Holy Crap. That was odd. Yesterday afternoon I made my way to Christiania, a part of Copenhagen just a ten minute walk from my home. Located on the island of Christianshavn, it is basically a town within a town. A town filled with hippies, artists, skaters, internationals, students, pushers, wannabe-pimps, rastafari, homeless and punks.
Christiania or "staden" was found in the 70s, when people just started taking over abandoned military barracks and building houses on it. Today it acts as a self-governed freetown with a semi-legal status as a independent community.
It's hard to describe what I saw in there. If you happen to know the "Tacheles" in Berlin – it's like that, just that it's a whole friggin' town. To me it seemed, that that's what hippie communities back in the late sixties must have looked like: colorful self-constructed shacks and houses, lots of art on the walls, badly kept yards, piles of junk laying around, organic food stores, tiny cafés, open air bars, stray dogs, music everywhere and lots of friendly alternative people, half of them either rolling joints or smoking up. Oh and not to forget a market square and "Pusher Street", basically a 200m strip filled with people selling and discussing the quality of big chunks of hash.
Of course there's also lots of odd looking folks and pre-pubic gangsters trotting around, sometimes even a couple of tourists seem to have lost their way in the tiny alleys, but overall it's a very friendly place with an air of anarchy and flower power. Sadly there seem to be plans by the Copenhagen authorities to demolish this place in a not too distant future. But until then I think I'll maybe spend another one or two afternoons in staden...



For more information check Wikipedia and Christiania.