The Swine Dine (or, Is it Art? It looks like a table to me.)

On Sunday September 16 we left Århus and took a 4 hour train ride to Copenhagen to meet our old friend, Pete Backus. We lodged ourselves at the new and rather swanky high rise Danhostel and gave them all the money left over from the Malmo hostel. Then we went out in search of food. We learned two important facts on our first food foray:
1) you must sell your first born to buy a meal in Copenhagen
2) even if you sell your first born you may not find a place to spend your new bounty if you’re searching on a Sunday night.

After an hour of fruitless searching and some deft flirting on Pete's part, we found a stylish sushi joint dripping with Feng Shui recommended by a beautiful pair of Danish girls. Thanks to Pete we had our first restaurant meal during our stay in Denmark (where the food was not wrapped in wax paper) and oh what a meal it was! The rolls and sashimi were pure indulgence. It was a deluge after a serious restaurant drought.

To recover from the damage the hotel and the restaurant did to our wallets we opted for all the free activities Copenhagen had to offer. On Monday we hopped on the City's free bikes and tore through the city like a juvenile biker gang.


Our first stop was the hippie haven, Christiania, an abandoned military base that a group of activists occupied in 1971 and never released. Today it is a wild marriage of inspiring commune, happy hippie utopia, and Deadhead style drug fest. We entered through a beautiful neighborhood that reminded us of Fremont some years ago. We walked narrow paths rimmed with houses all nestled together, past the community stable where children were taking riding lessons, past co-op cafes and playgrounds full of kids. The community had photos from the 1971 occupation set up to show the contrast of the stark intimidating military scene juxtaposed with the lively inviting reality of today.

Around the corner the scene changed dramatically. It was 9:30 on Monday morning, the open air drug market was in full swing and the bars were dolling out the beer. We parked our free bikes in the ample bicycle parking and ambled on to grab a cup of coffee. We found no only coffee but also women swilling beer and teenagers rolling the fattest joint imaginable. It was surreal. We finished our coffee, extricated ourselves from a conversation with a red eyed Dane and headed for the hills. It wasn’t until we’d past through the dirt plaza full of booths selling all manner of Christiana logo gear and drug paraphernalia and reached the solid ground of Copenhagen’s upscale Christianshaven neighborhood that we realized that while we were away from our bikes some bad hippie had popped out the deposit coins that were lodged in all of our bikes. It wasn’t terribly surprising, nor too expensive; each bike held a 20 Kronor coin, equivalent to about $4. But it left a sour taste in our mouth, far different from the warm fuzzy feeling we’d had upon entering the community an hour before.

We stuck to the free bikes and our feet for the rest of the trip. We used the bakery symbol as a stop sign and indulged in pastries whenever we got a chance. We lunched on bread, cheese, olives and beer in whatever public park we could find. On our last afternoon in town we stumbled into a glorious cheese shop redolent of mold and bought as much cheese, salami and stuffed tomatoes as we could carry. We wandered into the park outside of the queen’s castle, Rosenborg Slot, and searched for a picnic table…nothing but park benches and beautiful lawns signed “do not walk on grass”. Then, miraculously, across the moat we saw five lonely tables awaiting us. Hmmm…they are on the castle grounds…and there are guys with guns marching around…hmmm…let’s go explore. We approached the metal tables. There weren’t any signs telling us to stay off the grass and the guys with the guns didn’t seem to care so we made ourselves at home and spread out our picnic. It was lovely, divine cheese, beautiful weather and lovely surroundings. Somewhat surprisingly, there was a large pig pen right in front of the castle with a “pig dock” extending out into the moat with several pot bellied pigs roaming around. As the soldiers continued to march and the tourists ambled around the castle, we felt like we had had gotten away with something.

We were just finishing the last tasty morsels when a disheveled man approached wearing rubber boots, a rumpled overcoat, long scraggly hair pulled back in a ponytail, a shaggy ten day old beard and a scarf wrapped around his neck. He looked like he might be asking for a handout from our lunch but his plan was decidedly different. He was all a fluster and blasted us with a tirade in Danish. When we stared blankly back at him he switched to a heavily accented lambaste, “You cannot sit here” he said “this is not a table, this is art.”
We began to apologize and clean up our spread, but the tirade continued; “You come and eat on art. You come with this food and you eat like pigs. You would think that if you were to eat on art you would at least eat beautiful food, but you... you eat ugly food.”

We were struck dumb while he continued, “I suppose you wondered that the chairs were uncomfortable, of course they are uncomfortable…they are art. This is an installation piece and you come and sit on it.”

At this point we were doing all we could to not break into laughter and Pete was quibbling with him about calling us pigs. It was a riot. The vagabond cum art docent finally left us alone to clean up our piggish spread and we laughed ourselves all the way to the train station where we bid Pete farewell before he headed back to London and we were off to the Island of Fyn.