Copenhagen: Modern city, etc. etc.

  • copenhagen_01.jpgOh dear, I was afraid of that. We didn’t care much for Copenhagen.

    Well, there’s noth­ing to say you have to make a love con­nec­tion with every­place you stop. And I don’t think it’s any reflec­tion on Copen­hagen. It’s breath­tak­ing, bustling, full of life.

    But the rea­son it wasn’t a hit with me is that it’s def­i­nitely a mod­ern city. And like a lot of Amer­i­can Ortho­dox con­verts, I’ve got an ancient heart, or some­thing like it. Bistros and ice bars don’t light my fire nearly as much as cathe­drals and cob­ble­stone pave­ment. So I’m the weirdo here.

    copenhagen_bikes.jpgGiven the sheer cool­ness of Copen­hagen, I should’ve been swept off my feet. Con­sider, for exam­ple, that the city pro­vides racks of good sturdy bicy­cles for any­one to rent at any time for the cost of a small deposit. That’s just cool.

    But that high cool fac­tor, IMHO, comes at the expense of the grandeur, the clas­si­cal beauty, the weight of the ages that the city must’ve once had. I walked into a door of the his­toric Chris­ten­borg church, that had a medievel stone sculp­ture of a saint bless­ing me, only to find that they’d con­verted it into a mod­ern art museum — a move that I would think wouldn’t please mod­ern art afi­ciona­dos or church-goers.

    copenhagen_church.jpgBut then, Copen­hagen prob­a­bly didn’t have that many church-goers to worry about. Den­mark is often called the most sec­u­lar nation in the world. Recent sur­veys have found out that the Dan­ish aren’t par­tic­u­larly inclined toward athe­ism more out of apa­thy than any­thing else. They don’t mind the idea of prayer and church because those things can no longer give any offense. And at the point that Chris­tian­ity can give no offense, it likely can’t give much of any­thing else. If a per­son is beyond reck­on­ing sin to them­selves or any­one else, I sup­pose they have entered a twi­light place where a lot of things don’t matter.

    So I couldn’t relate to them, and that’s the bias I have to admit to. A final anec­dote sums up my problems.

    Find­ing myself with a cou­ple hours at the end of the day, I decided to go see the Lit­tle Mer­maid statue that has become such an iconic sym­bol of Copen­hagen. (Didn’t have a cam­era with me, but HERE‘s a link if you don’t know the one I mean.) From the dock I set out fol­low­ing the wide cob­ble­stone side­walks of the coast around the Baltic sea. It was fine weather and there were lots of fel­low pedes­tri­ans out (no skate­board­ers or rollerbladers, by the way, now that I think of it.) Halfway to the statue, I came across a newer, big­ger ver­sion of the mer­maid on the rock than the one every­one is used to see­ing. A plaque anounced that the sculp­tor had wanted some­thing “more con­tem­po­rary and more natural.”

    More nat­ural? For a mer­maid? What does that mean? Well, in this sculp­tors opin­ion, it appar­ently meant that she should look like a movie star show­ing off her new boob job. Because she was big and buxom and had her chest and her butt thrown out in that saucy way we see in all the ads for designer jeans and per­fume. The statue looked like some­thing that belonged in front of a Hoot­ers restau­rant down by the docks.

    I pushed on another half mile and got to the orig­i­nal mer­maid statue. She looked small and unim­pres­sive by com­par­i­son, almost lonely in spite of the tourists crawl­ing all over her like ants, get­ting in close to have their pic­ture taken, throw­ing an arm around her, wav­ing and smil­ing, feed­ing her ice cream. She sat on a rock, naked but not at all volup­tuous. Just look­ing over her shoul­der, lost in melan­choly thoughts.

    That’s what need improv­ing on. That was what had to be thrown over for some­thing more con­tem­po­rary. And “nat­ural” what­ever that means under the circumstances.

    So I’m for the old, orig­i­nal, clas­sic mer­maid … against the mod­ern, gaudy, unsub­tle mer­maid. Now I know some­thing about me and Copenhagen.


    Related posts:

    1. The White City and us
    2. Silly air­port art
    3. Global warm­ing or just Big City warming?
    4. Adver­tis­ing and the state of Art — epi­logue: pomo
    5. In Jean for Thanks­giv­ing, Vegas the next day

    June 5th, 2009 | Grace | 5 Comments |

5 Responses and Counting...

  • Anam Cara 06.05.2009

    Yeah, I never got much out of Copen­hagen either. (Ams­ter­dam is even worse!) There are other cities that are much more inter­est­ing. We spent 2 weeks trav­el­ing through Den­mark in 1999. If a Viking was there, so were we.…. And there is always the orig­i­nal LegoLand in Bil­lund. Ribe, Jelling, and Roskilde were my two favorite stops. Well, there’s lots more to do. And the best is yet to come!

  • Grace

    That’s the thing about mak­ing these cruise stops — you’re often in the big­ger, tarted-up cities. So if you wanted an authen­tic feel of the coun­try, you’d have to dig deep. Going into the other vil­lages sounds ideal. But how did you deal with the lan­guage bar­rier? It wasn’t much of a prob­lem for us, but I imag­ine it would be if you went provincial.

  • Anam Cara

    Well, first of all, you’d be amazed at how many peo­ple speak Eng­lish. Sec­ondly, I have one of the world’s largest col­lec­tions of for­eign lan­guage phrase books. : )

    Next, we have a smat­ter­ing of Ger­many, a lit­tle Span­ish, less French, and a back­ground in Latin. As long as we have an alpha­bet, we seem to be able to do okay. Even in Fin­land where they, sadly, have only vow­els –much like Hawaii. (East­ern Europe kept all the consonants)

    Lastly, never under­es­ti­mate sign lan­guage and point­ing (to pic­tures, maps, food, etc.) when in a pinch.

    Seri­ously, we never found lan­guage to be a prob­lem in any coun­try we’ve been to. The hard­est part is fig­ur­ing out what the menu item actu­ally IS. (In Egypt we won­dered whether what we were eat­ing was camel hump or dog on sev­eral occas­sions! You think that’s funny — look around and count dogs — do you see any?)

  • Mimi

    Bwa­ha­ha­hahha, tarted up cities. I know exactly what you mean, but I still giggled.

    I’m with you, the old Mer­maid statue is JUST FINE, thank you.

  • s-p

    Looks pretty ster­ile, just like their fur­ni­ture. No thanks.

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