On the move: Scandinavia, Part I
May. 13th, 2001 02:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lillibetThe week before we left I was focusing on planning our trip to Portugal with
my parents in May, figuring out where we wanted to go and what we should see
and where we would stay and how we could get there. I finished that up on
Thursday and then it was time to pack for Copenhagen, about which I hadn't
really thought since we booked our trip a couple of months ago.
While procrastinating packing, I whiled away the time by booking theater
tickets for ourselves and our guests, so I've added seven more Shakespearean
plays to our schedule, in addition to a bunch of other exciting shows.
We're figuring that if the various companies would cooperate and we kept up
this rate, we could see all of Shakespeare's works during our stay. Of
course, we could just see the Reduced Shakespeare Company's performance of
all 37 plays in 90 minutes, but somehow that isn't the same.
We flew from Heathrow to Copenhagen on Saturday morning with no problems.
There is fast, cheap, frequent train service from the airport into the city
and our hotel was in the same square as the central staion, so it was very
convenient for us. The Hotel Astoria's major selling point is its location.
It's clean, but feels more like dorm accommodations than a hotel, with
single beds and very little floor space. But we pushed the beds together
and straightened out a small problem with the shower and survived reasonably
comfortably. Of course, being next to the train station, there were trains
going by next to, in front of and under the hotel at all hours, which is an
additional challenge, but we managed to sleep fairly solidly.
Jason had to be in Copenhagen for a meeting of the International C++
Standardization Committee, so he took the train out to the Danish Standards
Institute every day to meet with 50 other techies from all over the world.
Several of their wives were also there and I very much enjoyed their
company. Our old friends, Brendan & Elana, were there from Ireland and we
also got to know some of the other couples a bit better. One of
them, David and Luann, have just bought a house on Prospect Hill in
Somerville, around the corner from the apartment my sisters shared for
years.
Once we had checked in on Saturday afternoon, we went out and walked around
the city for a couple of hours, visiting several of the main squares and
finding the Christianborg Slot (slot=castle/palace). We came back for a nap
and then went out for dinner with Brendan and Elana to a sushi place we'd
noticed in our travels. Wonderful, wonderful sushi! There is no yellowtail
in London, as far as we can tell (one place has it on the menu for #12 per
pair, but they never actually have any), so we were ecstatic to find it there
and at very high quality. And their salmon was incredible. And they had
niku no tataki (raw beef in ponzu sauce) that is one of my favorite things.
On Sunday we went out with Brendan & Elana, Richard & Marina (who also
live in Dublin, although she's from Barcelona) and Andy, who, as someone
else put it, "is from England even though he looks like he's from MIT." We
walked back down to Christianborg Slot and toured the ruins of the various
previous castles on that site, which are now in the basement of the current
slot. After that we walked across the bridge to Christianshavn, the
neighborhood on the next island to the east. It was described as a nifty
neighborhood of shops, cafes and restaurants, but they were all closed for
Sunday. We did visit Vor Frelsers Kirke (www.vorfrelserskirke.dk) and
climbed the 400 steps to the top of the tower--the last 150 are outside, in
a spiral around the tower.
Back on ground level, we walked by Christiania, a commune still surviving
from the 60's, and then decided we'd had enough walking in the rain and
wanted lunch. So we grabbed cabs back to the hotel and tried the Bistro
next to the station. Half of the party had their buffet, but Jason and I
both went for the "laks og hojreb," or "smoked salmon (starter, with salad)
and roast beef (with fries and green beans)" that was delicious. The others
went back to the hotel to nap, but we decided to make the most of Jason's
non-meeting time and set off again. We walked along a lovely canal, with
many water birds, including a swan nesting right by the path. We walked
past the botanical gardens (they closed at 4pm, about fifteen minutes before
we arrived) and ducked into the Statens Museum for Kunst (www.smk.dk), the
national art gallery, to use their bathrooms before they closed at 5pm.
From there, we walked through the park of the Rosenberg Slot, which was
really beautiful, and then along a pedestrian street of shops, past the
Round Tower and St. Peter's Church, and then back to the hotel.
We napped for a bit and then went to dinner with nine other people at
RizRaz, a Mediterranean restaurant one of the couples had noticed in their
wandering. Many people tried their buffet, but I started with carpaccio
(since I can't find it in London, I have to take every opportunity here) and
followed it up with "shamarma" which was lamb bits with onions and other
vegetables, served with hummus. Jason had the lamb with couscous, which he
enjoyed, but he confessed that mine was better. We finally let the
waitstaff close up the place and headed back to the hotel around midnight.
It was at that dinner that we were seated with Luann and David and got a
chance to really talk with them.
On Monday I got up for breakfast with the guys, but then decided to spend
the morning reading, which turned into napping. I met Luann in the lobby
at noon and when the Mortensens arrived to pick me up, I asked if she could
tag along. They are the parents of an exchange student who lived with my
family while I was in high school. They also had Ulla's sister, Camilla,
with them, so it was a tight fit into their car, but they were very gracious
about letting me bring Luann along. They took us on a tour of the harbor
area of Copenhagen, then we drove about an hour up the coast to the
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (www.louisiana.dk) in Humlebaek. We spent a
few hours there, including a lovely lunch looking out at three Calder
sculptures beside the sea. It is a wonderful collection in a beautiful
museum in a breathtaking setting. The special exhibit was a retrospective
of the work of Sigmar Polke. None of us had heard of him, but I really
enjoyed some of his stuff, particularly his work with transparent media.
After leaving the museum, Mr. Mortensen drove us around for about an hour
and showed us several other castles in the area, and then took us back to
their home for coffee. Their house is just astonishing. He is a renowned
designer and has designed much of their home and its furnishings. One of
the most remarkable bits is that after visiting one of Frank Lloyd Wright's
houses in the Chicago area on the trip that brought them by my parents'
house in New York, he went home and ripped out the plain white ceilings of
their living room and designed and installed the recessed wooden ceilings he
had seen. We commented on the lovely writing desk and he said that he was
very proud of it, as the country had chosen it as their gift to the Prince
Consort (the Queen's husband) for his 50th birthday. Every piece has a
story and is exquisite. Starting with a fairly non-descript, two bedroom
tract house, they have created something unique and incredibly beautiful.
Mr. Mortensen had a Rotary meeting to attend at 5pm, so he left and after a
few minutes more, Mrs. Mortensen dropped us at the train station in Hillerod
and we made our way back to the city. She really got me--I suddenly
realized I had left my coat in the car and asked if Mr. Mortensen had taken
the car to his meeting and she told me yes and let me go on for a couple of
minutes, figuring out if there were anything vital in it and how I might get
it back without inconveniencing them terribly, before she revealed that he
had taken the other car and my coat was still sitting in the car in front of
the house. I really appreciated their taking the time to see me and
entertain me so graciously in what Ulla confessed was the worst possible
week I could have picked, since the annual furniture design tradeshow was
starting on Wednesday and they were frantically busy in preparation for it.
