Festival - Copenhagen, Denmark
visited Jul 5, 2006
After the last post, we spent most of Sunday wandering around the most famous bits of the city, including the Little Mermaid who sits on a rock near the port. We arrived back at the festival house to be told that there wouldn't be anyone to let us in at the squat where we were staying until about midnight. To our jetlagged selves, this sounded painful, but a nice woman showed us a mattress in the attic of the house here, and, despite the heat, we crashed for a few hours. When we finally got to the squat, we were shown a large concert room that was the designated sleeping area for festival people. It smelt of old beer and cigarettes, but the atmosphere was a little better up on the stage, so we set up there and crashed. As it turned out, we only had one night there, as the second day, we were told about two women who had offered their house for showers and maybe to sleep, but only to "nice" women (which we apparently are). As I was desperate for a shower (I hadn't had one since Korea, and this was our second day in compenhagen!), we turned up there quite late on monday evening, and ended up staying the night. It's a lovely little flat on the top floor, occupied by a Danish lesbian couple and their flatmate from Sweden. It's nice to be able to stay with and talk to some locals - the people at the squat didn't seem in the slightest interested in talking to us, and we sort of felt like intruders. It's much nicer in the flat, and we are very very grateful to the three women for hosting us! Our days have pretty much consisited of spending the morning wandering around Copenhagen, and the afternoon and evening at the festival. Kate has had fun showing me all her old haunts from her semester here in 2004, as well as the tourist sites of the city. Unfortunately it's been really hot, so our tolerance for wandering around is a little limited, but my overall impression is that Copenhagen is a very pleasant little city. As part of the festival we have been to workshops on Queer family, Queer Hair and a very exciting talk and film from Del LaGrace Volcano, which was unexpected. He is in the process of making another book of photos called "Femmes of Power" which sparked Kate's interest. After the workshop we spent some time talking to Del, along with some other people interested in being in the book. It looks like an exciting project! Also as part of the festival, we visited Christiania. This is a whole area of Copenhagen that was squatted about 30 years ago, that has declared itself an independent state. We visited the queer house there, which is actually just a theatre and organising space, but it's very nice to know it's there. We were also given a tour of christiana by one of the women from the house, which was nice, as we would never have seen all the intersting nooks and crannies of the area without it! On to England and Cold Ash tomorrow. I hope it is cooler there!