Blogging from Copenhagen - First Impressions
I’m staying in the Frederiksberg section of Copenhagen. The main street has plenty of cafés and Italian eateries, as well as shops for clothes and the usual goods. My hosts have a lovely, spacious and remarkably uncluttered apartment, with plenty of windows.
One of the first things you notice here is how barely anyone has shades or curtains on their windows. This means that, at all times, you can look into their homes and observe what they’re doing–having morning coffee and bread, getting undressed, watching television, every intimate and homey moment.
This morning I went for a run in the Frederiksberg park (Frederiksberg Have), that has an ice skating rink at the entrance, a duck pond, a Zoo, and lots of meandering dirt paths. On one of the paths, I came across an interesting sight: a tree adorned with ribbons and dozens of baby pacifiers. There were also clear plastic bags with messages on paper inside them. When I got back to the apartment, I asked my hosts what this meant. Apparently this is a local tradition. When a child has reached the age where he or she might be able to abandon use of his or her pacifier, they go to the tree and hang it up. This is one of the child’s first rites of passage. It seems an easy enough way to break the child from the habit without too much trauma. My question is how long do those pacifiers stay on the tree? What happens next?
Today we’ll be spending our time at the Klima Forum, the alternative activity center to the official COP-15 Bella Center.
If there’s time, we’ll also try to get back to Bo Bech bakery, where they specialize in making only one kind of bread, a sour dough, and to make it the best possible bread you can buy. To be shared with a cheese you can buy at a cheese shop a few doors down. Yesterday, we tried to get by the bakery, but it had already closed. On the way, we found a charming hat shop, Modiste Susanne Juul. The owner, designer and hatmaker is a charming, talkative woman who works day and night in this season to make her lovely creations. There are knitted hats (she makes one in the morning before coming to the shop and one in the evening after getting home), cloth hats with fur, leather hats… I hope to make a short video of her. Stay tuned.
Now, off to the adventure of understanding climate change.