We made it back to the hotel just in time to meet the guys returning from
their meeting. Someone had recommended a tapas restaurant, so after getting
help from the desk clerk (impeded by her hearing "topless" instead of
"tapas" at first) in finding it and calling to see if they could accommodate
us all, we headed out. We ended up with nineteen people and managed to have
a very lovely meal of a garlicky seafood soup, a sample plate of tapas (two
bites each of chicken drummettes, potato salad, meatballs, potato cake,
chicken in a tomato sauce, and sauteed mushrooms), and a good paella, washed
down with very nice Sangre de Toro red wine.
We later found out that somehow our end of the table had a completely
reasonable dinner, but the other end of the table was much less content.
David found a piece of glass in his gazpacho and Andy stormed off in a huff
before his food arrived, because they weren't keeping him supplied with beer
at a sufficiently steady pace. I was sorry they had a less-than-stellar
experience, but was glad in some ways that it didn't impact us.
We strolled back to the hotel and the guys went off to bond over beer.
Elana and I hung out for a while and then Brendan called to say his Palm
Pilot--her Christmas/birthday present to him--was missing. It seems that
it was picked from Brendan's pocket during the walk back, along with an
attachment for it, and their credit and bank cards, which were together in
one pocket of his bag. So they had a late night of cancelling cards and
arranging for replacements, after running back to the restaurant to look
between the cushions and be sure nothing had gotten left there.
On Tuesday I sat over a leisurely breakfast with Luann, Marina and another
wife, Vivian, with her 5 month-old son, Peter. Marina headed off to
Rosskilde on her own and the rest of us went to the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek,
Denmark's answer to the British Museum. It is a lovely building with an
amazing collection, founded by the Carlsberg family of brewery fame.
They've established a couple of different foundations for the arts and
education and one of our guidebooks pointed out that Denmark is the only
country in the world where you can drink to support the arts.
Luann is an archeologist by training and works in the administrative
department of the Harvard Museums. So she was able to make the rooms of
Egyptian, Greek, Etruscan and Roman artifacts even more interesting than
they would be on their own. It's amazing to me how much I did learn on our
trip to Egypt. Now when we see Egyptian artifacts, they make so much more
sense to me than they did previously. We had a very nice lunch (puff pastry
filled with shrimp salad for me) in the palm court at the center of the
museum. Luann and Vivian spent the remaining 45 minutes in the gift shop,
but I ran through their collection of paintings. I breezed past most of
Denmark's Golden Age of Painting, unstruck by any of the works, but stopped
to spend some time looking at their wide selection of paintings by Corot,
bronzes by Degas (including some of his horses, influenced by the
stop-motion photography he was doing at the time, which I'd seen exhibited
at the SFMOMA), and unusual pre-Tahiti Gauguins, which I liked more than his
other work I'd seen, and I felt I'd used my time wisely. I made it back
before they closed the shop and bought a couple of things. Luann was
desperately trying to winnow a huge pile of books she wanted down to
something she thought she could fit in her luggage and finally took the six
she couldn't bear to leave. We walked back around the Tivoli Gardens to the
hotel, where I napped until dinner.
The guys were all staying at the Institute for a special session by the
creator of C++, so six of the wives (Elana, Luann, Vivian, Marina, Lana--a
sweet woman who organized the Hawaii meeting I enjoyed so much--and myself)
went to a steak place around the corner. It was okay--my "carpaccio" turned
out to be prosciutto, which was probably my own fault with the language, my
"rare" steak was quite medium, and our waitress was surly and slow--but when
the bill came (after our waitress had left for the evening) it was wrong in
some subtle way we couldn't quite identify, and came out at 200 kroner each,
instead of the 300 per person we'd expected. Without our waitress and
without any Danish, it was just too complicated a problem to attack and the
baby was getting restless and cranky, so we just gave them what they'd asked
for and got out.
The guys had gotten back while we were out and were just heading out to the
bar, but Jason turned back and kept me company and then fell asleep while I
caught up on my email and got started on this report.
On Wednesday I left the hotel at 9:30am and walked all day! The weather was
warm enough that I didn't take a coat and even my cardigan was too heavy
later in the day. After popping into a small grocery store to wander around
and check out what odd foods I could find, I went back over to the Rosenberg
Slot and toured that. It's filled with objets d'art and paintings and
furniture, in addition to the tapestries and ceiling paintings and parquet
floors. Much to my delight, they had many different tables and cabinets of
inlaid wood or semi-precious stone, several of which were strikingly
beautiful. In the basement they have the Danish Crown Jewels, which are very
beautiful, and artifacts of Ole Romer, the Dane who discovered the speed of
light back in the 17th century before coming home from Paris to set up the
Danish office of standard weights & measures and serve as the king's
technical consultant. They have an ingenious method of dealing with all the
different languages of their visitors--instead of having curatorial notes
posted with the objects, they rent you a guidebook that has introductory
material on the castle and its history and a brief description of each room
in the castle, followed by a listing of all the objects in the room. So
when you're in a room and you're interested in knowing what a particular
piece is, you look for the number on it and then look that up. I enjoyed
that, because I didn't get bogged down in reading descriptions of pieces
that didn't actually interest me, as I often do in museums.
After leaving the palace (and watching a changing of the guard), I wandered
through the botanical gardens of the University of Copenhagen, across the
street. They are very beautiful and just starting to bloom. There wasn't
an exit where I thought there would be, so I ended up walking up to the exit
by the greenhouses, at which point it seemed silly not to go in and see the
pretty plants. Leaving there, I walked back around to the Statens Museum
for Kunst (www.smk.dk) and had some lunch in their cafe. Once again my
desire for carpaccio and my lack of Danish tripped me up and I ended up with
a plate of thinly sliced *beets* with olive oil and parmesan cheese. They
were reasonably tasty, but not what I was expecting. I consoled myself with
a slice of their lovely, rich, nutty carrot cake before heading into the
galleries.
In many ways, the SKM feels like two different museums. The new wing of
glass and steel, high ceilings and white walls, feels like MOMA and is
filled with 20th century art, most of it Danish. They do have Modigliani's
"Alice" and several works by Georges Braque (and not just his Cubist stuff).
