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July 13th

Yesterday was both the day I said goodbye to Copenhagen and the longest bike ride of my life. These two things might seem like a bummer or just bad in general. But to be honest I was beginning to want to get out of Copenhagen, and the ride to Helsingor was more beautiful than hard.

We began the 30-mile journey from Copenhagen to Helsingor at around 9:00 AM knowing there would be some pitstops along the way. The first being a group meeting and tour of the newly developed (some parts are still under construction) neighborhood of Copenhagen by the name of Nordhavn. Nordhavn is special because it is built on top of all the earth and much they dug up when building the new metro line in Copenhagen. I find this so smart. Copenhagen is having a housing crisis right now, and rather than just tell people to bad, you can't live here unless you know someone who can get you into an apartment, they as a city decided to think outside the box. I know this will be quite expensive housing but they will have 40,00 people living and working in a neighborhood on land that did not exist 10 years ago. In landscape architecture there's an old Japanese have a term "dig here, pile there", it means that you can use the materials you dug up or took out of one thing to build something else. I've never thought of this concept on such a large scale, certainly never in the same breath of urban planning and design, it's honestly quite genius. Below are some photos of what is currently developed and being developed right now.





After the stop in Nordhavn, the real journey began. the 50 KM bike ride up the beautiful coastline of eastern Denmark was something of beauty. Yet I found something even more interesting than the beautiful scenery and views of the ride; they had amazing biking infrastructure the whole ride up. Whether we were biking next to the high way on cycle tracks, had a buffer between us and the highway, or just on a separate path far from the road completely, everything was maintained extremely well and was super safe.

This experience was awesome to me. Now I understand why people will bike to their summer homes from Copenhagen. They can make a beautiful day out of biking up to their vacation homes, and then once they are in what every town they are staying they can use their bikes to get around. It is so awesome to see a nation make itself so interconnected through transportation other than the car. I know that it's much smaller than the U.S. but I really hope we can come together someday back home and do something similar.

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