Copenhagen

So today we went to Carlsberg Brewery which was so awesome! It had a really cool museum with the Wolrd's Largest Bottle collection and the history of beer making, as well as the history of the Carlsberg label and lots of cool interactive exhibits about historical beer making technology and techniques compared to today. Then you got to have two glasses of different Carlsberg, Jacobson, or Tuborg beers. I had a Hefeweisen, which I didn't like that much (it was a banana beer) and the Carlsberg Brown Ale, which was delicious. Then I walked over to the National Museum which had alot of cool exhibits from the middle ages and the renaissance. It had alot of rooms set up like what they would be in that time period and lots of cool outfits and crowns and swords. It was all very regal. Then I went home, read for a little bit and we went to dinner as a group at a vegetarian buffet. It was so good to eat vegetables again after two weeks of bread, cheese, meat, and more bread, all of which I barely ever eat at home. The next day I spent all day walking around the city by myself. I really like my group, but I’m getting sick of being in a group all the time, so it was nice to have some freedom. I went to this art museum that was really pretty. It was a really old building that had been completely re-done inside. It had a nice garden in the center and some cool exhibits of Danish paintings, some nice Monet, Degas, and Rousseau. They had these neat sculptures of Degas ballerinas too, which I had never seen before and thought were really beautiful. They had a lot of really nice sculpture, including Danish, Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and other older pieces. Then I wondered over to the Danish Architecture Center which was having an exhibition on Sustainable Design. They featured a lot of new age international buildings. I wish they had had more information about what made the buildings sustainable, but the woman working there said there was more information on the website. One really interesting one was this woman who had designed a Mobile School on a trailer that would follow around these poor kids that had to move all the time because of the monsoons in India. The design folded out of the trailer and was very efficient.
Then I wondered around a neighborhood called Christhavn along the canal and everyone was outside with their boats and sitting by the water on this beautiful Sunday, it was really pleasant. I walked over to Christiania, which is a hippy community kind of like People’s Park that started in the 70’s. It is a little more permanent than People’s Park though, it is in some old army barracks and people actually live there, as opposed to just squat. They were having a fair though, with this band that was playing CSNY kind of stuff, but they weren’t that good. After that I walked back through Christhavn, which you can tell is the yuppie part of town with lots of cute little cafes and stuff all around the big canal running through the city. They have a park running along it where everyone was laying out in the sun. I happened on some people playing lawn bowling and seemed to be on teams and have jerseys and be rather serious about it. By this time it was 5:30-ish and I headed back to the hostel to meet the rest of the group for a delicious dinner at an Italian restaurant by our hostel and ice cream after.
The next day we went to the Greenlandic House, which is like a cultural and resource center for Greenlandic people living in Copenhagen. They had these cool pictures in the café downstairs done by Greenlanders. Then we went to the University and got to see the ice cores they are working on there. They have 7 miles of ice cores stored in Copenhagen. Then Gerard, our professor, gave a talk and we had cake with some of the ice researchers working there. Danish people have coffee and cake pretty much every afternoon, it’s very civilized. Then I walked back to the hostel and went for a run to look at the little Mermaid. That night we went out to a restaurant that was all you can eat and all you can drink for 45 Kronner, which is quite a deal. And surprisingly it was good food too and Carlsberg and red and white wine on tap. We are getting ready to get on the plane now and I will be back in Seattle this afternoon. It has been a great trip and I hope this not the last that I see of the ice. Talk to you soon. Love, Sarah