Sunday, August 18
Jake had paintball things to do in the morning, so Cyndi and i were on our own. Today, we were going to explore Roskilde.
Before my cousins moved here, Roskilde is the only Danish city i could have named besides Copenhagen, and i only knew about Roskilde because the second-largest annual music festival in the world happens there. I used to download a lot of concert bootlegs on Napster in the early 00s. Cyndi & Jake were able to attend the Roskilde Festival this year, and were excited to tell me they saw the Foo Fighters, and also an alien balloon and a cow balloon tied together so that as they bounced with the crowd, it looked like the alien was fucking the cow.
We took the train out to the same station as when we did my supply run to Fotex, and where we got the amazing kebabs. We grabbed some quick breakfast items from the 7-11, because somehow, 7-11s in Denmark are brightly lit, clean, welcoming spaces full of friendly people and food that doesn't completely suck? When Cyndi was telling me about Danish 7-11s, i had responded, "7-11? The same place with the pizza that gave me diarrhea while i was driving through the Rocky Mountains?" Anyway i selected the two items that looked least familiar from the fresh food warming shelves. One of them turned out to just be a meatball. The other was kind of like a taquito, or a gas station tornado, with spinach and cheese inside. They were alright!
We talked about walking over to the Roskilde Domkirken (Cathedral) first, it made the most sense geographically, but a quick check on the internet revealed that it was closed until 1pm. Of course! It's Sunday, they're having services. Our tourism will have to wait.
Instead, we made for the Viking Ship Museum. We unexpectedly walked through a cool park, and i didn't take any photos or video until for a while. Suddenly, i was like, oh shit, this is a cool park, i should shoot something, so i started up the new 360 camera, only for us to reach the end of the park a minute later.
Coming down a residential road, we found kind of a traffic jam, just a line of cars stopped at a roundabout, backed up for a couple of blocks. This is weird in Denmark, especially outside of Copenhagen; Roskilde is the tenth most populous city in the country, at 52,000 people, but it's still quiet and quaint. You just don't see "traffic."
"What is going on with all these cars??" Cyndi wondered out loud, as we passed an elderly woman tending her garden.
"The Tour of Denmark bicycle race is coming through here!" the woman replied. "They're stopping traffic at the intersection. You'll be fine going on foot!"
"Ohhh," Cyndi said. "Well that's nice, it's great to see all these bikes!"
"And all these fit young men in lycra!" the woman laughed.
I didn't even know we were getting close to the museum, but we approached a body of water and i noticed what looked like a Viking ship sailing away. We had arrived.
The museum was crowded. There's a theater right near the entrance which plays a short documentary, but we skipped it because of the line, figuring we'd circle back later. We wanted to see some boats.
They have the remains of five viking ships on display in the main part of the museum. Historical records indicate they were built in the early 11th century. All five were scuttled in 1070 to form a blockade in Roskilde Fjord to protect the city during an enemy attack. They were excavated in 1962. The museum was built in 1969 expressly to display them.
A father and son walked past us wearing full Viking regalia, very high-quality cosplay.
Behind the boats, full floor-to-ceiling windows provide a lot of natural light to the whole museum, but also give a wondrous view to Roskilde Fjord. As we gazed out the window at the butt of a duck looking for a fish, Cyndi said, "Oh! This is your first fjord! You got to see one before Norway!"
"Nice! My first fjord!" I said. But after thinking about it for a minute, i wasn't so sure. "Actually, i think my first one might have been in New Zealand. I know they have fiords. I know we passed through a region called 'Fiordland.' Not sure if that's different. What exactly is a fjord, anyway?"
"I'm not actually sure," she replied.
I tried to look it up on my phone, but i wasn't getting any mobile data in the building and the wifi was not connecting.
Aside from the ships, there is a pretty intricate miniature set showing the progression that this type of battle may have taken, minute by minute. In another room, two replica ships are set up which can be climbed on, and have displays in all the parts that open up. It's cool enough for adults to explore and touch things, and see how they function, and sturdy enough that children are allowed to play on it and pretend to be vikings. They even have costumes available for the kids to wear. Like, Halloween-costume level stuff, not like the cosplay we'd seen earlier.
