It is as if, somehow, everything was rolling in this city. The bicycles are rolling. How otherwise, if not with the bikes? After all, three-quarters of the Danes have their own bicycle. Moreover, half the population even uses them. In the streets they are too numerous to count. Some occasionally are only pushed.
Sometimes they are ridden carefully or used as rickshaws, transporting a girlfriend, a child, a young tree to be planted, some package or a dog. (Women having come from the Middle East are said to enjoy riding bikes the most, since there is no way they could do it in their own countries. Even bicycle courses are organised for them to learn to ride safely.) As tourists we can also borrow one in the street for a deposit of only 20 crowns, and when we have had enough we just give the bike in and the deposit is returned. Prams are also rolling. Each is entirely black and has the appearance of a cart-like article - this seems to be the season's fashion. They carry babies with round faces and blue eyes. And the end of a croissant is rolling, which a pigeon is trying to pick up. Somehow, here in Copenhagen life seems to be rolling in its own easiness.
"It's flat and it's green," said a visitor, and we can also add "human and young". "Hygge," the Danes say, with an approximate meaning of homely, comfortable and friendly. Hygge - we could also use this word if we wanted to describe the atmosphere so characteristic of Copenhagen. This is what appears in human relationships, since respect for others and respectable treatment is an elementary part of Danish identity. "A few have too much, but still fewer have too little," say the locals. And the same hygge can be seen in the elegant and simple purity of Danish forms, which we constantly encounter in offices, in homes and in shops.
Locals are proud of their city, which is not only clean and friendly but also safe and easy to get around. Parts of Copenhagen are quite independent and homogenous, though they still hold together and, in an unmistakable way, make up an unmistakable city, just as the pieces of a puzzle produce a single picture in the end. The Strøget, the busy swirl of the pedestrianised street in the city centre, with its shops, restaurants and cafés is well-balanced by the city's quiet eastern part, the Østerbro. (Concerning cafés, locals began to discover somewhere back in the 1970s why the Mediterranean-style atmosphere of sitting outside and drinking coffee is so pleasant. Today, well into the swing of it, they sip their coffee enthusiastically at street tables, even on a weekday morning in weather chilly to a non-Dane, perhaps with a warm blanket on their knees - the elderly, the young, tourists and young mothers with the inevitable black prams parked by their side.)
Copenhagen is fascinatingly habitable and its residents precisely reflect that. They inhabit it. In summer the Kirkegård Cemetery, for example, is filled with locals. Since there are fewer green areas in this part of the city, local residents simply use the place as a park. They picnic, sunbathe or read among the graves discretely marked with stones. Some are horrified, saying that the dead buried here, the philosopher Kierkegaard, for example, or the great story-teller Hans Christian Andersen, deserve more respect. Life, however, is alive and wants to live. Thus the picnickers remain.
Perhaps hygge also represents the way Copenhagen's residents hold on to what they have. In Christianshavn, for example, in the southeastern part of the city, the initiative to erect modern buildings instead of the dilapidated, dying blocks of houses met fierce opposition. Copenhagen's citizens prefer reviving what has remained of the past with a bit of injected modernising, rather than ruining it. As a facelift, the Royal Library received a new wing, the 'Black Diamond' built of granite from Zimbabwe, and the decayed and not too secure factory buildings of Islands Brygge were transformed into enviable residential blocks with the help of prominent architects. (Moreover, in this neighbourhood the water of the harbour was cleaned to the extent that residents use it as a beach in the summer. How many big cities can claim that people, at least the sane and the healthy, dare plunge into their water? Copenhagen residents are extremely proud of this - absolutely justifiably.) Rehabilitation has reached the former red light district of Vesterbro - although some red lights still remain. Renewal has also extended as far as the zoo, where the elephant house has been designed by a noted British architect.
A spectacular sign of such renewal is the new pride of Copenhagen, the extravagant and confident building of the Opera, designed by Henning Larsen. It rises high, like a giant pagoda on the embankment in the Holmen district. This area itself shows that the Danes do their best to preserve what is beautiful, appealing and worth preserving. They try to build the future in such a way that its foundations are rooted in the past. The attractive residential buildings and art schools of Holmen used to be military barracks. Walking back from the district we experience that puzzle feeling again - as if we were going from one stage setting to another, in a theatre where very different plays are on each night directed by the same person. After all, Christiania, the 'free state', which was founded by a group of artists and hippies in the former military area back in the 1970s, can be found adjacent to a neighbourhood reflecting consolidation and calm well-being.
After thirty odd years, Christiania can still shock. There is a graffiti covered fence marking the border and even the cars nearby are sprayed. Others may be more adventurous, but I recoil. What could there be behind the fence? In the end I gather my strength and, encouraged by someone walking his dog, I enter. It soon turns out that the fence is not there to protect the outside world from those inside, but for those inside to find shelter from the harmful influences of the outside. There are no cars in Christiania and the community has its own laws. Characteristic symbols of the hippy age mix with the 21st century in this dilapidated and, at places, desperately looking district, which is really a state within a state. Its southern part has visibly preserved the original atmosphere. People with dreadlocks, a neglected appearance and a bit of a hangover warm themselves around a rusty oil barrel, surrounded by a multitude of dogs. They don't seem entirely trustworthy.
Of course, Christiania is not regarded by everyone with goodwill. Nevertheless, since drug dealers were swept off the 'streets', as far as they can be called that, a few years ago, the place has practically been tamed into a regular tourist attraction, a kind of 'open air hippy museum'. There is a small map at one of the entrances where stars mark the optimists and veterans. Highlighted, too, are the restaurants, including the famous Spiseloppen, and cafés, of course not in the usual sense of the word. At 3 pm guided tours are available for only 30 crowns. There are small shops where we can buy those compulsory items of hippy existence, Jamaican hats and transfers advertising cannabis. There is even a sports centre, exclusively for members. A sign at the exit proclaims in English: "You are now entering the EU".
So we return to the EU and with it Copenhagen, and although a bar in Christiania described itself as the "safest bar in Copenhagen" we rather walk back to the city centre, Nyhavn, which in a way epitomises the entire city. There are impressive colourful houses on both sides of the street, a narrow canal with clean water and plenty of boats, while on the pavements there are restaurants, cafés, pizzerias, tea rooms, beer halls and inns displaying various colours and shapes, offering a multiplicity of items and services. Although it is still spring, the tables are occupied, not in a crowded way, but pleasantly, buzzingly. It is calm and cheerful. People are young or, if not, they are at least in love - or at least appear to be.
"Hygge" - I remember and look for a vacant table.
Anna Nagy