After a couple of hours in there, I wandered back into the original
building, where the Danish and European Paintings (and a few sculptures)
1300-1900 are housed in a maze of small, jewel-toned rooms. I walked fairly
quickly through those and wasn't incredibly impressed. The collection is
vast, but not first rate. Somehow they managed to have five completely
uncompelling Rembrandts. I went back and spent some time sketching, and
left around 5pm to walk back through the park and home again. Copenhagen's
parks are very lovely and seem to always have people in them. Mothers here
all seem to use the old fashioned prams that make me think of Mary Poppins.
I guess the fact that they just leave them on the street outside shops and
cafes means that they don't need the smaller, collapsible ones.
I got back to the hotel at 5:30pm and Jason arrived shortly thereafter. We
made arrangements to have dinner with Richard & Marina and then Jason napped
for a bit while I read email. The four of us went to a place in Grey Friars
Square called Peder Oxe. They serve slightly French, but mostly traditional
Danish food. I had a tasty but wimpy lobster bisque, followed by a steak in
a lovely creamy sauce. Jason had their salad bar with the best tomatoes
I've ever tasted in such a setting--obviously vine-ripened and very
fresh--followed by a nice rack of lamb. We skipped dessert and had
coffee...they brought us an enormous pot and demitasse cups and we drank
several cups each. Richard and I (the talkers at the table) got into a long
meandering conversation about education and racism and the Irish political
situation that was very interesting and fun. We wandered back to the hotel
and Jason worked on some drafts while I hung out with Brendan and Elana.
On Thursday morning I breakfasted with some of the other women and then read
for a bit. At 11:30am seven (Vivian, Luann, Elana, Michelle, Carina, Marina
and I--and Peter, of course) of us met in the lobby and headed out to Sweden
for lunch. Now that they've opened the Oresund bridge, there are regular,
inexpensive trains to Malmo that take about half an hour. Luann's guidebook
had a "daytrip to Malmo" section that recommended a lovely little cafe about
a ten minute walk from the station where I had a delicious sandwich of bacon
and garlic potato salad together with a bowl of Thai chicken soup. The
weather was beautiful and Malmo was lovely, but Elana had to be back to meet
someone she knows online and I wanted to check out a couple of shops, so the
two of us took the train back together while the others stayed to wander
around for a couple of hours. Back in Copenhagen I wandered down the
Stroget pedestrian mall and checked out Illums Bogliehus, a department store
specializing in Danish design. They had some lovely things, as did a couple
of the other shops I stopped into, but I made it back to the hotel without
making any purchases.
I really like some of the Danish furniture, particularly the stuff made of
wood, with clean lines, like the tables & chairs and the bureaus, and they
have some marvelously simple and ingenious fixtures for the bath and
kitchen. In Norway we especially enjoyed the heated bathroom floors--though
it was never cold enough for them to be really necessary, it is really nice
not to have cold tile underfoot. But when it comes to upholstered objects,
I find that the spare lines make all the couches look to me like they belong
in ladies' rooms and doctors offices; I want something more snuggly. But
some of the leather armchairs are truly beautiful and in everything there
seems to be an awareness of design aesthetics that I think is often lacking
among American consumer products.
Back at the hotel on Thursday afternoon, I napped for a bit and then Jason
arrived from the meeting, having sprained his ankle on cobblestones while
running for the train. I ran out and got a bandage and an ice pack and he
iced and took ibuprofen and elevated. This was the last night of the
meeting, so we were all going to the Tivoli Gardens for dinner and he didn't
want to miss it. Elana had noticed in her guidebook that they have
wheelchairs that can be reserved, so she got the deskclerk to call ahead for
one and it was waiting for us at the cloakroom when we arrived. We had
dinner in the garden pavilion of one of the restaurants. It was sort of an
unfortunate occasion--the host company didn't have the money to provide a
banquet, so it was just a group of about sixty people going out to dinner
together. The food was okay, but the service was excrutiatingly slow and
the waitress messed up our table's order, so the woman next to me got stuck
with a choice between eating steak instead of the salmon she'd ordered or
waiting twenty minutes for another salmon plate to be prepared. I started
with smoked salmon and then it was my turn for a rack of lamb with garlic
and a potato cake, which were both completely acceptable. Jason started with
an underwhelming lobster bisque, mostly smoky, salty and alcoholic, though
it did have chunks of lobster meat in it. His salmon entree was only okay,
though he might have been playing it down to make it easier for the woman
who didn't get any. We all skipped dessert, not wanting to wait another
hour in this place, and headed out into the gardens.
Jason and I went on two rides. The first one was amazing. It's a very tall
spire with a ring around it, onto which are strapped twelve people, with
their feet hanging free. The ring rises and rises and rises and you think
"this is a nice view, lovely, gee we're really high, and we're still rising,
and still going and geez, how high are we going..." and then the ring drops
almost down to the bottom and then bounces halfway up and down a couple more
times. I found it exhilarating, with a real sense of spiritual
transformation. Jason had a less emotional reaction to it, but still
enjoyed it very much. The trip up, with all the attendant anticipation, is
the scary part. The drop is just wonderful. The seat holds you securely
enough that it never feels like you're falling out of control, just soaring
back down to the ground.
The second ride, The Monsoon, is hard to describe. Picture a huge comb with
eight teeth, upside down, with people strapped to the front and back of each
tooth, four across. The "comb" moves forward, up, back, and down and then
reverses (back, up, forward, down), while jets of water rise out of the base
below you, so that you get a little bit of spray in your face. It's not at
all frightening, just fun, like a merry-go-round.
After that we wandered through the park for a bit with Elana & Brendan and
various other people who came and went. I had lots of fun pushing Jason
around in the chair and Elana got him a pinwheel to carry. We hope we got a
good picture. We left as the park was closing, around midnight and came
back to the room to read email and sleep. Jason's foot was "uncomfortable,"
but not terribly painful and didn't seem to be swelling much and on Friday
he was walking on it with only a slight limp and claiming it was "okay."
On Friday, after breakfast with the wives, I took our laundry out to have it
done (since the hotel doesn't do laundry over the weekend) and then got our
remaining things somewhat more organized. Elana was packing up, so I hung
out with her until the boys got back from the wrap-up meeting around noon.
We went out to a nice lunch with the three Irish couples and Robert Klarer
from IBM Toronto at the lovely Apollo Brewery just down the street. I had
carpaccio (beef this time) with minestrone soup and caged bites of the
others' pork shortribs and bratwurst, all of which were very tasty. It was
good to have a chance to say goodbye to the Kehoes, who were leaving right
after lunch.
