Biking in Copenhagen

Wow! After biking around Charlotte, Copenhagen offers a whole new experience in urban cycling. Bicycles are literally everywhere! There are as many or more of them on the road as cars, and besides well maintained and ubiquitous bike lanes, they have their own traffic signals. Rosanna and I went this morning to Baisikeli, where we met the proprietor Henryk, and rented a couple of city bicycles.

I told Henryk how much I envied the bicycle culture in Copenhagen, where automobiles, pedestrians, and bicycles coexist in seemingly balanced numbers and peaceful respect. When I mentioned that I do some urban riding in Charlotte, but I do not always feel safe, he told me that the situation was much the same in Copenhagen in the 1980s, but a few devout cyclists and the rising price of fuel gradually created the cycle utopia they have now. So maybe, as gasoline in North Carolina approaches $4 per gallon, there is hope for an evolving bicycle culture in Charlotte.

All Danish bicycles have an engraved serial number. After stolen ones are recovered by police, and long after the owners have been reimbursed by insurance, Baisikeli refurbishes them. Initially they are rented for use around the city, by people like us. But eventually, the bikes are converted for transportation, farm vehicles, and even ambulances, before being sent to Africa. We saw a photo of one of the ambulances, basically a bicycle with a stretcher for a trailer. Not coincidentally, "Baisikeli" is the Swahili word for "bicycle". Proceeds from the bike rentals are used to for the African relief effort. It's a real win win win situation.

After Anna got out of class, we all took a bike trip to Rosenborg castle and walked around the gardens. There are a number of statues, including one of a Danish queen named Caroline Amalie. Someone at the bike shop told us a story about one of the kings hiding a key for his lover underneath the lion's tongue outside the castle, so Rosanna looked for the key, but it was not there. Lucky for her, since a stern looking guard was on duty. We had a nice lunch at a sidwalk cafe, Pussy Galore's Flying Circus, named after the character in the James Bond movie "Goldfinger".

After lunch we took a bike trip to Christiania, a utopian alternative community that started when some hippies in 1970 took over an abandoned Danish army base. I shudder to imagine what would have happened in the good old U.S. of A. if hippies had taken over an abandoned U.S. Army base; I certainly don't think their descendents would still be living there in 2008. But that is the case in Christiania. We first walked our bikes down the main street (Pusher Street), past rows of street vendors and bars with live music (including a sort of a bluegrass band). Moving out of the "business district", we rode our bikes all the way around the lake (or it it a bay), pausing for photographs before heading back and cycling through the "residential district". As much as I admire the pretext, it seems on first glance to be a disorganized jumble of "interesting" people, and randomly constructed housing, from the sublime to the ridiculous. It's as if there was a rock festival and noone ever went home. I wouldn't really want to live there, though I might have thought so when I was a little younger. Still, it seems like there should be some kind of middle ground between the consumer-driven capitalism run amok that we live in and the fairly extreme utopian vision of Christiania.

Finally, we had a wonderful dinner at Spiseloppen, a surprisingly normal restaurant in a loft on the edge of Christiania. What an amazing day this was! Thanks Anna!