Denmark

Denmark is a country that I have experienced in many different shapes and forms since it was only 20 minutes away from my hometown Helsingborg in southern Sweden. In my childhood it was cheaper in Denmark so we often went there to buy toys and go to the amusement parks called Tivoli and Bakken and then get some taxfree candy on the ferries going home. The red sausages known as pølse were the most exotic thing I had tried at that age and I always had fond memories of Denmark since all the family went there and had fun.

Lalandia is a huge waterpark in southern Denmark, just a ferry away from Germany, where I went three times as a kid. The first time was like a dream come true, living in a big house in a made-up village for the visitors, and having walking distance to the waterpark so you could go there every day. I don’t know why but I love places that doesn’t feel real, there’s no real life going on there, it’s a construction of someone’s idea and I like that feeling of an imaginary place, like I can imagine Disneyworld to be even though I haven’t been there.

When we weren’t swimming in the waterpark we went to a bar to play some pool and listening to the jukebox and since we were kids we thought it was cool that they had drinks without alcohol too. I thought it was for kids, and I remember my favorite drink to be Drivers Dream, which today is an obvious reference to not drink and drive. But at that point of time I thought it sounded cool, it must be a reference to a cool car or something since it’s a driver’s dream!

I bought a dried seahorse in a souvenir shop and I remember not believing my mom when she said it was a real animal, because I thought it was made up like unicorns. No way there are small horses swimming around in the sea where I swim in the summer. Maybe I took the name a little bit too literal.

I always want to try everything once and I didn’t like that the waterpark had one area that I couldn’t get into called Adam & Eve. It was a nudist section and you had to buy a special coin to get into that area. I didn’t care if it was nudist or not, I just didn’t like the feeling of missing out so the next time we went to Lalandia me and my friend Martin went in. There were only naked old men and women in there, and a father that sat a little bit too close to his 18 years old daughter, and us two kids. We quickly learned it wasn’t his daughter when they kissed so now we understood why they sat so close. Since we were kids we got bored by just sitting in a pool, so we started snorkeling and saw too many genitals for a kid to see in one day. I can just imagine what the old people in there thought when they saw us started snorkeling and they all had a smirk on their face when we did it.

I also have a bad memory from Lalandia when my mom and her boyfriend sat and talked with a random guy who had invited himself at a bowling bar. I have always been good at picking up good and bad vibes from people just by observing them and I got a bad vibe from this man. Some hour later my mom felt dizzy and said she needed air and had to go out for a while, and the stranger said he could keep her company. I had never seen her like this before so I refused to let her be alone with him and so I said I would go with her instead because her boyfriend didn’t seem to care and just stayed in the bar. Outside she said she felt drugged and I told her that we need to get out of this place and go home and I was walking with her and my bike towards our house that we rented. The stranger came out and went after us and when we told him to leave us alone he kept on stalking us. I told my mom to get on the bike and I pedaled with all my strength and when he started to run after us I felt it was a question of life and death. When we got to the house and got in safe I was so relieved until I remembered my mom had told him where we lived since he claimed to be a good cook and that he wanted to cook for us the next day. I just hid myself under the couch and wanted it all to end. And could you guess what, he never showed up the next day to make us dinner.

The last time I went to Lalandia with friends and siblings only and even though I think it’s strange that we’re allowed to go there by ourselves as kids I still love my parents for letting us be independent at young age. I remember it not being the same without the whole family, and maybe we were getting too old for it too. When we got back to the customs between Denmark and Sweden they wanted to check me for illegal stuff. I thought this was weird since I was just a kid that had been on a waterpark vacation. After he checked my stuff he was like “maybe you should go home and get some rest, your eyes look very tired”. I guess he thought I was drunk or high because of my weary eyes and I felt cool for being portrayed as a potential drug smuggler even though I had been scared in the investigation room since I had seen movies where they used plastic gloves to check for drugs in places I wanted no one to go.

This is me a lot older at another waterpark called The Reef in Frederikshavn, I never grow up

When I became a teenager the thought of Denmark turned to a place where you could buy alcohol because they are not strict about it like in Sweden where you got to be 20 to buy it. The ferries between the countries got more known as transportation for drunk teenagers from Sweden and we often went to the Kronborg castle to party in the summer time.

