Christiania

Exloring somewhere new is always memorable, but it wasn't really until today that Copenhagen finally grew on me.

In part, it's because we spent the day meandering through the old town, past stately buildings, along canals choked with moored boats, stopping to admire a heron in a lake in the middle of a park, staring at the graceful rides soaring skywards in the Tivoli Gardens (classier by far than your overlit anglo sideshow tat). And for all these things I wished I still had one more day.

But the real objective of today was to see a place Mikko told me about for years: the free people's republic of Christiania, declared by bikies and peace activists on former Ministry of Defence land in the 1970s and one of the world's great living examples of communal living.

I suspect the reality that Lissy and I explored today would fall a long way short of the Finn's anarchist ideals: "they just said Fuck off. You police not comin' here. And people power stayed," he used to say. "And they sent in the army, and the cops and they had riots and the people won".

It's true that battles like that have been fought here. But Christiania has been represented in City Hall since 1975. The people themselves elected to clean up 'Pusher street', and many of the one thousand people who live here now have kids who attend the onsite school. The local administration proudly boasts that their homes consistently exceed the local building regulations and that taxes and utilities bills are more likely to be paid on time here than anywhere else in the capital.

In the face of such massive bureaucracy, you understand why Christianians (and the city) need the million tourists a year that visit the site, and view the overpriced tourist shops, the £10 burgers as more an economic necessity - even though it feels a bit like selling out. If it helps maintain the rest of the ideal... perhaps...

Relics of the more fiercely independent past still stand: 'bevar Christiania' flags are everywhere, the Moon Fisher Cafe cynically boasts that after "6000 police raids since 2004" it's "Europe's safest cafe". You can still be offered drugs on Pusher street if you eyeball the right people. (Relax Mum!) And the public open space is rich with Tibetan prayer flags and other messages of peace. But a perfect anarchy? Not in the sense of a place where rules are not needed. I wondered for hours what Mikko would make of it. It was odd to be confronted with the reality of someone else's envisioned dream (I have no idea if he ever made it here himself): something that looks very different from the ideal he always described, which was an unrealistic vision that he ultimately shattered for himself anyway... Sigh.... There were quarts of tears - not least because I was travelling with 'past people' in tow - Lissy rang Ange and MsHelle and together we wrapped ourselves in a cloak of people who live life every day embodying a vision like this community and its ideals of freedom, spirituality and peace. And I realised that just because one person's dream didn't pan out, the dream doesn't have to be over. I really do wish I had just one more day...