Browsing Tag

tourism

The design quirks of Copenhagen

It’s summertime, the top tourist season in Copenhagen, and the streets and the bike lanes and the harbor boats are full of people from around the world. One of the things they come to look at is Danish design.

I’ve created a new audio tour of Danish design in Copenhagen via Voicemap, but I thought I’d share a few quirks of design in Copenhagen that are not in the tour.

First of all, did you know that Copenhagen has its own color?

It’s called Copenhagen Green, and it’s a dark emerald green, mixed with a fair amount of black. A little like the dark green we see on the leaves of trees here in August. Pantone 3435C, for you designer types.

Green and black blend well

You’ll notice that all Copenhagen benches are this color, and there are thousands of these wood and cast-iron benches around town. They were originally designed more than a hundred years ago by Thorvald Bindesbøll, an art nouveau master also known for the Carlsberg beer label.

You will see Copenhagen Green on many wooden doors and window frames in the old city, as well as lamp posts, railings, even small bridges in the beautiful Ørsteds Park, all painted Copenhagen Green. This was a conscious decision by city leaders in the early 1900s.

They felt the combination of green and black blended well with both natural and urban settings and using it widely would create a sense of harmony. Plus almost everybody likes green.

August 8, 2024 by Kay Xander Mellish

Who is Holger Danske?

Many countries have a fictional character who represents them. Uncle Sam for the USA, Marianne in France, Bharat Mata or Mother India.

Others have a legendary figure, who was real at one point but is now shrouded in myth, like King Arthur in England.

For Denmark, Holger Danske is both.

He was probably real, although he didn’t live in Denmark. He was a Danish knight living in France in 8th century, serving Charlemagne, and he appears in several of the epic poems of the time as Ogier the Dane.

When those poems were translated into Old Norsk, he became Oddgeir danski, which gradually morphed into Holger Danske.

The sleeping hero

He has been a hero for centuries. And he is a sleeping hero.

The legend is that when Denmark is in trouble, Holger Danske will rise from his slumber and come to its defense.

This is why during World War II, when Denmark was occupied by the Nazis, one of the largest resistance groups called itself Holger Danske.

Consumer products

If you’re not Danish, you may have experienced Holger Danske in the form of consumer products.

There is a Holger Danske moving company with trucks all over Denmark, a Holger Danske beer, Holger Danske Aquavit liquor, Holger Danske tobacco. There’s a Holger Danske bar. Holger Danske has appeared on the Danish national football shirt.

And, very famously, there’s a statue of Holger Danske in the basement of Kronborg Castle, often known as Hamlet’s Castle, in Helsingør, Denmark – which Shakespeare referred to as Elsinore.

(I go by the castle in my new audio tour of Helsingør.)

July 7, 2024 by Kay Xander Mellish

Stories about life in Denmark, Travels in Denmark

Take our “How to Live in Denmark” Helsingør self-guided audio tour

Visiting Denmark? Take our fun new self-guided audio tour of Helsingør, aka “Elsinore”, the setting of Shakespeare’s great tragedy “Hamlet”.

Designed in co-operation with VoiceMap Audio Tours, this is a GPS-triggered tour, so you can put your phone away and focus on the sights and sounds of this fabulous medieval city while I tell you amusing stories.

🏰 Walk the ramparts of Kronborg Castle, where the opening scenes of “Hamlet” take place, and hear about the king who built it and his 14-year-old bride.

✝️ Explore the streets of medieval Helsingør, and visit a quiet 15th century religious cloister that was once used to store tourists’ horses.

🚢 See the shipyards where giant ocean-going ships were built and enjoy the great Street Food market in one of the old shipyard halls.

🧜‍♀️ And meet the “Male Little Mermaid”, a 2012 version of the better-known female icon. It has a sensor one of its eyes, so it occasionally blinks at you.

Check it out here: Self-guided audio tour of Helsingør or access it via TripAdvisor.

(You can also take the tour virtually if you’re not in Denmark at the moment.)

Other Helsingør attractions

I can also recommend the M/S Maritime Museum if you have a full day to spend in Helsingør. Although you walk past it during this two-hour audio tour, the tour doesn’t take you inside.

Designed by the Danish celebrity architect Bjarke Ingels, it’s an exciting and colorful contemporary museum, even if you don’t think you care about ships.

The museum offers fascinating exhibits on the history and art of tattooing, the women who supported sailors both at home and abroad, and the Danish slave trade.

Vintage shopping

If you love vintage clothings or antiques, I can also recommend putting aside time to visit Helsingør’s many charity shops.