Behind that, there is a display of tools, equipment, clothing, and other day to day items the vikings used. There's a full ringmail shirt, which is hung such that it assumes the form of a human torso. You can touch it, and lift the metal from the bottom to see how heavy it is.
We never did get back to the cinema, opting to move on to other things, since that line wasn't getting any shorter.
On the grounds outside, there was a lot happening. Cyndi said that when she and Jake had visited previously, none of this was here, and Jake was going to be a little jealous of all the cool stuff he was missing.
Kids were getting dressed up in Viking costumes and hitting each other with replica swords and shields. They were walking around to other stations to learn little bits of Viking life. A full blacksmith shop was set up in a tent, with a guy doing some actual blacksmithing, and letting the kids run the billows on the fire. We walked through a small maze gouged into the ground.
Past that, at the docks, floated more replica Viking ships, these ones actually seaworthy. We were able to climb inside of one of them, to get a feel for walking around on the thing as it bobbed up and down in the water. It's not really easy to access the floor while you're traversing the boat; mostly it's a balancing act on the beams that run from port to starboard and may also be seats.
From there, there's a foot bridge over to the shipyards. There are clubs in Roskilde that get together and just...build Viking ships. For fun. Then they sail them. We saw a few of these boats in various stages of construction, and the people who work on them for the sheer pleasure of doing it. It kind of made me want to build a Viking ship.
The shipyards also include several preservation tanks which they are using to slowly bring up additional pieces of the five wrecks from the bottom of the fjord. They can't just be pulled out of the water; they've been down there for a thousand years, to suddenly expose them to air would cause them to disintegrate. They need to be gradually adjusted. Like a diver avoiding the bends.
The cathedral was a nice walk from there. We went through a different part of the same pretty park. This time i did remember to capture some images!
Roskilde Domkirken is a large cathedral, with the high gothic arches you'd expect, the enormous pipe organ, and a long proper area leading to an elevated pulpit with significant artifacts. A little odd, there's a lectern in the middle where readings may be delivered, but like...half the chairs have their backs to it, so that's confusing to me.
This church is also extremely fucking metal.
There's skulls everywhere. There's a huge door (which only Danish Royalty are allowed to enter, but any may leave from) that depicts what looks like a melting Jesus and two decapitated heads. There's a centuries-old clock that animates to display a dragon getting killed every hour, and as it dies, it lets out a scream that can be heard across the entire church. Unfortunately, at the hour, we were on the other side of the building, so we couldn't see it happen, but we sure did hear it.
Like Westminster Abbey, Notre Dame, and some other churches i've seen in Europe, Roskilde Domkirken is also filled with dead bodies. Kings and queens for a thousand years, at least forty are thought to be buried in the church, but only 37 have been verified. The oldest, who has not conclusively been found yet, is Harald Bluetooth, King of Denmark from 958 until his death in 986, and also King of Norway for at least a few years in the 970s. He is also the namesake of the bluetooth technology we all depend on and tenuously love/hate today.
In addition to visiting the sarcophagi of so many previous Danish rulers, we also came to the spot where Denmark's previous queen, Margrethe II, will be laid to rest. Not right now, she's still alive, she voluntarily abdicated earlier this year to allow her son Frederik X to ascend. She's 84 and she's been Queen since 1972. The area where she will be buried currently has a colorful bench as a placeholder for her tomb. We had a seat and chilled for a bit, where a queen will be buried.
There are also thousands of other bodies in the church, many of which can never be identified. Some prominent religious and political figures have large stone grave markings in the floor, again, like we saw at Westminster Abbey and Notre Dame. There's one strange one that sticks up from the floor, and is frankly a tripping hazard, that has no words engraved in it. According to the booklet, the legend was that this grave belonged to a helhest (hell horse), the ghost of a three-legged horse who was buried alive.
There is no horse in the grave, which is actually older than the legend of the helhest, but evidently it contains "parts of two human skeletons."
The melted Jesus door, by the way. From seeing it, i had assumed it was salvaged from one of the many times the church has burned in the last thousand years, but no. It's new, and it looks exactly as intended. Installed in 2010, it was designed by Peter Brandes to depict the Bible story "Journey to Emmaus," when two of the disciples first recognized the resurrected Christ after his death.
