Sunday bird blogging

A blackbird at Tivoli. I love the different shades of brown on her breast.

Poetical Saturday

Although I am usually either geometric or reflective on Saturdays, I am recuperating from a bad case of bronchitis that left me with a cracked rib and memories of strange half-waking dreams when photos I was taking came to life.

So here's a change of routine: a slightly surreal photo of purple flowers in Copenhagen that looks like something out of my cough-wracked dreams, and a few lines from the great Sufi poet Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks.

Don't ask questions about longing.
Look in my face.

Soul drunk, body ruined, these two
sit helpless in a wrecked wagon.
Neither knows how to fix it.

And my heart, I'd say it was more
like a donkey sunk in a mudhole,
struggling and miring deeper.

But listen to me: for one moment,
quit being sad. Hear blessings
dropping their blossoms
around you. God.

Urban poetry

Train tracks, near the main station in Copenhagen.

Oslo, we have a problem

I was going through the pictures I'd taken as we left Copenhagen, and liked this one in particular, the way the grungy building contrasts with the cruise ship deck chairs. But there was a weird spot on it -- easy enough to remove with Photoshop, but a sign that I got some dirt on my lens.

Sure enough, all of the pictures had the same spot, and when I looked more closely at the later ones, I could see hairs as well. And the lens was fine, which was very bad news because it meant that the dirt was inside the camera, on the mirror or the sensor -- it was very windy on the deck and I must have been careless swapping a lens out -- and I had stupidly left my camera cleaning kit in New York.

I panicked. I'm here to see the fjords, but I also really want to photograph them, which will be difficult without a working camera. I decided to try to find a camera store in Oslo that could take a look at the camera and give me the right tools to clean it, and maybe still get back to the ship in time to leave for my scheduled excursion to the explorers' museums.

And thank you Norway, because I did it. I found a store called Expert City near the train station that sold all kinds of electronic gear. They didn't have what I needed but they directed me to Japan Photo, just up the street, where a very kind and efficient young woman cleaned my camera for me, and even gave me a discount on a lens cloth. My vacation was saved!

Oslo, you will forever be one of my favorite cities, even if an emergency pit stop at the train station bathrooms costs 10 kroner.

The Grand Tour (Scandinavian version)

Yesterday I was in Stockholm, today I'm in Copenhagen, and tomorrow I'll be in Oslo -- so the grand tour continues.

I'm on board the Vision of the Seas, sailing off to see the fjords. Here's the pilot boat escorting us out of Copenhagen harbor.

I am afraid I will never be Nordic enough to like herring. I tried a little piece at breakfast, just to see if it no longer reminded me of the cod liver oil my grandmother made me take for some long forgotten childhood ailment. I had to quickly eat a cinnamon pastry just to get the vile taste out of my mouth. And of course I want to be able to say that I've eaten a danish in Denmark, so the pastry was historical as well as medicinal. And unbelievably delicious.

The view from the haven

Some of the wonderful views of the Rådhus from the gardens. I loved the details on the brickwork.

Sometimes I feel I've got to get away

Just across the street from Tivoli, I was trying to admire the spire of the Rådhus, or City Hall without getting trampled by the thousands of tourists. On the H.C. Andersen Boulevard side of the building, a little sandwich board in front of an alley pointed to something called the Rådhushaven.

A haven sounded wonderful, so I followed the sign. And it led to this perfect little park, an oasis in the midst of the insane hustle bustle on the other side of those old brick walls. One other woman wandered through with a camera; other than that I had the place entirely to myself except for a few magpies hanging out around the fountain.

Koncertsalen

The concert hall at Tivoli.

Reflections

The ornate reflections in one of Tivoli's highly stylized fountains.

Flowers

I don't usually take pictures of flowers. Where's the challenge? They're lovely, but they just sit there, waiting to be admired and photographed.

But these blue flowers at Tivoli were so beautiful I had to make an exception.

Colors of Tivoli

Tivoli is like a proto-Epcot, with Chinese and Indian and Bavarian styles jumbled gaily together. And somehow it works, and is completely charming.

Flying

This is one of my favorite pictures ever.

Tivoli

I think I would have liked Tivoli more if I hadn't gone to Skansen. The children at Skansen may have been a little shrieky, but the noise was nothing compared to the riders on the Star Flyer and other amusement park type attractions at Tivoli.

