Wiebe Wakker
June 5, 2016
Today was sightseeing day. Copenhagen has been on my bucketlist for quite a while. Yesterday I was talking about my trip and I realized that this has been the most Northern part I have ever been, crazy because it’s so close to Holland. I’m going to extend this record a lot as I have decided to travel to the North cape. But first Copenhagen.
It really is a beautiful city. It’s big but it doesn’t feel like that, people are relaxed, possibly also because it was 27 degrees today. I started at the most touristic attraction: the statue of the little mermaid. It has been there since 1913 and was created by Edvard Eriksen, of course based upon the story by the Dane Hans Christian Andersen. The mermaid has been decapitated a couple of times, blown up with explosives and been put on a burqa as a protest against Turkey’s application to join the EU.
The statue was commissioned in 1909 by the son of the founder of Carlsberg. It’s considerably smaller as I aspected but placed higher then the hundreds of Japanese people taking pictures with their selfy sticks.
My favorite part is Nyhavn, a fishing harbor dating back 300 years ago with many bars, restaurants in colored houses. An elder Australian couple came to me when I was having a brake to ask me for directions. We had some smalltalk and I explained them what I was doing. They are from Sydney and offered me a place to stay if I’m there, great to have a place to stay at the finish line.
Around 5 I started to feel tired and decided to go to my next stop. It was in Roskilde, 30km outside of CPH and famous for it’s festival. Mads was my host and I already met him at the FDEL meeting last Sunday in Vejle. He has a big house right at the Fjord. From his garden you can walk on a pier where he has a big boat. The sights here are amazing. I could sleep in a small house in his garden.
Mads is very interested in sustainability and e-mobility. He has a background as engineer ands just founded his own company where he combines all of that. For companies he creates sustainable solutions such as heating and energy production.
His own his is carbon neutral too, he creates electricity with solar panels and a heat pump takes the warmth out of the water and creates heat in the house. He has two daughters. The oldest one, Sofie, was just about to go on a trip to London as a preparation for her study. She will going to visit the House of Unions and see David Cameron speak. His youngest daughter Emma is a fashion blogger and has 16.000 followers on Instagram, very impressive as she is only 15.
After dinner and an ice cream in the old Viking harbor we drove to a testsite from Vestas, a Danish windmill producer. They just installed a new windmill which has 4 mills attached to it. This one was “small” and if all the test succeed they built a bigger one which could produce 4×16 Gigawatt.
Almost everything that Mads has is electric, also his bike. In Denmark they have a few rules for e-bikes but Mads wants to go faster then allowed so he tweaked it a bit. He bike has a topspeed of 50km/h which is very fast for a bike. I drove it and it is cool to drive it. When you step just a little bit you already go fast, it’s like you use a turboboost with Mario Kart.