Although it’s a working-class town, Helsingør is quite close to the “whisky belt”, Denmark’s richest area. Rich people tend to have great giveaways.

Visit Sweden

Finally, Helsingør is a great jumping-off point for visiting Sweden. There’s a public ferry at the Helsingør train station that will take you there in 20 minutes.

You’ll land in the Swedish city of Helsingborg – similar name, but a very different vibe. It also has a great small hotel made out of an old bank vault.

Coming soon: an update of my Self-Guided Danish Design Tour of Copenhagen.

July 2, 2024 by Kay Xander Mellish

Podcasts, Stories about life in Denmark

Drugs in Denmark

When it comes to drugs, Denmark’s approach is inconsistent. Getting illegal drugs doesn’t seem to be too difficult, but getting legal drugs can be.

Hashish, which is illegal in Denmark, was until recently easy to procure at “Pusher Street”, in the so-called Free State of Christiania in Copenhagen. Christiania is one of the tourist attractions of Copenhagen.

This old military base, which was taken over by hippies during the 1970s, is a unique place, with dirt roads and ramshackle wooden buildings put together with odds and ends and some gorgeous wild nature which is surprising to find in the middle of a European capital city.

Pusher Street was a row of wooden booths where until recently buyers could choose from a selection of hashish being sold openly, although the dealers would smash your camera if you tried to take a picture of it.

It’s been shut down again and again in the past, usually after violent incidents, but it always risen up again. The truth is many Copenhageners like the fact that hashish dealing is centralized in one place. They don’t want the dealers and customers coming to *their* neighborhoods.

Snowflake doesn’t mean winter weather

Anyway, much of the drug dealing in Denmark today doesn’t take place on Pusher Street, it takes place via smartphones like everything else. Via text messages, or on apps that are popular with young people, like Snapchat.

When someone has a snowflake emoji next to their Snapchat profile image, it doesn’t mean that they like winter weather.

September 29, 2023 by Kay Xander Mellish

Podcasts, Stories about life in Denmark, Travels in Denmark

How to Meet a Dead Viking: The mummies of Denmark

Many people who visit Denmark are fans of the Vikings, the familiar name for Scandinavians before the medieval era, although technically speaking the Viking raiders were at their peak in the years 800-1100.

There are plenty of opportunities, especially now during tourist season, to see modern-day Danes dressed up as Vikings, building wooden ships, cooking over open fires, and fighting with swords and shields. Exhibitions like this are very popular with visitors from overseas.

Viking ‘mummies’

What they might not know is that you can see actual Vikings in Denmark, or what’s left of their bodies. It was common in the Viking era and before to toss sacrificial items and people into peat bogs, which, it turns out, preserve bodies and clothing and hair very well.

So there are several places in Denmark where you can see actual humans from the Viking age, more than a thousand years old, and sometimes their clothes and hairstyles, sometimes even the last food they ate, reclaimed from their stomachs.

Some bodies are so well-preserved that they still have fingerprints.

August 1, 2023 by Kay Xander Mellish

Podcasts, Stories about life in Denmark

No ice cream in July: Scenes from the Danish summer vacation period

In Denmark, the right to a long summer vacation is enshrined into law – the national vacation law, which states that all employees have a right to three weeks’ vacation between May and September.

July is peak vacation time, and some companies close down entirely for a week or two, forcing their employees to take some time off.

Shops close, too. An ice cream shop in my neighborhood closed down for the entire month of July last year. You would think this would be peak time for ice cream, but for the owners of the ice cream shop, their own vacation was more important.

Bicycle shop closes

This year, I noticed that the bicycle store up the street is closed for three weeks – hope you don’t get a flat while out biking in the summer sunshine. So is the local “smørrebrød” sandwich shop. (Too bad about your picnic.) Even a local boutique selling swimwear is taking a summer break.

Danes believe that if you take a good, long, Danish summer vacation, you’ll come back refreshed, with new perspectives.

Free time is precious in Denmark – certainly more important than prestige, since people don’t generally use their job titles, and far ahead of money, since whatever you have the government will be taking a big bite out of. Free time is cherished, free time is wealth, and that’s one of the reasons the summer vacation is so prized.

You’ll often hear Danes ask each other how many weeks they’re taking for summer vacation. “So, this year, are you taking 3 or 4?”

June 29, 2023 by Kay Xander Mellish

Stories about life in Denmark

Rich in Denmark

Denmark is a rich country, but does it have rich people?

It does, but Denmark’s wealthy tend to keep a low profile, due to the informal Jante Law that prohibits too much showing off.

That said, spring and summer is great time to see Danish rich people in their natural habitat.