And Tivoli is commercialized to a degree that almost puts Disney to shame; my first impression was that it consisted entirely of shops and restaurants and a few rides. But I lingered, and walked around and eventually found that it did have its own very Danish charms.

There were bands playing, and a pantomime, and gardens and fountains and lots of places to sit and admire them that didn't require buying an overpriced meal. And when it got chilly, I had an Irish coffee. Which makes anything look better.

It's the materials

The main exhibit was on innovative materials, from crayons made out of soybeans rather than petroleum, to protective "leather" that's soft and flexible most of the time, but whose molecules compress into a hard shell on impact if there's an accident.

This denim actually acts as an air purifier. It's coated with a thin layer of titanium dioxide, that works with sunlight to remove pollutants from the air, and break them down into less harmful chemicals that come off when the jeans are washed.

Danish decor

Some old Danish home decor magazines that were on display, from the days when American suburbanites lusted after rooms full of Danish Modern furniture.

It's funny how dated they appear, because this kind of furniture really did translate so well into American cliche.

Danish design

The Danish Design Center was a fifteen minute walk from the hotel, just on the other side of Tivoli and the train station.

The permanent exhibition is a large room crammed full of examples of Danish design, only half of which were designed by Arne Jacobsen, including the first egg chair I've seen outside the pages of Elle Decor.

There were also some films and I saw Mr. Jacobsen for the first time; although he is one of my design heroes, you don't generally see a lot of photos of famous designers, especially the ones who are no longer around to promote their new lines of cookware or vacuum cleaners. If I had to imagine what he looked like, I have to confess he would have borne a striking resemblance to Max von Sydow in early Bergman films: cool, blond, with cheekbones that could cut a new fjord out of the mountains.

Instead he was a genial, walrussy kind of man, who may have gotten the inspiration for the egg chair one morning when he was looking in the mirror.

In Scandinavia, even skid row has bicycles

It's not really skid row -- though there is a fine gathering of apparently homeless people drinking wine from the bottle in the next block, this part of Copenhagen is also home to lots of emerging design shops and galleries next to the sex shops and fast food restaurants, so it's a neighborhood in transition. Inexpensive enough for the artists, but still home to the more colorful original inhabitants as well.

And given how manicured and storybook-pretty some of this city is, I enjoyed seeing a little of the grittier side.

The Mermaid Room

The day's misadventures continued upon arrival in Copenhagen. First, apparently I needn't have worried so much about my passport because no one even looked at it. Since the creation of the EU, you no longer have to go through immigration when traveling between countries by train, but I certainly didn't expect the same experience when flying. (And I didn't have to take off my shoes or take out my laptop going through security at Arlanda, either. No wonder Europeans hate us for our freedoms.)

I got in a taxi, pulled out my hotel confirmation, and discovered that it didn't contain the hotel's address. And it's a new hotel, open only a few months, so the driver had never heard of it, and all I could offer was the name, Hotel Andersen, and that it was a few blocks from Tivoli. I couldn't get a strong enough signal to use the browser on my Blackberry, so the driver lent me his iPhone, and I Googled the hotel, and finally had the address and directions just as we arrived in central Copenhagen. Technology saves the day!

I had picked this hotel because it was well-reviewed, reasonably priced, and close to the things I wanted to see. The website had also promised modern Danish design, which I was definitely curious to see.

But I didn't expect that they would offer me a choice of color schemes. How fun is that? I picked the mermaid room, turquoise with lime green accents.

Saturday reflections

Sticking to the theme of the photographer reflected in the picture, here are two fairly recent shots where I show up in the photo, one obvious and one not so obvious.

The photo on the left is a door in Copenhagen in June of last year. My walking tour group had disappeared around a corner and I took this picture in a hurry before running to catch up. I ended up missing too much of the door frame to make for a decent picture, but you can see me taking the shot very clearly.












The picture on the right is from Venice in April. You can see one arm, one leg and my purse double reflected on the left side of the windowpane.

Summer reflection

When I got back from Dublin, I was very happy to think that I wouldn't be going anywhere for months.

Now that the snow and slush of winter seems to have us in a permanent grip, getting out of New York for even a few days no longer seems like such an unpleasant idea.

In the meantime, here's a reflection from a courtyard in Copenhagen on a perfect day in June.