Monday, June 9, 2008

We can't believe this is real

On our tour of Copenhagen today Rasmus and Camilla took us to a place called Christiania. Is it an area of town? Is it a suburb? Nope-it is its own country...kind of.

In the 70s some hippies took over this abandoned military hold in the middle of town on the river and said, "this is ours." And they still live there-they don't pay the danish taxes, they have their own laws, and function on a pure democracy. Everyone has to attend a meeting and vote to change rules in the area, allow people to have certain things on their property, and to punish rule breakers. This section of society isn't' known for their perfect attendance, so not much gets done there.

Some rules are: 1. No "hard" drugs 2. No cars 3. No bulletproof vests and you can read the rest in the article link above.

The thing we can't get our heads around is how that can still exist within a modern city. They tried something like that in San Francisco but I think the government intervened in a month and these people have been "self governing" for over 30 years.

All that being said, they really did have some cool graffiti.

christiania art 5

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

What a crazy place! Did you guys talk to any Christianites about their way of life?