ishøj and køge

On the first Sunday of every month the S-tog trains in Copenhagen are free! So on the first Sunday of February, a group of us exchange students organised to go to the Arken Museum of Modern Art in Ishøj and then if we had time, on to the end of the line and Køge.
It took about 20 minutes to get to our first stop and then we walked for about an hour to get to the museum from the train. Luckily it was a pretty nice day - a bit overcast but not really freezing - so this was tolerable. The Arken Museum was pretty amazing. The building itself was pretty impressive and it also was home to an interesting collection of Modern art installations.
The highlights for me were the Olafur Eliasson piece called Din Bline Passager (Your Blind Passanger) which was a long tunnel filled with smoke and coloured light making it almost impossible to see more than a metre in front of you. It really was a surreal experience. I wasn't too keen on it at the time, but I think the artist was somewhat successful in creating a space that challenges the concept of shared and personal space.

 

Other highlights of the museum were a wall covered in photos of landscapes, some butterflies that represented social issues and some Damien Hirst pieces that were quite humorous - posters of food packagings made to look like prescription medicines. 

There is also a beach at Ishøj which was ok but not that nice - the weather was pretty crappy I'll admit, but it was quite small and quite close to an industrial area so the view wasn't that great either. We stopped here for only a couple of minutes before heading back to the station and onto Køge which was a pretty little seaside town. Apparently it was once know for witch-burning, but we weren't there long enough to see any evidence of that. We were also there late on a Sunday afternoon, so not much was open and there weren't that many people about. We did manage to find a kebab place and a pub that were open for some refreshments and to warm up before heading back to Copenhagen.