That’s when they put the roof down on their expensive German cars and drive through the medieval old towns, drink rosé chilled in silver buckets at fancy outdoor cafés, or sail through the harbor on their personal boats of various sizes.

In the summer, Denmark’s rich come out to play.

Two types of wealth

There are two types of wealth in Denmark, old wealth and new wealth.

Old wealth is the leftovers of Denmark’s nobility, Dukes and Counts and Barons, even though noble privileges were officially abolished in 1849.

Many of these families still own their old castles and country houses, some of which have been turned into hotels or fancy restaurants. You can stay there for a weekend with your sweetheart. Very romantic.

And then there’s new wealth. Denmark’s richest man owns Bestseller, a fast fashion chain that owns names like Vero Moda and Jack & Jones.

The heirs to LEGO, which is less than 100 years old, are also quite well off, and so are the heirs to the Ecco shoe fortune.

May 25, 2023 by Kay Xander Mellish

Stories about life in Denmark, Travels in Denmark

Randers is not a joke

Every country, it seems, has a city or region that is the butt of jokes. The rest of the country makes fun of the locals’ abrasive accents and supposedly low-end behavior.

In the United States, it’s New Jersey. In Sweden it’s Skåne, the area close to Denmark that includes Malmo. I’ve been told that in England it’s Essex, in Scotland it’s Aberdeen, and in Ireland it’s Kerry.

In Denmark, it’s Randers.

Randers is a city in Northern Jutland, about a half hour away from Aarhus. It used to be bigger than Aarhus, and bigger than Aalborg too, but it was a manufacturing town, and when manufacturing fell apart in Denmark after the Second World War, so did Randers.

Today, the stereotype of Randers locals involves muscle meatheads, possibly criminal, possibly in some sort of motorcycle gang, with a rough, gravelly accent, and lots of tattoos and leather.

And that’s just the women. The men are the same, but with shorter haircuts.

September 21, 2022 by Kay Xander Mellish

Podcasts, Stories about life in Denmark

On the Road: Copenhagen Northwest, beyond the cherry trees

It’s springtime, and the cherry trees are about to bloom in Copenhagen Northwest, which is usually the only time people who live outside Northwest bother to go there.

Northwest is a working class neighborhood, so much so that the streets are named after working-class occupations.

While other Copenhagen neighborhoods have streets named after kings and queens and generals, Northwest has Brick-maker street, and Book-binder street, and Rope-maker street, and Barrel-maker street.

But there are other things to see in Copenhagen Northwest besides the cherry trees, which have become a bit of a crowd scene since they were reported on by a national news network.

Old city, new neighborhood

Like many industrial districts in a post-industrial society, Northwest has become a bit of a trendy neighborhood. I live here, and when I first moved here ten years ago it was hard to find a café to meet up in. Lots of cafés and restaurants now, lots of young people, lots of activity.

March 19, 2022 by Kay Xander Mellish

Stories about life in Denmark, Travels in Denmark

How to Live in Denmark On the Road: Copenhagen’s Harbor Bus, “Havnebussen”

One of Denmark’s cheapest and most colorful vacations is a few hours riding back and forth on Copenhagen’s big yellow harbor bus, or “Havnebussen”, a commuter ferry designed to transport ordinary citizens between downtown and the urban islands of Christianshavn and Amager.

For those of you who have no summer vacation plans yet, or who don’t have the cash to go very far, the harbor bus can take you from tourist trap to high culture to party culture, from shabby little wood shacks to neighborhoods of chic glass apartment houses with their own private beach.

All for as little as 14 kroner, or 2 euro, if you pay with Denmark’s popular rejsekort, or nothing, if you’re a tourist with a Copenhagen Card. (Beware – you cannot buy a ticket onboard, although you can pay with with the DOT Tickets app on your phone.)

You can start at any of the currently operational 7 Havnebussen stops, but let’s start at Nyhavn, in part because it’s the easiest stop to find if you don’t know Copenhagen well.

June 25, 2021 by Kay Xander Mellish

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Kay Xander Mellish is a US-DK dual citizen. She grew up in Wisconsin, USA, but has lived in Denmark for more than a decade. Kay is a popular keynote speaker on Danish working culture and offers practical advice to international professionals navigating Danish work environments.

In addition, she helps Americans and Danes avoid misunderstandings and improve their cross-cultural teamwork.

Kay is the author of "How to Work in Denmark" (2022 and 2018), "How to Live in Denmark" (2017 and 2014), "Top 35 Mistakes Danes Make in English" (2016), "Working with Americans: Tips for Danes" (2019), and "Working with Danes: Tips for Americans" (2020). All of her books are also available in audio format.