Lunch over, we left the group and ran over to the Glyptotek. We only had
forty-five minutes, so Jason got a very quick tour of the things I
considered most interesting, including the new wing that hadn't been open
when he was here in '95, and the small special exhibit on the Belvedere
torso and its influence on 19th century sculptors, together with a copy of
the most recent scholarly attempt to recreate the entire sculpture, based on
the clues of the fragment. A small classical chamber chorus was rehearsing
in the theater at the center of the south wing and their clear voices were
resonating in the lovely acoustics of the chamber. One of the most
interesting paintings in the collection was a small study by Manet of "The
Execution of Maximillian." Manet later painted a large (8'x6', maybe), more
finished version, but whoever bought it decided to cut it up and sell the
smaller pieces separately. Degas was horrified and went around trying to
buy up the pieces and then reconstructed what he could find onto a large
cavas--now in the National Gallery in London--but there are several key
sections missing and it was neat to see the whole composition. We met up
with Jamie, Vivian and Peter as we were leaving and walked back to the hotel
with them. I napped while Jason worked a bit and then we went back to the
sushi place we'd enjoyed so much on our first night in town, this time with
Luann & David and Steve Adamczyk of EDG in NJ. I hadn't had much of a
chance to talk with him earlier in the week and ended up hearing all about
the renovation of the kitchen of their Craftsman home, which was kind of
nifty.
On Saturday we had breakfast with the remaining folk. Stefan, the exchange
student who had spent some time living with my family, was to pick us up at
noon, but called to say he couldn't make it until two. So we took the
subway up to Osterport Station and walked through the Kastellet Park to see
the Little Mermaid--because you haven't really been in Copenhagen until
you've seen it--and then visited the Resistance Museum. It's a small
exhibit, but manages to convey a real sense of the Danish experience with
World War II. The tone also seemed to be very objective, neither over- nor
underestimating the contribution of various resistance movements and
strategies and not villifying the people who tried to maintain the greatest
degree of independence for occupied Denmark that was possible while
cooperating with the Nazis. They mentioned that the story of the Danish
king wearing a Star of David in solidarity with the Jews is a myth, but that
it has endured and spread, perhaps because it is such a concise symbol of
the real heroism and solidarity of the Danish people of the time. The
letters from people condemned to die for their work with the resistance were
very moving.
We left there and were horrified to see graffiti on the back of a traffic
sign right near the museum replacing the "s" in "Israel" with a swastika.
We would like to think we've moved past the place where the horrors of World
War II are possible, but people are still stupid and cruel.
We got back to the hotel and had time to pick up sandwiches across the
street. The bread was stale, but the meat was good and it was an easy
lunch. Just as we finished, Stefan arrived and we headed north together.
He took us up to Helsingor, which Shakespeare made famous as Elsinore in
_Hamlet_ which was based on stories of the Danish folk-hero, Amleth. We
toured Kronborg Castle, built in the 17th century and re-built twice since
after fires destroyed various sections. The building was lovely and the
views across the straight to Sweden were stunning, but the interiors were
fairly bare and plain. Stefan was disappointed, I think, that we used up
our time there, rather than using the time to tour the more impressive
inside of the castle in Hillerod, but we were glad to see what we did. From
there we drove down to Fredensborg Palace, the summer home of the royal
family, where we got an ice cream and walked around the building. Then we
visited the castle in Hillerod. It was closed by the time we arrived, but
the outside was lovely and the gardens were gorgeous. We wandered there for
a while and then went to Stefan's home. There we met his wife, Brigitte,
and his two sons, Caspar (almost 3) and Alex (5 months). They have a lovely
home in the house by a lake about 20 kilometers from Copenhagen where
Stefan's grandmother lived until they bought it from her three years ago.
We enjoyed a nice dinner, starting with fish eggs and onions in cream sauce
served with a tasty bread, and then a main course of salad, potatoes with
sour cream and dill, and a leg of lamb roasted on the grill with garlic
embedded in it. It was all quite delicious. After dinner I got to hold
Alex for a while. He caught a nasty cold virus two months ago and is still
somewhat sick with a terrible cough. But he is a calm baby with huge blue
eyes like saucers and a penchant for grabbing the nearest available finger
and sucking on it. We had a lovely chat with them and then Stefan very
kindly drove us back into Copenhagen, though we could easily have taken the
train. It was good to see him again after fifteen years and catch up a
little on all the changes we've both been through.
On Sunday we had breakfast with the Schmeisers (Vivian, Jamie and Peter) and
the remaining Irish folk, then checked out and put our luggage in the
hotel's storage room. We took a train down to Ishoj, on the coast, south of
the city, and made the 20 minute walk out to Arken (www.arken.dk), another
Museum of Modern Art. It is built to resemble a ship, in a modern-art kind
of way, and is set among the dunes. There are a few works from their
permanent collection on display at any one time. Most of these were
computer generated or enhanced photographs and the most interesting of these
were works by a woman who takes a bunch of headshots of famous people and
creates a composite of them, according to some equation of importance. For
instance, she has one called "War Head" that took the faces of the leaders
of the "Nuclear Club" at the time (Reagan, Brezhnev, Thatcher, etc.) and
weighted them according to the percentage of the global nuclear arsenal they
controlled. The resulting "portrait" has a lot of Reagan and Brezhnev, but the
others are in there. More visually fascinating were pieces examining beauty
that took various film stars and combined them to create two male and two
female "portraits" of conventional beauty. There was also a special exhibit
by Gerard Richter, whose paintings on glass I had seen at the SMK.
All this was interesting, but the real reason we were there was to see
"Echoes of the Scream," an exhibition of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" and
other works, along with several pieces by other artists (Jasper Johns, Andy
Warhol, George Baselitz, Per Kirkeby, Joseph Beuys, etc.) who were
influenced by Munch. I was not very familiar with Munch's work, so it was a
good chance to see more of it. I particularly enjoyed his later works,
especially "Nude by the Wicker Chair."
We took a bus back to the train station and thence back to Copenhagen
proper. We went past the Central Station and up to Norreport and then
walked back toward our hotel. In the square next to Peder Oxe, we found a
tiny little sandwich bar in a cellar. You pick your bread, cheese and meat
and then take them over to a buffet where you can slice yourself tomatoes,
onions and peppers and add lettuce, mayo, mustard, pesto, olives, capers or
cornichons to your sandwich. We ate them at tables in the square, where
there are blankets to keep off the chill, but they weren't necessary that
day.
The first couple of days were occasionally rainy, but generally we were
surprised by how lovely and warm the weather is. Copenhagen was mostly in
the 60's, but got warmer at times, and in Norway it was downright hot for
touristing. We mentioned our surprise and were told that spring is actually
late this year, that usually it would be even warmer by now, but that early
May is the best time of the year to visit Scandinavia, as the tourist season
hasn't really begun and the weather is consistently beautiful.
my parents in May, figuring out where we wanted to go and what we should see
and where we would stay and how we could get there. I finished that up on
Thursday and then it was time to pack for Copenhagen, about which I hadn't
really thought since we booked our trip a couple of months ago.
