Day 2 in Denmark - 30th August

Today’s been quite a jetlagged day. Slept fitfully at night, waking up a couple of times, and finally woke up around 4am. Couldn’t go to sleep after that, just tossed around for a while, then woke up and checked email etc. Finally decided I’d just go running – so left the hotel around 6am with a map and a camera. It was quite beautiful – cloudy, but no rain, thankfully. The darkness had mostly crept away. The streets were quite empty – just the odd car/cyclist/passerby.



I ran for about an hour and a half, and it was quite lovely. Stopped multiple times to take photos, of course – but on the whole must have done about 5-6 miles. Ran through some of the streets where we’re staying, and then over the bridge across the canal to the other, quieter side. That part is quite beautiful, with quite a few of these manmade canals, and lots of greenery all around. Surrounding that are residential areas. All quite peaceful and calm.



I ran along the water for a while, then branched off into the neighborhood of Christiania, which is quite an interesting place. As Wikipedia says, Christiania, also known as Freetown Christiania, is a partially self-governing neighbourhood of about 850 residents, covering 34 hectars (85 acres) in the borough of Christianshavn in the Danish capital Copenhagen. Christiania has established semi-legal status as an independent community. It was founded in 1971 by a group of hippies who decided to take over an area of abandoned military barracks! The people in Christiania have developed their own set of rules, completely independent of the Danish government. The rules forbid stealing, guns, bulletproof vests and hard drugs. Driving a car is also not allowed. A total of 132 cars are, however, owned by Christiania residents and need to be parked in the surrounding streets. It’s a really interesting place – like a world in itself. The houses look very different, as do the streets. Its like walking in some old world village. I saw some pretty antique things, as well as a horse barn. Very quaint indeed. I guess it says a lot about the Danes when you think about how they’ve just allowed the town to exist as it does, without paying taxes etc to the government, and making their own rules. Very interesting indeed.



I ran back through some other parts, stopping fewer times for photos on the way back. Got back, showered, changed, and then went down to have breakfast, which is part of the hotel deal. Had a good breakfast – some bread, cheese, Danishes (how can one NOT have a Danish for breakfast in Denmark!), some fruit and yogurt, and juice. Pretty decent stuff. Then Mille came to pick us up around 9am, and we drove up to the Niras complex, which is about half an hour outside Copenhagen. The drive was quite beautiful – very very green as soon as you get out of the city. Its quite amazing to see the shade of green against the grey sky – something u hardly see in California, where everything is mostly brown except for the couple of months after it rains. The lush green vegetation we saw here was quite amazing.

At Niras, the morning was mostly spent meeting different people, and getting introduced to some of the wide variety of projects they work on. Its basically an engineering consultancy – so they do a lot of technical work. We got to hear about some of their projects in demolition of buildings etc, safety work, crash testing/modeling, environmental stuff, IT, and so on. Was pretty cool meeting so many different people working on such different things, and all together under the same umbrella. We also had a very interesting conversation with Henrik whom we’d met yesterday, about Niras’s history, and then about knowledge, and what it really meant – the dichotomy between knowledge and information which many people don’t seem to realize, how knowledge is about people while information is about facts and computers, and how one can transfer knowledge from one person to another in an organization through something like a mentorship program. It was all quite thought provoking.

From there we were taken to the Danish Technical University by someone called Dora. We first had lunch there at the main canteen, which is quite different from, say, the Tressider student union in Stanford – almost more like an undergrad dining hall. There was some weird food there, but I managed to get something that was almost like veg fried rice and spring rolls.

We then went to the Environmental studies dept, where a meeting had been set up with one of the division heads. Basically denmark is huge on renewable energy – wind, solar etc, and now a lot of research being done on biogas, bio-ethanol etc. so that was kind of the focus of what we saw there. Got some idea of some of their work, including some cool stuff such as a microbial fuel cell – where micro-organisms are actually used to generate a potential difference across a set of electrodes and make it work like a fuel cell! All very interesting…kind of random as nothing was even vaguely related to work either Jacob or I are doing – I think they kind of misunderstood exactly what we were working in! so it was a lil out of place. But ok, I guess….

Of course by this time I was fighting jetlag, with bouts of sleepiness coming increasingly frequently! Especially in the car on the way back, it was all I could do to stay awake!



From there we were taken to one of Niras’s biggest projects today, and this was totally the piece de resistance of the day – this is a huge construction project to set up what will be one of Europe’s premium concert halls. The whole setup is just completely amazing – the kind of engineering going on is too good. They showed us mockups of the concert hall, which is pretty modernistically designed. They’ve designed it in such a way that the entire structure is essentially floating, and held up by just 3 staircases around its periphery! They also showed us scaled mockups of the interior, which are used to test the acoustics, and make sure one can hear the sound well at every point. The concert hall in itself is set up such that the main stage is at the center, and seating is all around it, unlike the traditional sort of system where the stage is up front. Seating capacity is 1800. All the walls and panels are carefully designed, taking into account the reflection of sound , direction of reflection, amount of absorption and so on. The central canopy is made up of several panels, each of which is adjustable, so as to allow fine tuning of the sound experience! Very cool indeed!

There are also several smaller studios, for different kinds of settings – rhythms, choirs, instruments etc. They’ve thought of everything – sliding panels exposing different kinds of wall surfaces so as to provide everything from a very soft to a very hard surface, which would have drastically different absorption characteristics.



Construction of course is still very much happening, and will probably take another couple of years at least to finish. We got to go right to the top in one of those elevators you see at construction sites, and from there got a wonderful view of the entire city and surrounding area. You could even see the sea, and across it, in the distant horizon, the mainland of Sweden!



After that we came back, rested for a couple of hours – I tried hard not to fall asleep! - and then went out for dinner with 4 of the young crowd from niras. Dinner was ok – quite a nice restaurant in a more young part of the town, frequented by a lot of copenhagen’s younger people. Got a taste of Danish beer which apparently is supposed to be quite the thing to have – it was ok, I guess.  The two girls in the group, Anna and Christine were pretty talkative, but the 2 guys, Mario and Thomas hardly spoke – so it was just a little weird! So not quite sure what THAT was all about. But whatever, got a decent dinner, and now am just looking to crash. Quite exhausted after the day – its been a long one.



Tomorrow, of course, is the main reception where the prizes are officially awarded. More about that later…..