Christiania

We have left Copenhagen now but on Saturday evening, after we finished our second half of our walking tour, we rode a rickshaw 

over to Christiania to explore Copenhagen's hippie community.  We had heard that Christiania was very entertaining in the evening because it is a very artsy community

and lots of entertainers perform in the evening and it was Saturday night, after all.

We had heard correctly and thoroughly enjoyed our time there.  We were there several hours and we would have returned if we had more time in Copenhagen. Christiania is like a commune that formed in 1971 and now is a "free city", an ultra-human mishmash of idealists, hippies, potheads, non-materialists and happy children.  There are about 600 adults living here, 200 children, 200 cats, 200 dogs (off-leash, of course), 17 horses, and 2 parrots.  There are even a handful of Willie Nelson-type seniors among the 180 remaining from the original takeover in 1971.  In 1971, it was just a bunch of old abandoned military barracks and some hippie squatters just took it over and the city let them. Today, it thrives and they love tourists to come visit them because we are a major part of their economy.  

There are 14 neighborhoods here with nine rules: no cars, no hard drugs, no guns, no explosives, no advertisements and so on.  Marijuana is legal here and as soon as  you walk in the entrance...

you start getting whiffs of it everywhere.  Being from Seattle where pot is legal anyway, we often experience this when we're out and about, so it's not real shocking to us.  The street when you first walk in is called Pusher Street because that's where all the marijuana/hashish booths were.  Now they are all gone, the last one was taken down just last week because of outsiders coming in and abusing the peaceful ways of Christiania.  The residents do not like interacting with the police of Copenhagen.  We did see a Christiania pusher stall in the National Museum that we visited on Sunday, taken right off of Pusher Street.

What kind of hashish do you like?  Take your pick.

They had a lot of varieties.  Even though the above display is fake hash, the museum staff say the samples from the display are constantly "disappearing".

Bruce and I strolled around Christiania, occasionally stopping to hear musicians or look at artwork.

Here it looks like someone is trying to restore an old boat. 

The community pays the city about $1 million a year for utilities  and has about 1 million a year more to run it's local affairs.  A few "luxury hippies" have oil heat but most use wood or gas.  Locals build their homes but don't own them-they can't buy or sell property. A third of the adult population works on the outside, a third works on the inside, and third don't work at all. We had planned to eat dinner here on Saturday night because Christiania actually has very good restaurants so we picked the vegetarian restaurant called Spiseloppen. ("The Flea Eats")

It was like going into someone home and smelled wonderful!

They had a vegetarian baked dish that came with two of the many salads offered,

or soup of the day with bread that was Potato Rootfruit soup. I had Red Lentil Cream with Beet Root Sauce with rice and veggies.  

It tasted like a homemade dinner from home. (only better since I didn't have to make it)  Bruce loved the look of all the salads so he ordered a plate of three salads and then ate half of mine because I was so full after only eating half. They gave very generous portions.

He had a carrot salad, a lima bean salad with cabbage and then an apple fruit salad.  All of them were seasoned so well with whatever, it just tasted so good after eating in restaurants for so many days.  Then, we just sat there letting our food digest and enjoying the warm and cozy feeling of being in someone's home except it was just a typical Christiania restaurant.  We would have definitely come back here to eat if we were in Copenhagen for more than a few days.  Another part of Copenhagen's feeling of being home away from home.  We left Christiania but I think I might have left a piece of my heart here, maybe because I'm just a little bit of a hippie at heart.