I am a huge fan of solo travel and typically travel by myself or with my family or a small group of friends. I’ve enjoyed traveling with our large group but it’s been an adjustment and it’s been helpful to take time for myself and take solo adventures. While in Copenhagen I visited the Jewish Museum and Glyptoteket by myself and used my bicycle as a means of transportation. Solo bicycling in a city where I was unfamiliar helped me adjust quickly to the customs and the routes in the areas I was in.
Both museums had a very in-depth architectural history. The attention to architecture, both interior and exterior in Denmark seemed significantly more than in the US. I noticed similar architectural patterns in Amsterdam, where my solo museum journey via bike continued. I went to the Anne Frank House with a group and the Van Gogh, the Portuguese Synagogue, and the Jewish Museum by myself. The architecture in Amsterdam is much more influenced by its medieval roots and existing infrastructure, particularly the Anne Frank House, the Portuguese Synagogue, and the Jewish Museum which are all in older buildings.
I was not expecting to draw connections between this class and the museums I visited. My interests in museums are mostly impressionist and post-impressionist art and history which I struggled to connect to themes of sustainable transit. I was proved wrong, however. In the Glyptoteket they had old videos of people biking to the museum from the 1920s, just as I had done 100 years later. The Anne Frank Museum detailed the restrictions placed on Jews by the Nazi Occupation, including the banning of bicycle use. Motifs of bicycles and their use were present in all the museums I visited and emphasized the importance of access to transit and the historical relevance of bicycles, and the freedom they can provide. They allow people access to gorgeous art and culturally and historically significant exhibits, and they give children access to these things as well. This blog post is a bit unstructured (as intended) and sappy but my experiences biking to museums in Copenhagen and Amsterdam has been very significant in my understanding of the importance of sustainable transit.
This is a really cool post and cool to have all these things happening at once - visiting museums, visiting museums as a way to get some solo time, visiting museums as an excuse to explore and familiarize the cities, and then the surprise of finding connections in some of the museum content and your lived experience in near real-time. Super cool.
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