/bar (where anyone can come for lunch etc) combined with the usual bank functions. The opening hours were also much longer, 10am to 8pm. Apparently this is the Deutsch Bank’s vision of what a future bank should look like. Seemed like a good concept to me!

I finish off this ridiculously long post with a couple more photos for your enjoyment.

Original Berlin Wall fragment

Subway Station

Day Trip to Møns Klint

Danish Countryside

The Cliff of Møns (pronounced like a shortened version of 'moon')


Two days before my first exam I went for a Student Association-organised day trip to Møns Klint which is a really amazing geological formation about 2.5 hours south of Copenhagen. I got to see some lovely Danish countryside which can be summed up in two words: green and flat. 


We had a charming Danish guide who spoke well-good engrish who was able to explain some of the more stand-out stuff we were seeing. Along the way we passed through a village that was having a market day. There was one stall, one stall owner, and one customer... Well, it was a small village so that could have been a record turnout for all we know.


The area that you pass through on the way to the Cliff is described as the 'rotten banana' due to the fact that people can't make a living in that area, so everyone is selling up (or trying to) and moving into Copenhagen or Odense which is one of the other main cities about 2 hours West of Copenhagen. Perhaps, then, that market day was a runaway success...

The Cliff itself was absolutely amazing! It is made of limestone and about 100m high. If you dig through the bits that have crumbled off you can find fossils (or fossiles as our tour guide pronounced it). I got part of a fossilised octopus tentacle out of it.


Around the Cliff is one of the first National Parks in Denmark, which was created in the last 10 years or so. National Parks are something of recent arrival in Denmark, but then as I learned in one of my law classes, Denmark has had fairly robust environmental legislation since 1849 so the Danes likely didn't need them. (Just a little factoid to prove that I didn't sleep during my classes.... much)


Within the park is a really beautiful beech forest and apparently we were lucky to go when we did, because the sunlight filters wonderfully through the leaves, and only for two weeks a year. After that the trees bush up and under the canopy becomes dark and gloomy.

Liselund

Liselund 


Stop Two on our tour was a 'garden' that was more a park than anything. It was done in the romantic style apparently but I wasn't that overly wowed. 


The History of it is that there was a summer palace there and in the 1800s a Danish King decided to make a park/garden for his beloved wife Louise. 


By this time I was hanging out with this Canadian girl from Toronto who took verbal diarrhea to a whole new level. As unfortunate as this sounds, she would have to be the first Canadian that I didn't really like. We got a wee bit lost while she unleashed the verbal floodwaters which turned out to be quite a nice detour as I got a really good photo out of it. 


Elmelunde


Stop Three was one of the first Churches ever built in Denmark, built in the 1200s. It had some amazing paintings on the roof that told the Bible stories. I will now embark on what I think is a super interesting history about it. If you don't want to read it then scroll down to the next chapter.


This Church was originally Catholic and fairly simple in design, until a couple of hundred years later when some rich locals built internal walls for it. The area where this Church is located is littered with Churches every few kilometres, which is a sign of the wealth of the area in Medieval Denmark. The locals would have had to have been wealthy to support that many Churches. (Contrast that to the modern-day 'rotten banana' that this area has become)


Because the area around the Church was agricultural, it is likely the locals were illiterate so the roof was painted with Bible Stories to show the faithful what the priest was telling them.


After Denmark converted to the Lutheran faith in the mid-1500s, the church was painted white inside and out and the roof art was painted over. This is because one of the fundamental points about early Lutheranism was that it was a marked departure from the excesses of the Catholic Church with its paintings, gold filigree everywhere, corrupt priests etc. The whole idea of Lutheranism was to focus your mind on the word of God and not be distracted by visual frippery.


In recent times, there has been a move to uncover Denmark's history and as a part of that, the roof in this Church has been painstakingly stripped back to show what was hidden.