Just outside the church, we came through a courtyard with and interesting collaborative bench art project. There was a café in the middle where we stopped for lunch. I got a fantastic chai latte, there was a taste in there that was very familiar but which i couldn't quite place, and smørrebrød rødspættefilet, an incredible open-faced sandwich with breaded fish and shrimp. Cyndi got what turned out to be a large crate filled with appetizers.
Sated, we started toward the Roskilde Rock and Roll Museum, something i was very excited about both in advance because of the music festival, and doubly so now after Cyndi described it as a very hands-on, interactive museum that expanded her idea of what a museum can and should be.
We had to walk a little ways to get to our bus stop. Here in Denmark, the bus stops all have digital signs with real-time updates on how many minutes until your bus arrives. When we left the café, we were pretty sure we had about seven minutes before the bus reached that stop. Upon arrival, it said one minute, which tracks. We saw that on the sign, looked away for a moment, then i swear when we both looked back it said five minutes.
So we waited.
After what felt like about five minutes, it said four minutes.
"It was five minutes, four minutes ago!" i said, paraphrasing Snatch, as i am wont to do.
We contemplated walking over to a different bus stop, but just as we were about to go, of course the bus arrived.
It dropped us off in an area that did not so much look like a city, but more a very small town. From the bus stop, Cyndi led me across the street and straight into a forest. As soon as we broke the treeline, it opened into a wide dirt path through the woods.
We were only in the tree cover for about a block before the path dumped us into the ass end of an industrial area, with a strange drainage ditch that looked like it might have been an aborted water feature. As we passed through the mishmash of metal work buildings and greenhouses, i noticed a strange structure peaking over the roofs. It was bright orange and textured like the metal studs on a punk's leather jacket. I mused that i used to have an external hard drive that looked like that.
"What a fascinating building," i said, pointing.
"I have excellent news," Cyndi reported.
The pavement leading up to this strange orange-studded building was painted to look like they'd rolled out the red carpet for us. As soon as we entered the Roskilde Rock and Roll Museum, the very second thing i noticed was that they were selling t-shirts of an inflatable alien fucking an inflatable cow. The first thing was a giant cardboard troll band playing corrugated instruments.
As i was busy noticing these things, Cyndi went to hang her coat up. The coat hangers are all on the ceiling, 20 feet above the ground, and can be brought down with a pulley system.
The museum starts on the 3rd floor, then continues down to the 2nd, and ends at the gift shop on the first. Or, i guess, as the Danish count it, begins on the 2nd floor, continues to the first, and ends at the gift shop on the ground floor.
We went up the elevator. It's very slow, it takes a couple of minutes to ascend two floors, but it plays you a musical intro to the museum as it goes. Also the thing is lined with mirrors, so you have a few minutes to be wacky with your friends. Cyndi suggested that the elevator is slow to accommodate the music; i thought the music might be to distract from how slow it is. After seeing the rest of the museum, though, i think she's probably right.
The exhibits are very interactive and everything is presented in a very interesting way. You start out with some laser displays that you can somewhat control, plus more mirror installations to play with.
The other direction, you come to a room dominated by a huge, spinning recreation of a vinyl record on a turntable, maybe 12 feet across. In other words, at 10x scale. You can sit or lie back on the LP and stare up at yourself in the mirrors on the ceiling as you go around and a round. Probably at 0.33 RPM, though, or 1/100th speed. Maybe even slower.
As you lie there, speakers above play snippets from songs that have been sampled in other famous songs, and you are invited to guess the sample. They do skew toward things that were popular in Denmark, though, so there's a lot in there that i just had no idea.
There's more rooms with recreations of fashion trends, old audio equipment, studio setups, posters, merchandise, and more. The whole museum is less focused on collecting ephemera that previously belonged to famous musicians, like many museums i've been to, and more on using reconstructed examples of what was to teach the history. While i do often like to look through a display case and be like, "whoa, that's the cocktail napkin Sid Vicious wiped the corner of his mouth on at the Viper Room in Los Angeles in 1971," i like this approach too. Rather than coming home and answering, "How was your trip?" with "I saw a famous napkin!" i'll be able to say, "I saw a DIY denim vest concept that i'm definitely going to rip off."
They did also have a cocktail napkin that David Byrne drew a flow chart on for some reason.
