Gothenberg :: Sweden
My side trip to Berlin and some more nordic bits.
Places: Copenhagen, Berlin & Gothenberg
Coolest thing I did: Took a 19 and a half hour return trip to Berlin on a whim to see Anita and her mate Renuka. How's that for spontenaity?
Coolest thing I didn´t know: Public nudity is quite acceptable in parks in innercity Germany.
My last night in Copenhagen was one that I didn't think I'd be doing. It costs a heap of money (I may have mentioned this) to drink in Denmark and I had no intention of going out for a big one at any point whilst I was there. Eeeet! Wrong. In a night that involved something called Carlsberg Master Brew, Christiana, 20Kr bikes for hire, being adopted by random a random Canadian and his Greek mates, a U2 cover band, paying a cover charge to get into a Chinese resteraunt for Karoke and seeing the sun come up at 1am, I managed to have an excelent time, but set myself in bad stead for the 7 hour bus ride to Berlin I was about to take.
Something I noticed about the Danes is when they speak their native tounge, the inflections in the voice sound alot like people from Northern England. I was wondering if that goes all the way back to Danelaw when the Danish Vikings ruled over large parts of everything north of the Thames? Anyway, I impressed people with that theory, even if it's wrong.
I also had the story of Holger the Dane explained to me. There's a statue of a sleeping viking under the castle from Hamlet I've mentioned before, but I didn't get a good explaination until I met a Danish Arts Student (what else?) out on the town. She told me that Holger and his mate Roland (who was a Frank) did alot of good work fighting the Moors when they invaded the Iberian Peninsula. He may also not have existed. Whist there are statues of Roland anywhere in Europe that they are a bit scared of Muslim hordes (the Balkans for example), good old Holger dosen't get much of a look in anywhere except in the tales of Hans Christian Anderson (I couldn't think up a nickname, give me time). However, the statue is supposed to wake up and protect Denmark if it's ever threatened. The fact that the Swedes and Germans both spent the 200 years since the statue was errected carving the Danish empire up between itself, I don't think Holger is doing his job very well. Either that or he showed up at Stalingrad during World War 2 without telling anyone.
Berlin. I was going to go to Berlin at some point after Russia, but Anita (with whom I have a history with in London) and her friend Renuka were going to be there on Busabout and it was the closest we were going to come to seeing each other whilst we were both in Europe. I'm glad I went and we saw each other again. There will be no more details, so you gossip harpies can bugger right off.
Berlin is now definetly somewhere I want to spend a week in when I get back. It's practically the entire history of 20th Century Europe in one city. From the head of Europe's first superpower to the pawn of the world's last 2 superpowers to a city that's just starting to return to it's status as a world capital, Berlin is a pretty exciting place to be. We staying in East Berlin, and it's starting to fill in the gaps between all those Stalin Gothic appartment blocks with trendy cafes and bars. Norman Foster was responsible for the new Reichstag. Entire city blocks that were left vacant since the cold war restrained Berlin from reaching it's true potenital are now surrounded by cranes filling them with new buildings. Communes of artists have taken over the some of the cold war ruins and put a spark back into the Berlin culture that was halted before World War One.
One of my favorite stories is about the photo of a Soviet soldier which was taken as the end of the Second World War. Apparently, Stalin ordered the Reichstag taken intact so just such a picture could be taken. It took 17,000 Soviet deaths to take the building from the 5,000 German soldiers defending it, room-by-room, so that photo could be taken. It's a good indication of how one madness was being replaced with another.
More on Berlin when I return in July, I'm sure.
I usually hate busses with a passion, so I can't belive just how well I took the 12 hour ride from Berlin to Gothenberg. It was broken up with a 2 hour ferry ride from Germany to Denmark at one point, but the bulk of it took place in a single 10 hour stretch. Those wacky Danes and Swedes have built a 7.5km bridge from Copenhagen to Malmo in Sweden meaning the second ferry ride I thought I was going to take never happened. Apparently 7.5km bridges are quite impressive, and are probably pretty hard to build. The trouble is I'm not an engineer so it's hard to appreciate (well, they do call my job network engineering, but it involves no exact science and most of the time dosen't work very well, probably like civil engineering in the late paleolithic age). However, it was a very long bridge.
Gothenberg is a nice town. The most noticable differece between Denmark and Sweden is, once again, the people. Whilst the Danes are a tall, beautiful people with a variety of hair colours, the Swedes are more a cute people, and are overwhelmingly blonde. They are far more stereotypical of the Nordic people you expect. Besides that, Gothenberg could probably be anywhere in Denmark (see, I'm an expert since I spent a total of half a day and 1 bus stop outside Copenhagen). The people are also just as friendly as they were in Copenhagen. I've been promised Stockholm is the best city in Scanders, so I'm looking forward to that in about a week's time.
Tomorrow, I'll be mostly going to Norway.