Elephants of Carlsberg

England has Big Ben. America has Lady Liberty. France has Eiffel Tower. Denmark? She has four Carlsberg elephants. Carlsberg Breweries in Valby (Southwest of the city-center) won’t be in my travel list if Kirsten didn’t recommend it vehemently. They are so diminutive for a conglomerate of such size, and it’s easy to miss this gate. Even the bus to the visitors centre doesn’t go past the gate so we had to walk to admire the Carlsberg elephants. (Only taking the visitor’s bus is recommended since it is 45 minutes walk from the nearest train station.)

These four magnificent statues (in fact they are carvings) form the gate that leads to the main entrance to the Carlsberg brewery. Completed in 1901, they symbolize four sons of the Carlsberg founder Ottalia Jacobson, and bore the initials of those four sons. On the elephants are the Swastika symbols, wishing health and prosperity to these four surviving sons of the tycoon. The Carlsberg Breweries itself used the symbol until the Nazis corrupted the symbol in the late 30s.

The Carlsberg Visitors Centre has nice exhibitions about the brewing of beers and the history of the Carlsberg-Tuborg Brewery. The entrance fee is cheap at 50 DKK (about 7 Euros) and include two beer tastings. However, it’s not a guided tour, and we had to follow the signs through the exhibitions halls, the stables, mews, garages with old beer wagons. The tour takes about 2 hours and inevitably ends in a small gift shop. Next to the shop is the beer tasting bar; but, it seems strange to me that some of the Carlsberg beers can only be tasted here and not sold anywhere in the world. One note of caution is that Carlsberg’s signature the Elephant Beer has twice the alcohol content as regular beer.

In the Tivoli Gardens, a kiss…

After lunch we went to Tivoli Gardens. Though it is an amusement park, Kirsten and a lot of Danes call it a pleasure garden, which makes me flinch. It first opened in 1843 as “Tivoli & Vauxhall”, taking inspirations from the Jardin de Tivoli in Paris and the Vauxhall Gardens in London. The origin story, as recounted by Kirsten, was pretty funny. It was built to indulge the Danish people so that they would forget about the politics.

First built in those years when Europeans viewed the Near and the Far East as the depraved centre of exotica and erotica, Tivoli have various Oriental buildings, from theatres to fountains: the Nimb Building with its domes and minarets, Chinese-pagoda gardens, Moorish pavilions, the Hanging Gardens, and the Bubble Fountain. (The original park was burnt down in 1943—again a symbolic message by the Nazis to destroy the old regime—but it was rebuilt.)

We took many historical rides in the park: the world’s oldest wooden roller coaster, (Rutsjebanen or Bjerg Banen (Mountain Track), according to omniscient Wikipedia), the world’s tallest carousel, Himmelskibet, and a nice free-fall tower, which Wikipedia doesn’t name.

We missed the Tivoli Symphony, which displays its merits only in the morning and at noon, but we stayed in the gardens until midnight. Tiny lanterns and bulbs illuminate the park from gorgeous Hans Christian Anderson Castle to the Glass Hall, which shines like an alien spaceship. The park transforms itself from an amusement park to a fair ground—open-air theatres replaced souvenir shops and cafés; jugglers and magicians came out of nowhere to entertain. But I was treated to two surprises.

At Chinese Mime Theatre, I saw Italian Commedia dell’Arte, and its clichéd story of Cassander, Harlequin, Columbine and Pierrot. I saw that once in Venice, but the Danish version was not only more colorful but also more vivant. (As a side note, the Chinese Theatre has a marvelous mechanical peacock’s tail curtain) From a small boat on the Tivoli Lake, we admired the firework display (only put together on Saturdays). Under the sky blued and crimsoned with Catherine wheels, and Roman candles, we ended the day with a lovely kiss.

Post-Scriptum: the return was not so pleasant. We didn’t know that the trains back to Køge stop running at half-an-hour past midnight, so we had to take a taxi back.

Ny Carsberg Glytotek, Copenhagen

Today, I went to the downtown Copenhagen with Kirsten. We caught a train there since she told me that we don’t need strenuous cars to explore Copenhagen. We stopped at Central Station København (that is what they call their capital in Danish) and crossed the street to Ny Carsberg Glytotek.
Perhaps the only museum in the world built by a brewery, Glytotek was built by Carl Jacobsen of the Carlsberg Breweries (which is apparent in its name). The museum has only two things: old Greek, Roman and Etruscan statues, and French paintings.

You enter the museum and the first things you see are the sculptures by Rodin and other modern sculptors like Bissen and Jerichau. (There is even a room for religious icons around the corner.) The museum pamphlet says its Rodin collection is the most important collection outside France, but since Cantor Museum in Stanford, CA also claims thus, I was left confused. Rodin’s another replica of The Thinker stood outside the museum, but since I have seen at least four versions of it, I was more amused and intrigued by the bronze sculptures of Degas, which include his complete dancer series.

Ironically, the most famous room in the museum is its tropical Winter Garden at the centre of modern sculpture exhibits. In the middle stood nude The Water Mother (by Kai Nielsen) with babies which points upwards to the iron-dome of the museum. The Winter Garden leads to the Great Hall, which is usually used for public meetings and such gatherings. Around the Great Hall are exhibits of ancient cultures, from Egyptians to Greco-Roman. In fact, the museum is a stronghold of Etruscan and Roman art, housing various busts and heads of Roman Emperors.

The second floor and the new wing house various painters, the majority of whom were impressionists: Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Degas and Cézanne. There were also David, Courbet, Manet, van Gogh, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec and Bonnard. According to the brochure, the most famous paintings in the museum are Bissen’s Prince Paris with apple, and Manet’s The Absinth drinker. I also learnt something about Danish Golden Age of painting, housed in the new wing.