While procrastinating packing, I whiled away the time by booking theater
tickets for ourselves and our guests, so I've added seven more Shakespearean
plays to our schedule, in addition to a bunch of other exciting shows.
We're figuring that if the various companies would cooperate and we kept up
this rate, we could see all of Shakespeare's works during our stay. Of
course, we could just see the Reduced Shakespeare Company's performance of
all 37 plays in 90 minutes, but somehow that isn't the same.
We flew from Heathrow to Copenhagen on Saturday morning with no problems.
There is fast, cheap, frequent train service from the airport into the city
and our hotel was in the same square as the central staion, so it was very
convenient for us. The Hotel Astoria's major selling point is its location.
It's clean, but feels more like dorm accommodations than a hotel, with
single beds and very little floor space. But we pushed the beds together
and straightened out a small problem with the shower and survived reasonably
comfortably. Of course, being next to the train station, there were trains
going by next to, in front of and under the hotel at all hours, which is an
additional challenge, but we managed to sleep fairly solidly.
Jason had to be in Copenhagen for a meeting of the International C++
Standardization Committee, so he took the train out to the Danish Standards
Institute every day to meet with 50 other techies from all over the world.
Several of their wives were also there and I very much enjoyed their
company. Our old friends, Brendan & Elana, were there from Ireland and we
also got to know some of the other couples a bit better. One of
them, David and Luann, have just bought a house on Prospect Hill in
Somerville, around the corner from the apartment my sisters shared for
years.
Once we had checked in on Saturday afternoon, we went out and walked around
the city for a couple of hours, visiting several of the main squares and
finding the Christianborg Slot (slot=castle/palace). We came back for a nap
and then went out for dinner with Brendan and Elana to a sushi place we'd
noticed in our travels. Wonderful, wonderful sushi! There is no yellowtail
in London, as far as we can tell (one place has it on the menu for #12 per
pair, but they never actually have any), so we were ecstatic to find it there
and at very high quality. And their salmon was incredible. And they had
niku no tataki (raw beef in ponzu sauce) that is one of my favorite things.
On Sunday we went out with Brendan & Elana, Richard & Marina (who also
live in Dublin, although she's from Barcelona) and Andy, who, as someone
else put it, "is from England even though he looks like he's from MIT." We
walked back down to Christianborg Slot and toured the ruins of the various
previous castles on that site, which are now in the basement of the current
slot. After that we walked across the bridge to Christianshavn, the
neighborhood on the next island to the east. It was described as a nifty
neighborhood of shops, cafes and restaurants, but they were all closed for
Sunday. We did visit Vor Frelsers Kirke (www.vorfrelserskirke.dk) and
climbed the 400 steps to the top of the tower--the last 150 are outside, in
a spiral around the tower.
Back on ground level, we walked by Christiania, a commune still surviving
from the 60's, and then decided we'd had enough walking in the rain and
wanted lunch. So we grabbed cabs back to the hotel and tried the Bistro
next to the station. Half of the party had their buffet, but Jason and I
both went for the "laks og hojreb," or "smoked salmon (starter, with salad)
and roast beef (with fries and green beans)" that was delicious. The others
went back to the hotel to nap, but we decided to make the most of Jason's
non-meeting time and set off again. We walked along a lovely canal, with
many water birds, including a swan nesting right by the path. We walked
past the botanical gardens (they closed at 4pm, about fifteen minutes before
we arrived) and ducked into the Statens Museum for Kunst (www.smk.dk), the
national art gallery, to use their bathrooms before they closed at 5pm.
From there, we walked through the park of the Rosenberg Slot, which was
really beautiful, and then along a pedestrian street of shops, past the
Round Tower and St. Peter's Church, and then back to the hotel.
We napped for a bit and then went to dinner with nine other people at
RizRaz, a Mediterranean restaurant one of the couples had noticed in their
wandering. Many people tried their buffet, but I started with carpaccio
(since I can't find it in London, I have to take every opportunity here) and
followed it up with "shamarma" which was lamb bits with onions and other
vegetables, served with hummus. Jason had the lamb with couscous, which he
enjoyed, but he confessed that mine was better. We finally let the
waitstaff close up the place and headed back to the hotel around midnight.
It was at that dinner that we were seated with Luann and David and got a
chance to really talk with them.
On Monday I got up for breakfast with the guys, but then decided to spend
the morning reading, which turned into napping. I met Luann in the lobby
at noon and when the Mortensens arrived to pick me up, I asked if she could
tag along. They are the parents of an exchange student who lived with my
family while I was in high school. They also had Ulla's sister, Camilla,
with them, so it was a tight fit into their car, but they were very gracious
about letting me bring Luann along. They took us on a tour of the harbor
area of Copenhagen, then we drove about an hour up the coast to the
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (www.louisiana.dk) in Humlebaek. We spent a
few hours there, including a lovely lunch looking out at three Calder
sculptures beside the sea. It is a wonderful collection in a beautiful
museum in a breathtaking setting. The special exhibit was a retrospective
of the work of Sigmar Polke. None of us had heard of him, but I really
enjoyed some of his stuff, particularly his work with transparent media.
After leaving the museum, Mr. Mortensen drove us around for about an hour
and showed us several other castles in the area, and then took us back to
their home for coffee. Their house is just astonishing. He is a renowned
designer and has designed much of their home and its furnishings. One of
the most remarkable bits is that after visiting one of Frank Lloyd Wright's
houses in the Chicago area on the trip that brought them by my parents'
house in New York, he went home and ripped out the plain white ceilings of
their living room and designed and installed the recessed wooden ceilings he
had seen. We commented on the lovely writing desk and he said that he was
very proud of it, as the country had chosen it as their gift to the Prince
Consort (the Queen's husband) for his 50th birthday. Every piece has a
story and is exquisite. Starting with a fairly non-descript, two bedroom
tract house, they have created something unique and incredibly beautiful.
Mr. Mortensen had a Rotary meeting to attend at 5pm, so he left and after a
few minutes more, Mrs. Mortensen dropped us at the train station in Hillerod
and we made our way back to the city. She really got me--I suddenly
realized I had left my coat in the car and asked if Mr. Mortensen had taken
the car to his meeting and she told me yes and let me go on for a couple of
minutes, figuring out if there were anything vital in it and how I might get
it back without inconveniencing them terribly, before she revealed that he
had taken the other car and my coat was still sitting in the car in front of
the house. I really appreciated their taking the time to see me and
entertain me so graciously in what Ulla confessed was the worst possible
week I could have picked, since the annual furniture design tradeshow was
starting on Wednesday and they were frantically busy in preparation for it.
