Copenhagen to San Francisco
I’m in need of a home exchange in July, and thought I might see how far a blog post gets me. You never know.
If you know of anyone who might be interested, do me a favour and send them this link, would you? I’ll be sending buckets of karma your way (alternatively you can send them the link to Home Exchange).
The deal is this. My wife (Danish) and I (English) and a friend (Danish) are going to San Francisco from July 14th to 28th. We need a 2-bedroom place to stay, in San Francisco. Of course, the more central and close to everything the better, but we are quite capable of taking public transport.
The flat we can offer you in exchange is a 130m² loft flat, with wooden floors, white walls and all the other obligatory Scandinavian things, rounded off with a nice English touch (this means pointless objects scattered here and there). It can sleep up to 6, but it’s probably more comfortable for 2 or 4; a couple or a young family.
It has a balcony that comes off the kitchen, which gets sun until about 4pm, and when that’s gone, you can just mosey up the stairs to the rooftop terrace which, although shared, is practically private as no one else can be bothered to hike all the way up to the top of the building (there is no lift). The views are spectacular, so spectacular in fact that we held our wedding reception up there.
It has all the things you’d want; dishwasher, washing machine, gas oven, TV, stereo, wireless – you name it.
It’s situated in Vesterbro, which is one of the 6 main districts of Copenhagen. The area is made up of 30-somethings, and young families, making it a youthful yet not too youthful area. There are enough bars, restaurants and cafés to make you sick, not to mention the proximity to parks and an open harbour pool (Copenhagen’s harbour water is so clean you can swim in it, so they built pools directly into the harbour). The flat is in an old hotel at the end of a dead-end street, which means no through traffic. At one end of the street is an ‘s-train’ station (underground/overground light railway) which takes you all over Copenhagen, and a bus stop. At the other end is a huge dual carriage way which was closed off many years ago, so only a smattering of cars use it. The central reservation has been turned into a kind of park, with basketball courts, ping-pong tables, a children’s play area, and lots of grass where you can sit, eat pizza and drink beers until the cows come home.
It’s about 10 minutes walk to the main train station (the airport is 10 minutes train ride from there), and 15 minutes to the City Hall (famous from The Killing), and to the main shopping street.
There’s not much not to like about it really.
Copenhagen is of course a wonderful, wonderful city. There’s even a song about it that goes something like that. Full of beautiful design, architecture and people, and with a café culture to make Parisians green with envy, it’s a city for all kinds of people. I’ve always thought of it as London stuffed into a town. It has the vibe of a much larger city, but is cosy enough to make you feel like you know it all.
I could go on and on about it, but I won’t. I will add though that London and Berlin are just 90 minutes away by plane (and cheap too, what with EasyJet, Norwegian and Air Berlin), and Sweden is just a 30 minute bus ride away.
That’s it for now. If you’re interested, drop me a mail at lara.mulady@gmail.com, and let’s see if we can work something out.