I'd be remiss if i didn't mention the room which was dwarfed by a floor-to-ceiling quarter of a disco ball, which they used mirrors on the wall & ceiling to give the appearance of a full disco ball. In this room, there was a projector screen which also used a camera to make an Xbox Kinect-looking shadowy outline of up to two people standing in front of it, and it would show you how to do dance moves, and you would try to copy them. Your silhouette on the screen would follow you, so you could watch your outline in third person and see how you were doing. The dance tracks were randomly generated, a couple was doing an oldies dance (maybe The Twist?) when we walked in. I had not intended to participate in the thing, but i accidentally walked too close, and it decided i needed to learn some hip hop steps. So i just rolled with it. I thought it was a little funny that the silhouette cut a hole in my chest where my camera was hanging from the neck strap. Cyndi did join me for the back half of the demonstration. I think it's for the best that no one got a video of any of that.
I was about to go into a green screen karaoke room decked out to look like a recording studio isolation booth when Jake came strolling up to us. He was done with the face shooting, he'd been home and had a shower and walked the dog, he'd grabbed himself some lunch, and now he was able to come join us for adventures!
I slipped into that booth and selected a random pop song to do my music video to. I didn't really sing along, i just danced like no one was watching because as far as i knew, no one WAS watching. I did feel, the whole time, that there was probably a screen outside that was broadcasting my entire performance to anyone else in the museum, so i kept that in mind.
My teal hair was also largely masked out by the chroma key.
When the song was finished, i was given an option to have the video emailed to me, and also a QR code to pull it up on my phone. I did both, fortunately, because the email has never arrived and at this point it's probably not gonna.
Cyndi & Jake were in a different room when i came out, which had a four-foot-tall wooden cassette tape. I stuck my hand in the wheel and tried to turn the spoke, but alas, even though it was a separate piece, it just wiggled a bit. It would have been a lot cooler if they'd hooked both wheels up with a pulley inside so you could turn them.
"I need a giant pencil!" Cyndi shouted.
There was a mostly empty room where Cyndi said there used to be an exhibit on the history of the Roskilde Music Festival. It's either under maintenance now, or is being replaced by a different exhibit, i think the signage was confusing as to which.
Next to that, there was a stack of note cards and a bulletin board where people can share a song with all others that come through the museum. So you can read the other cards and check out the recommended music, and also they put together a Spotify playlist every month with the suggestions. I submitted Venger by Perturbator & Greta Link, because it's been a year but that is still how i feel in my heart.
As we were exiting through the gift shop, we saw a man wearing a NASA shirt looking through the items. "Hey, didn't we see you at the Viking Ship Museum?" Cyndi asked.
"We did!" i said. "I remember you because i have the same shirt!"
We got to talking with the guy, and it turned out that not only had he lived in the US for a time, he was a Packers fan. Cyndi had just been telling me the previous day that her and Jake have given up on trying to explain that they're from Wisconsin to anyone in Denmark because no one knows what that is, so they just say "north of Chicago" now. She also said you can't say Green Bay or Packers because no one even knows what the NFL is. And now here we are, the first random stranger we have a conversation with, and he knows all of it.
"We're from north of Chicago," Cyndi said.
"Oh, like Milwaukee?" he asked.
And we were off to the races.
On the way out of the museum, there's a hand sanitizer station set up on a hi-hat stand, so you can push the foot pedal and it squirts the sanitizer. I saw Jake do it, and it shot out so powerfully that the sanitizer all ended up on his leg. Thinking i had learned something from watching him, i tried to push down very, very slowly and carefully on the pedal...only to watch the sanitizer clear my hands entirely and blast down my shorts in a way that looked exactly like you'd expect.
Coming out of the museum, we walked into an area of restaurants & bars built into old shipping containers. There seem to be a lot of shipping containers repurposed into buildings in Denmark!
I ended up getting another beer that i really liked. It was very fruity, didn't even taste like a beer at all. There was just no bitterness to it. It was still heavy like a beer, though, but i didn't mind as much as i usually do. No hemp in this one, unfortunately.
Maybe i should start drinking beer? Maybe i've reached a point where i like beer? But i drink beer slower than cocktails, it's a viscosity thing, and maybe that...would be a good thing for me?
For our last stop in Roskilde, we tried to go to a cute little bar that Cyndi was very excited about, Gustav Wieds, but sadly, it closed at 6 on Sunday. Next time, i guess.