We made it back to the hotel just in time to meet the guys returning from
their meeting. Someone had recommended a tapas restaurant, so after getting
help from the desk clerk (impeded by her hearing "topless" instead of
"tapas" at first) in finding it and calling to see if they could accommodate
us all, we headed out. We ended up with nineteen people and managed to have
a very lovely meal of a garlicky seafood soup, a sample plate of tapas (two
bites each of chicken drummettes, potato salad, meatballs, potato cake,
chicken in a tomato sauce, and sauteed mushrooms), and a good paella, washed
down with very nice Sangre de Toro red wine.
We later found out that somehow our end of the table had a completely
reasonable dinner, but the other end of the table was much less content.
David found a piece of glass in his gazpacho and Andy stormed off in a huff
before his food arrived, because they weren't keeping him supplied with beer
at a sufficiently steady pace. I was sorry they had a less-than-stellar
experience, but was glad in some ways that it didn't impact us.
We strolled back to the hotel and the guys went off to bond over beer.
Elana and I hung out for a while and then Brendan called to say his Palm
Pilot--her Christmas/birthday present to him--was missing. It seems that
it was picked from Brendan's pocket during the walk back, along with an
attachment for it, and their credit and bank cards, which were together in
one pocket of his bag. So they had a late night of cancelling cards and
arranging for replacements, after running back to the restaurant to look
between the cushions and be sure nothing had gotten left there.
On Tuesday I sat over a leisurely breakfast with Luann, Marina and another
wife, Vivian, with her 5 month-old son, Peter. Marina headed off to
Rosskilde on her own and the rest of us went to the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek,
Denmark's answer to the British Museum. It is a lovely building with an
amazing collection, founded by the Carlsberg family of brewery fame.
They've established a couple of different foundations for the arts and
education and one of our guidebooks pointed out that Denmark is the only
country in the world where you can drink to support the arts.
Luann is an archeologist by training and works in the administrative
department of the Harvard Museums. So she was able to make the rooms of
Egyptian, Greek, Etruscan and Roman artifacts even more interesting than
they would be on their own. It's amazing to me how much I did learn on our
trip to Egypt. Now when we see Egyptian artifacts, they make so much more
sense to me than they did previously. We had a very nice lunch (puff pastry
filled with shrimp salad for me) in the palm court at the center of the
museum. Luann and Vivian spent the remaining 45 minutes in the gift shop,
but I ran through their collection of paintings. I breezed past most of
Denmark's Golden Age of Painting, unstruck by any of the works, but stopped
to spend some time looking at their wide selection of paintings by Corot,
bronzes by Degas (including some of his horses, influenced by the
stop-motion photography he was doing at the time, which I'd seen exhibited
at the SFMOMA), and unusual pre-Tahiti Gauguins, which I liked more than his
other work I'd seen, and I felt I'd used my time wisely. I made it back
before they closed the shop and bought a couple of things. Luann was
desperately trying to winnow a huge pile of books she wanted down to
something she thought she could fit in her luggage and finally took the six
she couldn't bear to leave. We walked back around the Tivoli Gardens to the
hotel, where I napped until dinner.
The guys were all staying at the Institute for a special session by the
creator of C++, so six of the wives (Elana, Luann, Vivian, Marina, Lana--a
sweet woman who organized the Hawaii meeting I enjoyed so much--and myself)
went to a steak place around the corner. It was okay--my "carpaccio" turned
out to be prosciutto, which was probably my own fault with the language, my
"rare" steak was quite medium, and our waitress was surly and slow--but when
the bill came (after our waitress had left for the evening) it was wrong in
some subtle way we couldn't quite identify, and came out at 200 kroner each,
instead of the 300 per person we'd expected. Without our waitress and
without any Danish, it was just too complicated a problem to attack and the
baby was getting restless and cranky, so we just gave them what they'd asked
for and got out.
The guys had gotten back while we were out and were just heading out to the
bar, but Jason turned back and kept me company and then fell asleep while I
caught up on my email and got started on this report.
On Wednesday I left the hotel at 9:30am and walked all day! The weather was
warm enough that I didn't take a coat and even my cardigan was too heavy
later in the day. After popping into a small grocery store to wander around
and check out what odd foods I could find, I went back over to the Rosenberg
Slot and toured that. It's filled with objets d'art and paintings and
furniture, in addition to the tapestries and ceiling paintings and parquet
floors. Much to my delight, they had many different tables and cabinets of
inlaid wood or semi-precious stone, several of which were strikingly
beautiful. In the basement they have the Danish Crown Jewels, which are very
beautiful, and artifacts of Ole Romer, the Dane who discovered the speed of
light back in the 17th century before coming home from Paris to set up the
Danish office of standard weights & measures and serve as the king's
technical consultant. They have an ingenious method of dealing with all the
different languages of their visitors--instead of having curatorial notes
posted with the objects, they rent you a guidebook that has introductory
material on the castle and its history and a brief description of each room
in the castle, followed by a listing of all the objects in the room. So
when you're in a room and you're interested in knowing what a particular
piece is, you look for the number on it and then look that up. I enjoyed
that, because I didn't get bogged down in reading descriptions of pieces
that didn't actually interest me, as I often do in museums.
After leaving the palace (and watching a changing of the guard), I wandered
through the botanical gardens of the University of Copenhagen, across the
street. They are very beautiful and just starting to bloom. There wasn't
an exit where I thought there would be, so I ended up walking up to the exit
by the greenhouses, at which point it seemed silly not to go in and see the
pretty plants. Leaving there, I walked back around to the Statens Museum
for Kunst (www.smk.dk) and had some lunch in their cafe. Once again my
desire for carpaccio and my lack of Danish tripped me up and I ended up with
a plate of thinly sliced *beets* with olive oil and parmesan cheese. They
were reasonably tasty, but not what I was expecting. I consoled myself with
a slice of their lovely, rich, nutty carrot cake before heading into the
galleries.
In many ways, the SKM feels like two different museums. The new wing of
glass and steel, high ceilings and white walls, feels like MOMA and is
filled with 20th century art, most of it Danish. They do have Modigliani's
"Alice" and several works by Georges Braque (and not just his Cubist stuff).
