Cultural orgy?

The National Gallery in Copenhagen was our last cultural endeavour, and on our last full day in the city it finally rained. We could spend our day in a museum without feeling guilty of missing out on sunshine!

The admission for this museum was free and we were there at opening-hour 10 a.m. Only a handful of people were gathering outside the museum in the rain, so we had the luxury of walking around in empty rooms with art, which was really pleasant!

The first floor is where we spend nearly all our time. The Danish art was there, along with the foreign art and the sculptures. The sculptures, already my favorite objects to photograph without a doubt, where lined up pretty neatly. The lighting was perfect to make nice photo's! Take a look at the following examples:














After we had seen the Danish art and the sculptures, we were moving on to the foreign art where we faced the cultural shock of our lives. I haven't been to many museums in my life, but I know cultural madness when I see it (I'll describe it in a moment). This museum has built up its collections around one big room, surrounded by smaller rooms. The big room has a chronological collection, while the smaller rooms surrounding it are 'themed'. For me, as an art n00b, this was quite confusing as I didn't know to which movement and period in art a work belonged. The museum did not give a lot of side information about the paintings beyond the basics like the title and the artist.

The madness was as follows. We were walking through the first small themed rooms of the foreign art when we got to the big room. It looked like this:



It was all the way crammed with paintings! It was a cultural orgy like I've never witnessed before. Paintings are so nice, but in this way it was too much of a good thing and it was totally impossible to enjoy the art in the way it should, in my opinion, be enjoyed. I like the way Tate Britain displayed their works. Plenty of space around it, benches near the big works, so you could sit down for awhile while enjoying them. In this room, they had one splendid Van Ruysdael painting, but I could hardly enjoy it. It was too distracting to see it being surrounded by tens of other paintings. This room actually made me a little pissed. We moved on quickly, to the smaller rooms where the paintings were hung up with more space between them.

All in all, I did enjoy myself in this place, but that one room fucked up the experience quite a bit. As a Dutch girl, I really like the Dutch paintings and it hurt me to see them being abused in this cultural orgy.
Museum experts, please tell me that this isn't normal???

Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek

On our second day in Copenhagen, Daniël and I ventured out alone, as Sylvia really had to work on her master thesis.

We went to Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, a museum for ancient Greek, Roman and Egyptian art. There were plenty of sculptures, and I love taking photo's of those! The Egyptian ones were my favorites of course. I have to admit, that after visiting the British Museum only a week before, this museum could not compete with the collection and sheer size of the British Museum.

That being said, Daniël and I enjoyed ourselves here. The building was quite nice, with plenty of detail in the ceilings and walls. One ceiling in particular was really psychedelic to me:


The museum also had its collection of mummies and because it was relatively quiet, I took a picture of me and Daniël with the mummies! How cosy.



Their section with Egyptian sculpture was relatively small, but it sported some nice ones!
Disclaimer: not all of the pictures below this text are Egyptian.






This small statue was my favorite in the museum:



And of course,
we saw the stupid little mermaid, the biggest tourist trap of the city.
We were warned that it's only a small, uninteresting statue, but I still had an expectation of some sorts. When we arrived there it really was super small! Tourists were crowding around her, wanting to take a picture with her. I was more interested as to WHY this statue becamse such a big tourist attraction. The fountain nearby was sporting a huge statue which was carried out with more skill and interesting shapes than the Mermaid, and yet there were only a few people hanging around there!

København

Last week London, now København! My friend Sylvia lives in this city right now with her boyfriend. She met her boyfriend while studying abroad in Istanbul and she missed him so much that she is writing her master thesis in Denmark now. They are living in a small apartment near the city centre and they are so kind to let Daniël (my travel companion and friend) and me stay in their house for six days.


My first impression of København was: wow!! This city looks so clean, nice and spacious! It remembered me a little bit of Canada in some ways. We took a long bus ride from the airport to Sylvia's house and I liked everything I saw. No poverty like in London can be found here; it's a world of difference. It even looks nicer than the Netherlands to be honest. We Dutch people made the mistake of building very ugly houses in the past fifty years, whereas the Danish still built their houses in the same vein as their old ones. This makes the whole city look as an organic whole. Also, there are no high buildings.

Today we just strolled around the city. Our first stop was the bicycle dude, where Daniël and I rented bikes for five days. I'm very happy about this, there's nothing more pleasant of getting around in a city on your own. It's not that I dislike public transport so much (although the Tube in London was quite horrendous at times), but I prefer to not be tied to buses, trains, and tubes. You are more able to move freely on a bike, and I like that.

We went to the Botanical Gardens, Rosenburg Castle and the gardens around the castle, the city centre, Nyhavn and Daniël and I even went running together. I had to bring my running gear because I'm awfully behind on my training schedule. The Dam tot Dam loop is drawing nearer and nearer and I'm nowhere near ready to run the 10 miles. It was a little to hot to go running, but we managed to not get lost and ran for about one hour. A shower is almost never more pleasant than after heavy sport activity and this was no exception. We made a nice pasta pesto salad and just now rented a movie.

Tomorrow I want to visit a museum and visit the Palace.

Here are some pictures to give you a general impression of what I saw today.













The last picture was taken in the city centre, where you could find the 'living statues'. This man was the best one I have ever seen! He was walking his bicycle, apperantly on a very windy day. This guy payed attention to the tinyest detail of 'looking windy'. His scarf, the fake smoke blowing from his pipe, his coat...awesome!