It's another bright and sunny day in Denmark. Marie's promised to take us to this neighborhood in closer on the Amager Island side of the city that sold marijuana and hash out in the street. Christiania had been a barracks and defensive rampart during the Danish wars with Sweden in the 17th century. The post saw active military duty through World War II, including but not limited to serving as the site of execution for 29 Naxi collaboration criminals before the barracks began to empty in 1967.
Now it can be described under most guises as a large commune. It's "hippy population" - as it would be identified in the States - occupies the former military barracks, adorned with murals and big, glaring NO PHOTOGRAPHY warnings at the top street-side corner of each building. They peddle pot by the ounce and hash by the brick at meager shaded tables that dot either side of the unpaved main thoroughfare; Pusher Street. Not much in the entire neighborhood is paved, and if it is, it's cobble-stone and it hasn't been retouched since the military left. The vendors operating the quaint little drug stands up and down Pusher Street are all shifty looking individuals, never smiling, strictly business. Old Turkish men sit at high round bar tables in high chairs skirting the street to the purpose of avoiding the dust being kicked up by the steady stream of foot-traffic just after noon on a Nordic summer Saturday. They glare at us under their light woven-brimmed hats and thick, furrowed brows, pipe in hand, slowly working away at their perspective hash bricks. The whole atmosphere is that of a dark and sinister farmer's market, and it flows into an open, dirt courtyard fringed by a stage and a handful of bars. Some dreary, Danish four piece alt-rock band is droning away on the stage, and we sit for a spell and a couple of beers, Carlsbergs of course. We're still feeling the spliff we'd had with breakfast, and no one's really too swooned at the idea of relinquishing any more Krooners than we absolutely have to. Besides, we've still got a good amount of superb gange from our Amsterdam escapades, and the Danish Krooner is a whore, quite an expensive one at that.
Still high, and beginning to buzz from the beer and the heat, the stage music turns to soundtrack as my mind tries to half-grasp at the entirety of the environment around us. The suspicious anxiety, the wonderland beauty; the stray dogs weaving fast through the dense crowd with artful poise and dutiful purpose, small and ragged, mouths open and tongues flopping. We never go more than a couple seconds without seeing one. Every sort of person has found their way through the green garnished gateway of the courtyard. The old Turks stand together in groups with their matching short-sleeved, loose white button-downs, and their grave whispers and their thick, manicured mustaches. The hippy love-children that founded this place are sprinkled about, along with their kin, skipping down the pathways and swaying to the music, dreadlocks swinging in time. There are young ruffian types and crazy-eyed basers like so many fish in a pond. Every now and then, a confused looking, touristy character stumbles by in middle-class vacation attire, map in hand, guidebook at the ready. Hopefully, we donn't stick out so sorely. After all, we have Marie to guide us, to talk for us, and to tell us what not to do. And we already dress more or less like well-intentioned, eccentric vagabonds anyways. Tinted glass hide the gaping awe in our eyes, so to those around us, hopefully, we look like we belong in Christiania, perhaps holed up in one of those boxy glass houses tucked away in the high reeds and greenery by the water. What a place to be living, what a life so dangerously free that would be.
