Kulturnatten
“Drinking is how you enjoy yourself in Denmark – it’s a part of our culture.”
I am unsure as to how I forgot this when out jaunting about the city last night.
Of course we started out with the koncerthuset, where people seemed more civilized. That was really great--we saw a concert in the big hall and got to walk around to see all the different studios. What a great building.
Actually there were many great aspects of kulturnatten, like unlimited use of the trains/metro/buses. Seeing loads of people trooping about in the crisp autumn weather. Being able to experience different places at night, without a tour guide.
But they run into some problems with the whole 'allowing people to drink their faces off and enter cultural institutions' thing. Mainly, if I were a proprietor I wouldn't want to keep open much past 11 due to the amount of increasing stupidity and reckless abandon with which people throw their beer bottles around. Which is exactly how it is here. Unless some place is hosting an afterparty or special concert, which you could count on being inhabited strictly by wildly inebriated Danes, everything closes at midnight, maximum.
That... kind of sucks. It's not really a culture night, more like a culture evening. You can do 3, maybe 4 things, then it's off to bed.
In Toronto, culture night keeps open literally all night. You can be out until 4am doing cool things, and while this is all based on second hand information... my tendency is to think that if you dislodge the drinking from the equation, you may be able to sustain the culture night a bit longer.
My memories of Museumnacht in Amsterdam tell me that I took a frites-break around midnight, and then continued on to Nemo and Foam.
There is also a slight drinking problem in Amsterdam, it's called the British.
But the Dutch way of dealing with it is by design of course! They cleverly installed all their pubs along canals, where the extremely stupid wind up falling in as punishment. (Actually I remember on museumnacht that we saw someone being retrieved and rescusitated from the canal by central station.)
Public "cultural" drinking makes for a night that can really only be enjoyed partially - until people get too rowdy and everything has to shut down. Why must everything devolve into drunken rage here?