Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

July 29th

On our final day together as a group, we had rented out a private room in a restaurant to give presentations on our final project and share a final dinner together. Although the presentations only lasted three minutes per student, by the end of them all it was evident we had all learned a lot, so much that literally none of our final projects were on the same topics. It was really cool to see what everyone pulled from this trip with their different perspectives. As a person whos studying landscape architecture I focused on rethinking the street as a public space rather than just pavement for transportation and how the location infrastructure is in can encourage or discourage bicycle use. So many people had ideas that weren't completely centered around planning... even the planners. But, all of our ideas were still based around the idea of using the bicycle as the main form of transportation. As this is, unfortunately, my last blog post about my study abroad experience I thought i...

July 18th

After a fun night of celebrating our professor Marc's 50th birthday in Malmö, it was time to get the show back on the road and head to the Netherlands. We left our hotel at 5:45 AM in order to catch a 6:30 AM train from Malmö back to Copenhagen. This ride only took 35 mins to go across and under the channel between Sweden and Denmark. I had never crossed a channel on a train before so it was quite fun to experience. Once we got to Copenhagen and went through airport security we had a little over an hour to burn until our flight to Amsterdam was boarding. Some of the group had rougher mornings than others... The flight to Amsterdam was fast, in fact, they even shaved 20 mins off of the original wait time. Once we got our luggage we hurried to the train station of the massive transportation hub that is the Amsterdam Airport and caught the first train to Utrecht. This train ride only took 45 mins to go 22 miles. I found it very comfortable as well. Once we got to our hostel I...

July 21st

On Sunday the group and I had the opportunity to tour the countryside surrounding Utecht by following the river Rhine, as well as experience the suburb master-planned for bike use known has Houten. The ride to Houten was absolutely beautiful. Full of great views, WW2 bunkers, tons of sheep and cattle, and even a stop to swim, I must say I thoroughly enjoyed it. A lot of this ride was either on or adjacent to the roadway in which cars and motorcycles were going pretty fast. At first, this was a scary thought, but to our luck, the power bikes have over moto vehicles in the city carried over to the countryside. Cars and cycles would either wait until they had a safe way to pass us and go around if needed and all of them slowed down significantly when coming near and passing us. This reassured me that I, in fact, was safe. This experience was a little to me. Not that I felt unsafe biking around the countryside of Denmark or Sweden, but here it really felt like I was the m...