Skip to main content

July 5th

I arrived in Copenhagen last night after a grueling 10-hour layover in Iceland due to layovers. On my way to the hostel, I got lost multiple times. If it weren't the open friendliness of the people who live here I might not have ever found my hostel in the first place. Someone actually went out of their way to ask if I was lost and give me directions.
Due to jet lag and people who snore louder than Snorlax himself, I could barely get any sleep. So I decided at 6:00 AM to get up and get lost... this was the best decision I could have made! During my exploration, I started noticing things about the city that make it seem so ideal. There's a park every few blocks, barely any litter, beautiful street art, everyone bikes, and everyone to respect one another as well as there surroundings.


Later on in the day once our group had settled in and rented bikes, we made it a goal to get lost again. This was a completely different experience on bikes. Not only can you see much more of the city faster on a bike, but you also start to get an understanding of Copenhagens prominent bike culture. Here, transportation is an ecosystem in which everything has respect for their counterparts, whether that be drivers respecting cyclists, cyclists respecting each other, or even public transportation and pedestrians be respected by cyclists. This is not how I see America's transportation situation. In the U.S. All anyone seems to care about deeply is drivers. In Copenhagen they also allow cyclists to use nearly any street safely. Nearly all major streets have a raised bikeway, allowing the cyclists to get to where they're going as fast as possible while being safe. So far Copenhagen seems like what I've always learned a city should be,  except for the severe lack of minorities and people of color. But that's another issue. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

July 19th

Our first full day in Utrecht started with a meeting in Utrecht's city hall with traffic engineer Ronald Tamse. The first thing on our agenda was a presentation Ronald put together for us. One of the first things he showed us was this graph showing the transportation priority: This shows the growing priority of bicycles around the world and in Holland specifically. In fact, he argued that they have more priority in the Netherlands and Utrecht than in Copenhagen. I have to say I agree with him as well. While biking around the city you get the feeling that bikes and the people riding them are more important and more powerful than motor vehicles. This sort of thing causes more people to bike out of sheer convenience, and when there's less traffic on the street it creates more sociability on the street. Through this process, streets can become social or public spaces, rather than just a piece of pavement made for cars to drive on. This is great because so much of a cities ...
Post a Comment
Read more