Bicycles in Copenhagen

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Cargo-bike-canal

We got to Copenhagen yesterday in the early afternoon. We had booked another apartment with airbnb and met the owners daughter at the apartment in Valby, about 3 km from the centre of Copenhagen. After checking out the shops in the local areas we headed into central Copenhagen. The next day Thursday we walked into the city and hired a cargo bike, and Judy volunteered to be the cargo. It was a nice day (about 19C) and we rode all round the centre of Copenhagen, visiting the closed because of renovations Noma restaurant (number one Michelin restaurant). The number of people riding in Copenhagen has to be seen to be believed. There are more people riding on just a few streets of Copenhagen then there is in all of Adelaide.

There is no Lycra, no cleats, no road racing bikes, no helmets, and no drop down handlebars. Ordinary people wearing ordinary clothes and ordinary shoes riding around. It is one of the safest places to ride a bicycle in the world. Adelaide South Australia is not as safe to ride in, and we have compulsory helmet laws. Bikes have baskets, carriers and more, so things can be carried on the bikes like shopping, and cargo bikes abound for carrying children around.  There are great bike paths along side the road, mostly with a raised curb separating the bike path from the road.

 

Bikes in double level bike racks at a railway station near our apartment

Bikes in double level bike racks at a railway station near our apartment

The cargo bike outside our apartment. Notice the rows and rows of bikes that are parked outside every apartment building

The cargo bike outside our apartment. Notice the rows and rows of bikes that are parked outside every apartment building

 

 

Judy outside the closed for renovation noma restaurant

Judy outside the closed for renovation noma restaurant

Steak for lunch in Copenhagen, all the way from the Coorong in South Australia

Steak for lunch in Copenhagen, all the way from the Coorong in South Australia

 

 

 

 

 

On the road

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camped-sweden-1st-night

We picked up our (tiny) rental car this morning and by lunchtime we were on the road. We have driven about 450km south along the E4 towards Copenhagen, We detoured next to one of Swedens lakes. There are two lakes in the west one little and one large, we drove down the coast of the little one, it was enormous. You could barely see the far shore,

As it got later we started looking for campsites. Sweden (and Norway and Finland) have a law called :”Allmansrätten” or public right of access. This means you can camp all sorts of places as long as you follow some basic rules. We eventually went down a little country road, followed a dirt track into a pine forest and found a nice quite place to camp next to a creek.

Tomorrow we get to Copenhagen.

 

Walking Stockholm

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The Stadsbiblioteket Stockholm the central city Library, circular and designed in the 1920s

Tim Winton books in the Stockholm Library

Tim Winton books in the Stockholm Library

 

Australia wine in cardboard containers

Australia wine in cardboard containers

 

Ikea

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Note to self: In Sweden, they are just called ‘meatballs’. Asking for ‘Swedish meatballs’ in Sweden is grossly overstating the obvious.

Today, being a Sunday, we did what many other Swedish people do on this day of rest and went to worship at the Altar of the Flatpack and pay homage to the great god of consumerism at the biggest Ikea in the world. And it really is HUGE! 3 storeys full of stuff. The entire display area is arranged in concentric circles which spiral downwards from the 3rd floor, accessible via ramps, steps and escalators. There is a large dining area on the top floor, plus 2 smaller cafes, a food hall and a fast food bar. There are a couple of ‘I live in 25 sq metres or less’ displays. I thought there would be more, but then realised that while those displays are fascinating for us Aussies who live in much larger spaces, to the Swedes it’s real life and they don’t need Ikea displays to tell them how to do it.

We got there early, just after it opened at 10am. The carpark was fairly empty and there were some people inside the store, but that was nothing compared to the mass of people there when we left at 3pm. Huge queues at the checkouts and heavy parcel pick-ups, heaps of people just wandering around the displays, full cafes and dining room. Despite the much larger scale and there being more of everything in both quantity and range – I counted at least 6 different high chairs – it felt familar as we are used to navigating our way around the Adelaide store. We started at the top, on the 3rd floor and wandered around the displays for a while, then fortified ourselves at the cafe on the 2nd floor with pancakes (Greg) and coffee and a cinnamon roll (me). There were a couple of things that we wanted to buy, but we left them until the end of our visit, so we didn’t have to carry them with us.

