Apimondia 2025 - Copenhagen - Part 1!

[aggienaut]

   Every two years the World Beekeeping Federation "Apimondia" holds a congress (founded in 1895 this was their 49th so they missed just a few). I first attended in 2017 in Istanbul, and again in 2023 in Santiago, Chile. This last week it was held in Copenhagen, Denmark.

   I had always planned to attend, though its a very difficult time of the year for us here in Australia, practically the busiest part of the beekeeping season at the best of times, and in my current job as a varroa extension officer, the invasive pest mite varroa is just burgeoning across my state at probably its most critical rate right now, AND my colleague the OTHER senior extension officer also wanted to attend Apimondia! So I booked flights to just be there for the conference and the few days before and after during which there would be "technical tours" -- which I've found one of the most rewarding parts of these conferences.
   I booked my flights and tickets on June 30th so I could write them off on the financial year ending on that date ;) at the time I didn't think Cristina would be coming along, but later it was decided she would. Unfortunately, you know how flights are, you reload a page practically and the price goes up $1000. The exact flights I had booked were, well, $1000 more so we got her on flights matching as closely as possible to mine that ultimately I think were only like $300 more (my round trip flights were AU$2,300) -- the outbound flight matched so closely in fact that we departed melbourne within ten minutes of eachother, arrived in bangkok together, and arrived in Copenhagen also within ten minutes of eachother!



Saturday, September 20th - The Journey There
   Even though I booked through Luftansa I was a bit horrified to find my Melbourne - Bangkok flight was on Jetstar, our budget airline. So that was predictably fairly uncomfortable. I'd never been to Bangkok before, I found the airport both on the way out and again on the way back to be one of the more confusing airports I've been in. I'm a veteran of a lot of airports so I can say this with confidence. Guidance signs were sometimes vague, confusing or missing and asking airport staff, they were usually friendly but sounded like they were only taking wild guesses at instructions on how to get to places merely around the corner from them.
   But I did have a moment to eat some thai food in thailand so that was nice.

In Flight Movie Reviews
The Accountant 2 - I had seen the preceding movie in this series, which I recall as "like Rainman if Rainman happened to pick up being a badass cold blooded killer as a random hobby" and in fact trying to remember what happened in the first one I kept conflating it with Rainman. Ultimately the movie was of the genre of people trying to solve a case with frequent gunfights but the plot didn't really make sense, numerous parts of it required people to know things they didn't know until later for their motivations to make any sense. C
Troy - I actually hadn't seen this movie before! And I've been on more of a Greek myths kick than ever, had actually downloaded the Argonautica, Illiad and Odyssey onto my phone before the flight for light reading. All that being said, maybe I'm becoming too hard to please with movies because my feelings about it were just kind of meh. Fun to see all the actors who later became more well known looking so young though. B-
Flow - This was actually the only movie I saw on the flight back. After perusing the movie listings and seeing nothing I was interested in, I noticed more than one fellow passenger watching a beautifully animated film about a cat in a boat with a capybara and became intrigued. In the "Family" category of film options I seldom venture into I found it -- Flow -- it was actually really nice. Not cartoon animations but like, actually trying to be beautiful kind of animations (CGI to be sure but nicely done). For unexplained reasons the forest is flooded and the cat and various other animals escape in a boat. There's no dialogue, no talking animals, but they convey personality with not-implausible behaviors and noises. Sadly we landed when I still had about half an hour left (note to self, I was 59 minutes in). A

   I had a short layover in Munich during which I went through EU passport control, which I only realized when I arrived in Copenhagen stuffed up our plan to go through passport control together. As we had discovered in Mexico, just because Venezuelans officially have visa-free entry into a place doesn't mean it will be granted, so I'd brought our wedding certificate and intended we'd walk through passport control arm in arm, but alas I arrived in Copenhagen outside passport control and she arrived inside passport control. Fortunately she didn't have a problem but I was very afraid for a moment there.



Sunday, September 21st - Arrival
   I've been to Copenhagen airport a few times before and as I recalled it IS a very easy-to-navigate airport. Simple walk from the baggage claim out to the metro where the machines are straightforward (unlike for example Amsterdam where I once spent nearly an hour trying to figure out how to buy a ticket and was nearly reduced to tears). Our AirBNB was literally just ten minutes down the metro. Short walk of a few blocks (400m?) amongst pretty five story apartment blocks, cobbled streets, trees and shops on the first level of the buildings. I immediately noted that even though it being nearly the equinox and the north and south hemisphere's therefore getting very close to equal sunlight and daytime right now, the climate in Copenhagen was MUCH NICER than Melbourne. I forget there's places where you can go out without multimple layers at times other than the one month of a year it might be summer (maybe). Whether was delightful all week, then had a similar shock when we returned to Melbourne and blisteringly cold winds (actually it was freezing rain when Cristina arrived).
   We were unaffected by Russian drone activity a the airport as that began Sept 22nd, though I was worried it could effect our eventual departure, and with the upcoming Trump summoning of all his generals and admirals I wasn't sure WW3 wasN'T about to break out while we were there.

   Our AirBNB was a room in a flat. I thought it was well-reviewed (4.27 stars) though just now looking at it again tehre's an AirBnB note advising that that's in the bottom 10% of available places in Copenhagen. The host, apparently from Shanghai originally, was very friendly and obliging, letting us check in early, apparently getting up early after a late shift to clean the place early for us. Well I would have been content but Cristina who is more discerning about these things noted that while the floor had clearly been hastily mopped and there were fresh bed linens and such on the bed, there was also a large amount of visible debris on the floor under everything, and the window and mirror could use some cleaning. The host's flatmate apparently got deported to China the second day we were there, which didn't really effect us but was, like, a thing that happened.