Bottom panel shows Fall

It was quite entertaining to see actually. For example in a scene depicting the Fall, Eve is much larger than Adam so as to remove doubt as to who was responsible. The Snake (representing the Devil) had a woman's head and was making eye contact with Eve, thereby implying that the two were in cahoots (and that women are to blame for all the stuff wrong in the world I'm guessing).


A scene of Adam toiling outside the Garden shows him with a plow. This was a hugely expensive piece of farm equipment in the day, so this picture gives a clue as to the health of the local economy. Other pictures showed 'poor' people wearing rather nice clothes indicating the aforementioned point again.


At some point however, a rather elaborate altar and pulpit were installed that, to me anyway, jarred rather alarmingly with the rest of the Church.


The other thing I learned was that every Danish Church has a model ship hanging from the roof. These ships symbolise the Ship of Hope which I am guessing serves as a metaphor for community, the importance of helping each other and the fact that everyone is striving together to find the 'Promised Land'.


So there you go children, you just got EDUCATED!!!


Jaettestue


This ancient, Stone-age Burial Mound was stop number 4. Jaettestue means 'Giant's Living Room' in Danish, and this name is given because people thought that only Giants could have moved the huge and heavy stones to the location and built it.


It was quite a remarkable feat of engineering, as the design takes account of the flow of water and so on, so that the crypt didn't flood every time it rained. Apparently, there were 200 people buried in there. Someone asked where they were buried. Reply: You're standing on them.


It was quite a cramped space, but we fit 50 people in there easy enough. 

A Day at the Beach and a Day in May

A Day at the Beach

Over Easter Weekend it was so lovely and warm (22C) and sunny here in Copenhagen that I just felt compelled to go find a beach.

A quick check on Google told me that the best one to go to is called Amager which is on the Metro line towards the airport. As a side note, apparently most beaches around Copenhagen are man-made.

Amager (pronounced Aamarg) has gorgeous white sand and is really long. It faces the Oresund so there were no waves to speak of. I would describe it as a Lake Beach as opposed to an Ocean Beach.

It was absolutely gorgeous, I got quite a nice tan out of it and while there, discovered that Danes are big fans of the all-over body tan. There were a number of topless sunbathers towards the quieter end of the beach. My roommate went a few days ago and said he saw an old man stark raving... All his bits on show, in full view of anyone who cared to look.

Also, in what seems to be a standard for Denmark, there was an offshore wind farm not far from the shoreline.

A Day in May

Two days ago it was May Day. In Europe, May Day celebrates Worker's Rights and and all the Unions and Labour Rights movements etc get together and organise big events.

Here in Copenhagen there was a big event at one of the larger parks in town. All the Unions were out in force with tents and sales pitches; the left-wing parties in Denmark were all out in full show as well. Families had picnics and lots of people were drinking beer and getting drunk. Suffice to say, the hedges didn't need watering. There was also a guy handing out weed to anyone who wanted some.

There was lots of food stalls and arcade game things like you find at a Fairground. What was really weird though, was that the prizes at the arcades were all fake flowers like red roses and stuff. I don't know about you but I'd take a giant stuffed bear before I take a fake flower.

They had a big stage as well with bands all day. Well I'm assuming so, I got there later in the afternoon and there was a band playing in front of a communist flag. The irony of it though, was that this band sang a variation on F*** the Police, despite the fact that Communist countries tend to have ridiculously powerful police forces that tend not to care about your human rights (maybe I am just stereotyping but... KGB anyone?)

Final observation: lesbians everywhere. And I mean Everywhere. You didn't have to walk far to see one, or two making out.

Side story: a friend of mine went and on his way home encountered some neo-nazis at a bus stop. Apparently they told some black girls to walk into the traffic, harassed an Eastern European woman then seigheiled (not sure of spelling) in unison. I have a feeling they were at May Day just to cause trouble.

Driverless Subway




I just thought I would add a photo taken from the front seat of the driverless subway trains that they have here in Copenhagen. I really like them, and I think that if NZ ever actually considered decent investment in public transport in our largest cities, then something like this would be super awesome.