While we were waiting for the bus out of Roskilde, we saw a backpack left alone on the curb between the sidewalk and the bike lane. "There's a backpack," Cyndi said.
We all stared at it for a second. "Well...if you see something, say something?" i said.
"Nah, this is Denmark, it's probably not a bomb." We got sidetracked quoting a comedy routine that's come up a few times during the trip but that i cannot remember the source of right now and is impossible to duckduckgo, that's goes something like, "What if i forgot that i accidentally packed a gun in my carryon?" You know, the kind of things that normal people think when they go through airport security.
"Someone is probably coming back for it," Cyndi explained. "Around here, usually if you see something, people will leave it alone because it's just expected that the person will be returning for it. Like with my backpack last night. Everything is very trust based around here. And it works."
I love that.
And i wish that more of the world was like that.
I, the reckless optimist, do think that more of the world is like that than we give it credit for, though.
Traveling through Europe, you always hear people saying things like, "Look out, there are pickpockets everywhere! There is crime! People will steal your things!" And, yeah. Yeah there are pickpockets and thieves and bad things do happen and sometimes people act badly, especially when their needs are not being met. But i prefer to believe that people are generally good, and will generally do the right thing. Yes, stuff has been stolen from me. But not as often as stuff has been not stolen from me.
I know my experiences are not universal, and i know in many, many ways i've been an extremely lucky person my entire life. Bad things do happen to me. I'm taking this whole trip to try and recover from the worst thing that has ever happened to my family.
But i still choose optimism and trust.
And yeah, there's still plenty of time. I may still get robbed on this trip. Someone may make off with my entire backpack, all my camera gear, my laptop, all my provisions. I hope that doesn't happen. I would be absolutely gutted to lose all of the footage and photos that i view as one of the big justifications for this trip (i had said i was gonna try to do YouTube videos as i went, but i kinda knew that wouldn't happen. I will still make those videos, though.). But if it does, well, i knew the risks.
I heard a phrase decades ago that affected me so much more than i could have known at the time. I might just now be realizing that it may very well have been my guiding principle all these years. I like to say i'm adventurous, i'm reckless, but for a purpose. But here's what it comes down to. Here's the old folk saying.
"A ship in the harbor is safe. But that is not what ships are for."
We made a couple more stops so i could pick up the last few supplies i'd missed on our previous supply trip before heading back to the house.
After dropping our things off, we went to one of their favorite restaurants, Bollini's, and i had a delectable butternut squash pasta. I...really need better words for describing food. Everything i've had so far has been just incredible, fantastic, amazing, delicious, delectable, or some combination thereof. Aside from the 7-11 food, which was, alright! Bollini's salad bar also really got me. I had added a bunch of tiny cubes of what i had assumed was tofu, but it turned out to be feta. I'm not mad about that. Also they had both sundried tomatoes and straight-up cloves of garlic in oil that could be added to your salad. With the oil from those two items, who even needs dressing?
When we were ordering, Cyndi and Jake had their complete orders ready, you know, like normal people when the server comes to take your order, and i knew the food i wanted but i had not even considered a drink. I floundered a bit, i was about to ask Cyndi which wine she had gotten when she said "the cocktails are on the back page." I flipped there, and immediately knew i was getting the first-listed item.
"Don't tell them, but this is what i want," i said, pointing. He nodded, and disappeared.
"You didn't," Cyndi said.
"I think we all know that i did."
When he brought the drinks out, she saw it immediately and started laughing. "That's not what i thought you did, but it is very funny."
Aperol spritz.
During dinner, we talked a little about the Danish Royal Family. They seem pretty down to earth, pretty in tune with their subjects, especially compared to...pretty much any other royal family on earth, past or present. Evidently, there's an event in the spring where you can run with the Royals. There are 1.6, 5, and 10 kilometer races you can sign up for, and the new King comes and runs the race with you. He's been doing this since he was a Prince.
I might come back to Copenhagen in the spring to run with the King. That sounds like an experience.
From there, it was time to call it a night. Monday was coming, after all, and they were gonna need to work in the morning. And i...i was gonna need to figure out my Norway plans. Because at that point, i had none, other than "go there" and "find a stranger's couch to sleep on."
See? Optimism and trust.
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