After a couple of hours in there, I wandered back into the original
building, where the Danish and European Paintings (and a few sculptures)
1300-1900 are housed in a maze of small, jewel-toned rooms. I walked fairly
quickly through those and wasn't incredibly impressed. The collection is
vast, but not first rate. Somehow they managed to have five completely
uncompelling Rembrandts. I went back and spent some time sketching, and
left around 5pm to walk back through the park and home again. Copenhagen's
parks are very lovely and seem to always have people in them. Mothers here
all seem to use the old fashioned prams that make me think of Mary Poppins.
I guess the fact that they just leave them on the street outside shops and
cafes means that they don't need the smaller, collapsible ones.
I got back to the hotel at 5:30pm and Jason arrived shortly thereafter. We
made arrangements to have dinner with Richard & Marina and then Jason napped
for a bit while I read email. The four of us went to a place in Grey Friars
Square called Peder Oxe. They serve slightly French, but mostly traditional
Danish food. I had a tasty but wimpy lobster bisque, followed by a steak in
a lovely creamy sauce. Jason had their salad bar with the best tomatoes
I've ever tasted in such a setting--obviously vine-ripened and very
fresh--followed by a nice rack of lamb. We skipped dessert and had
coffee...they brought us an enormous pot and demitasse cups and we drank
several cups each. Richard and I (the talkers at the table) got into a long
meandering conversation about education and racism and the Irish political
situation that was very interesting and fun. We wandered back to the hotel
and Jason worked on some drafts while I hung out with Brendan and Elana.
On Thursday morning I breakfasted with some of the other women and then read
for a bit. At 11:30am seven (Vivian, Luann, Elana, Michelle, Carina, Marina
and I--and Peter, of course) of us met in the lobby and headed out to Sweden
for lunch. Now that they've opened the Oresund bridge, there are regular,
inexpensive trains to Malmo that take about half an hour. Luann's guidebook
had a "daytrip to Malmo" section that recommended a lovely little cafe about
a ten minute walk from the station where I had a delicious sandwich of bacon
and garlic potato salad together with a bowl of Thai chicken soup. The
weather was beautiful and Malmo was lovely, but Elana had to be back to meet
someone she knows online and I wanted to check out a couple of shops, so the
two of us took the train back together while the others stayed to wander
around for a couple of hours. Back in Copenhagen I wandered down the
Stroget pedestrian mall and checked out Illums Bogliehus, a department store
specializing in Danish design. They had some lovely things, as did a couple
of the other shops I stopped into, but I made it back to the hotel without
making any purchases.
I really like some of the Danish furniture, particularly the stuff made of
wood, with clean lines, like the tables & chairs and the bureaus, and they
have some marvelously simple and ingenious fixtures for the bath and
kitchen. In Norway we especially enjoyed the heated bathroom floors--though
it was never cold enough for them to be really necessary, it is really nice
not to have cold tile underfoot. But when it comes to upholstered objects,
I find that the spare lines make all the couches look to me like they belong
in ladies' rooms and doctors offices; I want something more snuggly. But
some of the leather armchairs are truly beautiful and in everything there
seems to be an awareness of design aesthetics that I think is often lacking
among American consumer products.
Back at the hotel on Thursday afternoon, I napped for a bit and then Jason
arrived from the meeting, having sprained his ankle on cobblestones while
running for the train. I ran out and got a bandage and an ice pack and he
iced and took ibuprofen and elevated. This was the last night of the
meeting, so we were all going to the Tivoli Gardens for dinner and he didn't
want to miss it. Elana had noticed in her guidebook that they have
wheelchairs that can be reserved, so she got the deskclerk to call ahead for
one and it was waiting for us at the cloakroom when we arrived. We had
dinner in the garden pavilion of one of the restaurants. It was sort of an
unfortunate occasion--the host company didn't have the money to provide a
banquet, so it was just a group of about sixty people going out to dinner
together. The food was okay, but the service was excrutiatingly slow and
the waitress messed up our table's order, so the woman next to me got stuck
with a choice between eating steak instead of the salmon she'd ordered or
waiting twenty minutes for another salmon plate to be prepared. I started
with smoked salmon and then it was my turn for a rack of lamb with garlic
and a potato cake, which were both completely acceptable. Jason started with
an underwhelming lobster bisque, mostly smoky, salty and alcoholic, though
it did have chunks of lobster meat in it. His salmon entree was only okay,
though he might have been playing it down to make it easier for the woman
who didn't get any. We all skipped dessert, not wanting to wait another
hour in this place, and headed out into the gardens.
Jason and I went on two rides. The first one was amazing. It's a very tall
spire with a ring around it, onto which are strapped twelve people, with
their feet hanging free. The ring rises and rises and rises and you think
"this is a nice view, lovely, gee we're really high, and we're still rising,
and still going and geez, how high are we going..." and then the ring drops
almost down to the bottom and then bounces halfway up and down a couple more
times. I found it exhilarating, with a real sense of spiritual
transformation. Jason had a less emotional reaction to it, but still
enjoyed it very much. The trip up, with all the attendant anticipation, is
the scary part. The drop is just wonderful. The seat holds you securely
enough that it never feels like you're falling out of control, just soaring
back down to the ground.
The second ride, The Monsoon, is hard to describe. Picture a huge comb with
eight teeth, upside down, with people strapped to the front and back of each
tooth, four across. The "comb" moves forward, up, back, and down and then
reverses (back, up, forward, down), while jets of water rise out of the base
below you, so that you get a little bit of spray in your face. It's not at
all frightening, just fun, like a merry-go-round.
After that we wandered through the park for a bit with Elana & Brendan and
various other people who came and went. I had lots of fun pushing Jason
around in the chair and Elana got him a pinwheel to carry. We hope we got a
good picture. We left as the park was closing, around midnight and came
back to the room to read email and sleep. Jason's foot was "uncomfortable,"
but not terribly painful and didn't seem to be swelling much and on Friday
he was walking on it with only a slight limp and claiming it was "okay."
On Friday, after breakfast with the wives, I took our laundry out to have it
done (since the hotel doesn't do laundry over the weekend) and then got our
remaining things somewhat more organized. Elana was packing up, so I hung
out with her until the boys got back from the wrap-up meeting around noon.
We went out to a nice lunch with the three Irish couples and Robert Klarer
from IBM Toronto at the lovely Apollo Brewery just down the street. I had
carpaccio (beef this time) with minestrone soup and caged bites of the
others' pork shortribs and bratwurst, all of which were very tasty. It was
good to have a chance to say goodbye to the Kehoes, who were leaving right
after lunch.