We broke the Ikea experience up by visiting a few other shops nearby – an electronics shop, a couple of specialist sports shops (golf & horseriding) and a big supermarket which offered customers a handheld scanner to use as they placed items in their shopping trolley. Not many people used them, but as the queues for the ordinary checkouts were so long, it would have saved a lot of time not having to wait in line.

We went back to Ikea for lunch and to do our shopping and the whole place was full of people browsing, eating and shopping. We bought cushions to use as pillows when we camp, plastic containers, a wire colander that we’ll turn into a toasting rack to go over our little woodburning fire and a neat little folding table. I’m sure when we’re camping there will be photos of it all. We dropped into the Food Hall on the way out for a few supplies, then headed back to our apartment on the subway.

Ikea-worlds-biggest

ABBA

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abba

It’s all there, 2 storeys below ground level. The music, the costumes, the photos and music video clips, lots and lots of memorabilia. The ABBA museum opened less than 2 months ago and it seems as if its already on every tourist’s Stockholm ‘must-do’ list. Well, it’s our first day here and we’ve ticked it off.

It was great, really great. We booked our tickets online and collected them from an ATM in the museum foyer. We booked for 11.15am (it’s open from 10.00am to 10.00pm daily), thinking that would give us enough time to get the subway into the centre of the city and then walk to Djurgarden Island, which is full of museums, including Skansen the world’s first open-air museum, where Annifrid ‘Frida’ was ‘discovered’ during a singing contest. Our knowledge of ABBA-related trivia has increased exponentially today! We got to the museum with an hour to spare, so we wandered around past some of the other attractions and found a little well-stocked supermarket and bought drinks and a Danish pastry.

The museum is set up in ‘rooms’, with interactive stuff throughout. You can sing onstage as the 5th member of the band, do quizzes, record yourself singing ABBA songs, and with all the activities you can scan your entry ticket and then look at the videos/photos/quiz results online later. Sorry to disappoint but we didn’t sing or perform and our quiz results were so woeful that we’re not sharing them with anyone!

There are reproductions of the music room where Bjorn and Benny wrote lots of the hit songs, the recording studio at Polar Music, the sewing room where a lot of those amazing glam-pop costumes were designed and sewn, and there is a whole room full of the costumes, with hundreds of album covers and gold records lining the walls. There are recent videos of each band member, remembering their lives pre-ABBA and one of my favourites – Lasse Halstrom the film-maker who at the time worked for Swedish Television and made a few music videos on the side, remembering the early days of making ABBA video clips. The museum plays ABBA: The Movie on a continuous loop. A lot of that movie was filmed in Australia.

We spent just under an hour and a half in the museum, and by the time we left it was getting very busy. We did the right thing going in the morning.

outside-abba-museum

 

ABBA-costumes-1

ABBA-costumes-2

ABBA-costumes-3

 

 

Stockholm arrival

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We arrived in Stockholm at Arlanda airport on time, after leaving home 30 hours before. We waited at the luggage carousel and got our first bag (mostly camping equipment), but the second bag never appeared. We were waiting with a few other people whose bags also didn’t appear, and after a about twenty minutes we found out that they were never going to appear. We found out one of our two bags was sitting at Heathrow Terminal 5.

We put in a form for the missing bag, and then got a Taxi from the airport to Kista. We has a great Iraqi taxi driver who not only took us to the right place but rang George the person we were meeting to make sure that it was the right place. Every Swedish person we have met so far has been very friendly.

We are staying in an apartment in Kista that we arranged on AirBNB. It is basically student accommodation in a building over the top of the Galleria shopping centre. The apartment is an Ikea size 25 square metres, but it has a kitchen so we can save some money cooking food ourselves. There are 3 supermarkets in Galleria, and prices are similar in most cases to Australian supermarket prices.

The 25 square metre apartment

The 25 square metre apartment

Judy-shopping-swedish-supermarket

Judy choosing bread in a stockholm supermarket