Me and my friend Pär at Kronborg showing off the latest fashion

I got into the music scene about this age too and so the amusement parks and waterparks got replaced by music venues, but the first big concert I ever went to was ironically at the amusement park Tivoli in -98 where I saw Smashing Pumpkins perform. I remember I lost my shoe in the crowd and I could already see my dad laughing at me when I would come home with just one shoe when I was to prove that I could take care of myself. But it was like a miracle that I found the shoe after the concert had ended and all people had disappeared and that feeling was almost better than the show which was alright but didn't live up to my high expectations.

I was quickly hooked on the music scene and went to shows in Copenhagen many times every year and almost got to learn to know the capital from it. Before I had mostly spent my time with my family on Strøget which is the famous pedestrian street. And I loved Copenhagen, it seemed so open minded, cultural and it really had its own identity. As compared to my hometown which is narrowminded and has no identity what so ever. Just do your best to fit in and people will leave you alone is the mentality and it almost felt like Copenhagen was the city that taught me a lesson of how to express myself.

Picture memory 1: me and my girlfriend Felicia at Skagen

Roskilde Festival is one of Europe’s largest music festivals and at the same time one of the biggest parties. I had just quit drinking even though I had just started so I thought maybe it’s not a good idea to go there, and it certainly wasn’t. Drunk people can be annoying when you´re sober and when there are 100 000 drunks around you at the same time, you get what I’m saying. 

I went back some years later and that time I embraced the festival spirit for real, sober was out of the question as I turned up with a hoodie with a marijuana leaf as the motive and a 1,5 litres beer bottle in my hand. I had turned up without my glasses because I was afraid they would be broken during the wild festival life and I thought I could have my one pair of day lenses during all the festival. They got really annoying after three days of itching and it was impossible to get them out because my eyes were so dehydrated. When I finally got them out after hours and hours I remember I yelled “I can see, I can see!”, which was ironic since taking them out meant that I couldn’t see anything with a clear view for the rest of the festival. 

Picture memory 2: Me feeling like the danish saga "Prinsessan På Ärten" (Once Upon A Mattress is the english title) while on tour with my band Ninjaspark

The freetown Christiania which is a self-proclaimed autonomous neighborhood in central Copenhagen was a place where you could buy drugs openly on the streets when I grew up. And I remember that me and a friend locked ourselves into the toilet at a music venue called Loppen to try and roll a joint before we were going to see Nouvelle Vague perform. 

We were really bad at it because we were newbies so it took us a really long time and suddenly someone knocked hard on the door and yelled “What are you doing in there!? Open up immediately!”. We got really scared and felt busted and thought there’s no way to hide it so we might as well confess as we open the door. We opened it and said we were sorry and that we had been rolling a joint and we understood that we would be thrown out. But the woman on the other side who worked there just said “Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you were doing some of the bad drugs since you have been in there forever. Don’t let me disturb you and have a nice evening!” 

Picture memory 3: me feeling safe while guarded by a danish soldier at a shitty hotel

Something that I find strange with Denmark is how bad the bands are that originate from there, since the music scene is so vital. There is one exception and that is the noisy pop band The Raveonettes which draw its inspiration of the 60s but with a distorted twist, like the more known The Jesus And Mary Chain from Scotland. I absolutely adore them but none of my friends were into them so when they were going to play in their hometown Copenhagen I felt like I was going to miss out on the best concert of the year. But my friend Nils joined me, not because of the band in particular, but more with the attitude of why not, let’s go and have some fun in Copenhagen! 

And fun we had and lots of beer with it. After we had gotten half of the crowd angry at us for spilling beer on them I felt the urge to try a reverse stage dive. That’s when you climb the fence that is holding the audience back, and then jump onto the stage. I timed it perfectly in a song where the light was flashing so it was pitch black between the flashes of light. The guards didn’t notice me where I suddenly was lying on the floor of the scene laughing at my own accomplishment, because I hadn’t even believed in it myself. While I was lying there laughing they spotted me and pulled me down and Nils thought “hey, let me try this too” and he jumped over the fence too. The guards were mad at us and of course they had to push us all the way down to the exit of the building even though we already were walking that way.