Lunch over, we left the group and ran over to the Glyptotek. We only had
forty-five minutes, so Jason got a very quick tour of the things I
considered most interesting, including the new wing that hadn't been open
when he was here in '95, and the small special exhibit on the Belvedere
torso and its influence on 19th century sculptors, together with a copy of
the most recent scholarly attempt to recreate the entire sculpture, based on
the clues of the fragment. A small classical chamber chorus was rehearsing
in the theater at the center of the south wing and their clear voices were
resonating in the lovely acoustics of the chamber. One of the most
interesting paintings in the collection was a small study by Manet of "The
Execution of Maximillian." Manet later painted a large (8'x6', maybe), more
finished version, but whoever bought it decided to cut it up and sell the
smaller pieces separately. Degas was horrified and went around trying to
buy up the pieces and then reconstructed what he could find onto a large
cavas--now in the National Gallery in London--but there are several key
sections missing and it was neat to see the whole composition. We met up
with Jamie, Vivian and Peter as we were leaving and walked back to the hotel
with them. I napped while Jason worked a bit and then we went back to the
sushi place we'd enjoyed so much on our first night in town, this time with
Luann & David and Steve Adamczyk of EDG in NJ. I hadn't had much of a
chance to talk with him earlier in the week and ended up hearing all about
the renovation of the kitchen of their Craftsman home, which was kind of
nifty.
On Saturday we had breakfast with the remaining folk. Stefan, the exchange
student who had spent some time living with my family, was to pick us up at
noon, but called to say he couldn't make it until two. So we took the
subway up to Osterport Station and walked through the Kastellet Park to see
the Little Mermaid--because you haven't really been in Copenhagen until
you've seen it--and then visited the Resistance Museum. It's a small
exhibit, but manages to convey a real sense of the Danish experience with
World War II. The tone also seemed to be very objective, neither over- nor
underestimating the contribution of various resistance movements and
strategies and not villifying the people who tried to maintain the greatest
degree of independence for occupied Denmark that was possible while
cooperating with the Nazis. They mentioned that the story of the Danish
king wearing a Star of David in solidarity with the Jews is a myth, but that
it has endured and spread, perhaps because it is such a concise symbol of
the real heroism and solidarity of the Danish people of the time. The
letters from people condemned to die for their work with the resistance were
very moving.
We left there and were horrified to see graffiti on the back of a traffic
sign right near the museum replacing the "s" in "Israel" with a swastika.
We would like to think we've moved past the place where the horrors of World
War II are possible, but people are still stupid and cruel.
We got back to the hotel and had time to pick up sandwiches across the
street. The bread was stale, but the meat was good and it was an easy
lunch. Just as we finished, Stefan arrived and we headed north together.
He took us up to Helsingor, which Shakespeare made famous as Elsinore in
_Hamlet_ which was based on stories of the Danish folk-hero, Amleth. We
toured Kronborg Castle, built in the 17th century and re-built twice since
after fires destroyed various sections. The building was lovely and the
views across the straight to Sweden were stunning, but the interiors were
fairly bare and plain. Stefan was disappointed, I think, that we used up
our time there, rather than using the time to tour the more impressive
inside of the castle in Hillerod, but we were glad to see what we did. From
there we drove down to Fredensborg Palace, the summer home of the royal
family, where we got an ice cream and walked around the building. Then we
visited the castle in Hillerod. It was closed by the time we arrived, but
the outside was lovely and the gardens were gorgeous. We wandered there for
a while and then went to Stefan's home. There we met his wife, Brigitte,
and his two sons, Caspar (almost 3) and Alex (5 months). They have a lovely
home in the house by a lake about 20 kilometers from Copenhagen where
Stefan's grandmother lived until they bought it from her three years ago.
We enjoyed a nice dinner, starting with fish eggs and onions in cream sauce
served with a tasty bread, and then a main course of salad, potatoes with
sour cream and dill, and a leg of lamb roasted on the grill with garlic
embedded in it. It was all quite delicious. After dinner I got to hold
Alex for a while. He caught a nasty cold virus two months ago and is still
somewhat sick with a terrible cough. But he is a calm baby with huge blue
eyes like saucers and a penchant for grabbing the nearest available finger
and sucking on it. We had a lovely chat with them and then Stefan very
kindly drove us back into Copenhagen, though we could easily have taken the
train. It was good to see him again after fifteen years and catch up a
little on all the changes we've both been through.
On Sunday we had breakfast with the Schmeisers (Vivian, Jamie and Peter) and
the remaining Irish folk, then checked out and put our luggage in the
hotel's storage room. We took a train down to Ishoj, on the coast, south of
the city, and made the 20 minute walk out to Arken (www.arken.dk), another
Museum of Modern Art. It is built to resemble a ship, in a modern-art kind
of way, and is set among the dunes. There are a few works from their
permanent collection on display at any one time. Most of these were
computer generated or enhanced photographs and the most interesting of these
were works by a woman who takes a bunch of headshots of famous people and
creates a composite of them, according to some equation of importance. For
instance, she has one called "War Head" that took the faces of the leaders
of the "Nuclear Club" at the time (Reagan, Brezhnev, Thatcher, etc.) and
weighted them according to the percentage of the global nuclear arsenal they
controlled. The resulting "portrait" has a lot of Reagan and Brezhnev, but the
others are in there. More visually fascinating were pieces examining beauty
that took various film stars and combined them to create two male and two
female "portraits" of conventional beauty. There was also a special exhibit
by Gerard Richter, whose paintings on glass I had seen at the SMK.
All this was interesting, but the real reason we were there was to see
"Echoes of the Scream," an exhibition of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" and
other works, along with several pieces by other artists (Jasper Johns, Andy
Warhol, George Baselitz, Per Kirkeby, Joseph Beuys, etc.) who were
influenced by Munch. I was not very familiar with Munch's work, so it was a
good chance to see more of it. I particularly enjoyed his later works,
especially "Nude by the Wicker Chair."
We took a bus back to the train station and thence back to Copenhagen
proper. We went past the Central Station and up to Norreport and then
walked back toward our hotel. In the square next to Peder Oxe, we found a
tiny little sandwich bar in a cellar. You pick your bread, cheese and meat
and then take them over to a buffet where you can slice yourself tomatoes,
onions and peppers and add lettuce, mayo, mustard, pesto, olives, capers or
cornichons to your sandwich. We ate them at tables in the square, where
there are blankets to keep off the chill, but they weren't necessary that
day.
The first couple of days were occasionally rainy, but generally we were
surprised by how lovely and warm the weather is. Copenhagen was mostly in
the 60's, but got warmer at times, and in Norway it was downright hot for
touristing. We mentioned our surprise and were told that spring is actually
late this year, that usually it would be even warmer by now, but that early
May is the best time of the year to visit Scandinavia, as the tourist season
hasn't really begun and the weather is consistently beautiful.