The night could have ended here if it wasn’t for our will to meet the band afterwards so we stood and waited a long, long time outside the venue and after all the audience were gone except for us the backstage area opened and it was an older woman walking out. A bit disappointed we still felt the need to talk to her and it turned out it was Sune’s mom, Sune being the guitarist and singer in the band. We told her she should be so proud of her son and we almost talked to her like you talk to children. 

Then suddenly the door opened again and this time they left it open to get some air into the venue. We sneaked in and there they were, the band and the arrangers. No one seemed to care about us entering and we kept a low profile to get to stay there. Then the duo left separately and we ran after them both to get some bad mobile phone pictures of me and them, we then followed Sune around since he told us he was going to an after party while Sharin, the other member of the band, was going home with some people with a stroller. Which didn’t seem that rock ‘n’ roll to us.

You can hardly tell but it's me and Sharin on the left and Sune and me on the right

We went into an apartment building in central Copenhagen and up some stairs to go the party together with Sune even though he didn’t seem that amused by us joining in without asking. Suddenly a guy turned up and asked us to leave since Sune had asked him to get rid of the Swedes. In bad Danish I tried to sound like I wasn’t a Swede and that he must had mistaken us for someone else. That didn’t help of course and we got thrown out.

While going down the stairs of the apartment building we realized there was a party at the first floor as well so we entered and hoped that no one would ask who we were. We stayed there for a while and didn’t connect with anyone, and so Nils had to go to the bathroom and I thought I would join him since I didn’t want to be left alone. He opened the bathroom door and of course Sune stands there looking back at us over his shoulder, taking a leak and having to forget to lock the door. He has went down to this party without us knowing and the comedy of it all made us just laugh and leave the party.

Out in the night in the streets of Copenhagen again and some prostitutes approached us asking if we wanted blowjobs and of course we said no but they didn’t seem to take no as an answer and kept on talking with us. At the same time someone walked by me and whispered in my ear “keep your hands in your pockets or you will get robbed”. I instantly put my hands in my pocket and at the same time some guys who were in alliance with the prostitutes tried to steal my wallet while the prostitutes tried to have our attention with their chit chat. The stranger who just passed us by has probably seen this act many times before and so I still owe him for saving me from getting mugged. We ran from the robbers and they chased after us. I saw a guy who just entered an apartment building and I ran as fast as I could to get to the door before it was going to close behind him. We got in and ran up all stairs to try and find a safe spot. Instead we were now feeling trapped if the robbers would get in, but they didn’t and after some time we felt safe enough to walk out again and go towards the central station. We´ve had enough of excitement for one evening.

The train wasn’t going for a long time and we were so tired that we went into a nearby hotel acting as if we were staying there. We went up to the highest floor and felt on the door handles to every door and of course they were all closed. Suddenly one door was open and at the same time I opened it, the guy sleeping in the room was waking up from the light of the corridor and he wondered what the hell was going on. And at the exact same time the receptionist from the hotel had spotted us and he was yelling at us to leave. We ran down the stairs and left the hotel and entered the train station again. It was around Christmas time so there was a big Christmas tree in the middle of the station with big boxes under it to simulate gifts. I was so tired that I thought to myself that I should crawl inside one of the boxes to take a nap, I never did, and maybe that was the first good choice of ours during this crazy night.

I have so many memories from Denmark that it’s impossible to tell them all, so instead I gave you some glimpses into some of them and maybe some other time I can talk about making love at the erotic museum or be camping at the Roskilde Festival ground in February and almost freezing to death, but that’s a whole nother story.

* Best things about Denmark – the open minded vibe that anything goes, the Dogma movies and Danish rye bread

* Most mediocre thing about Denmark – it’s too close to Sweden so it doesn’t really feel like going abroad

* Worst things about Denmark – it’s a bit filthy, it’s nice that they got the party started but they don’t seem to want to clean up the mess the day after so to speak, and beware of the smell from cheese shops

Best countries in the world according to the nerd (will be updated with every post):

1. Andorra

2. Denmark

3. Belgium

4. Bosnia And Herzegovina

5. Albania

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