   We got some delicious pastries at a bakery across the street and then did some sight seeing around Copenhagen. It was a very easy trip of just a few minutes by the same metro to the center of town. Wandering along Stroget street and surrounds, we marveled at all the beautiful architecture and just how clean and safe it was and how happy everyone seemed.
   As can be expected with jetlag we perservered as long as we could but by early afternoon we were fading and returned to the room where we continued to try to stay up until a decent time to go to bed but it was a struggle. (on the flip side of things, which I'm writing this the day after returning, I pretty much passed out just before 21:00, but then was lying awake at 2:30am so got up and began this at 3 or 4am)

Monday, September 22nd - The Equinox
   The morning of this day we had to return to the airport because Cristina was flying to Mallorca to see one of her good friends (she'd be in Spain the duration of my conferencing days, first Mallorca and then Madrid). Fortunately due to the aforementioned proximity and easy of access to the airport this was no problem at all.
   As best I can recall I then strolled around town some more, exploring some fortifications, ate some more delicious food (in this case "Copenhagen's smallest restaurant." Oh I toured the museum of the Danish resistance to the Nazi occupation. It was a well done museum with immersive audio tour though I was mildly annoyed that with lots of individual exhibits sometimes they'd begin with like a minute of scene setting ambiant noise and one wanted to get on with htings, and in general I have a preference for reading exhibits which I can proceed through much more quickly.


and then I stumbled upon German frigate Baden-Wurttenburg, always cool to see a state of the art warship but also a reminder of the crackling tensions with Russia, the Russian drone mother-ship to be discovered off the coast of Denmark a few days later.

Tuesday, September 23rd
   I began this day by trotting down a block or two to a really well reviewed little cafe for breakfast. Sitting outside, Cristina video called me from Mallorca and we chatted a bit in our usual spanglish. Just as I was saying goodbye to her the guy sitting at the next table cheerily waved to the camera and said something simple in Spanish (I forget what exactly but it was thematically related to goodbye). I was greatly amused by this and began talknig to him once I was no longer on the phone with Cristina, we ended up talking for an hour and a half, he was a very interesting and friendly Danish fellow named Ole who had also traveled a bit. I'm not sure what his current project is but he had run and then sold a kayak related company. So I made a new friend (spoiler alert we caught up with him again the last evening but we'll get there when we get there).



   I had meant to spend as much time as possible in the national museum but this delayed me a bit. On a previous visit Ii had spent several hours and only succeeded in seeing the first floor (of like five) of the museum which covers from earliest prehistory through the vikings. The rest of the history museum was also really interesting. I particularly liked a room full of things one might think of as sort of "steampunk" but they were real historical items from the middle ages at a time when gunpowder was becoming a thing and people were experimenting with making combination gun-warhammers and crazy things like that.
   Another big exhibit they were promoting was titled "the viking sorceress" which was an audiotour through some surreal rooms while it talked about viking mythology, which I already knew beyond the level covered therein so I was once again feeling annoyed with the pace limiting effect of audio tours. Also, starting to run out of time I finally got to the fnial part of the exhibit which actually did have a lot of artifacts that looked interesting, but at this point I didn't have time for the audio tour to take its meandering-ass-time to explain them to me. There was also a whole other wing on the traditional clothing of various people throughout the world I would have liked to see but by now we were really getting up on running out of time for me to get to the opening ceremonies of Apimondia and my colleague Ashton was texting me to hurry up and get outta there. I ran into the traditional clothing exhibit just to see if I could quickly find anything on the native people of Venezuela but at least cruising through the exhibit at nearly a run I was not able to discern such.



   Took the metro down to the conference center (the Bella Centre) arriving a comfortable 20-30 minutes before opening ceremony, but I think I'll begin a new etnry for the conference itself (:

Comments

[pondhopper.livejournal.com]

I'm amazed you were able to coordinate your outbound travels so well on different flights and airlines. Schiphol Airport isn't horrible but I've had no experience buying public transport tickets there. I do agree that Copenhagen is one of the best arrivals and departure airports ever. And I love taking the train from the airport over to Sweden. Beautiful!
I've not visited the museum you reference but it sounds very worthwhile.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

My account of my attempts to escape the Amsterdam airport

So I've been in Amsterdam for several hours now and... well I'm still alive, but only after thinking "fuck you Amsterdam fuck you Amsterdam I hate you Amsterdam I'm never coming back why am I even here" a lot.
Everything was going smoothly up until about 7am. My flight came in around 0530, passport control took less than five minutes and I was out in the "Shiphol Plaza" unsecured part of the airport. Got my first real coffee in two weeks (they only drink nescafe instant coffee in Nigeria, just like the middle east), though my regular coffee from starbucks cost 2.80 euros, ($3.76!! for plain coffee!). But was able to connect to the airport wifi and find a pretty cheap hotel (for the equivalent of $30!) that as I'd find out three hours later is totally nice!!

 So then at 0700 the tourist information kiosk opened and I bought a guidebook there and asked if they could explain anything I needed to know about the directions I had written down about how to get to the hotel. The girl there told me it was better to take the 192 bus (than the sprinter tram the internet had told me) and where to catch it.

So I wait half an hour for the bus and then look at the digital display and see that the 192 bus isn't even ON the display, which covers at least the next half hour.

So I go back into the airport, inquire at the train information kiosk. They send me to the train ticket sales window. I ask them what I need to get where I'm going and they tell me I should get a 24 hour pass which I can get AT THE TOURIST INFORMATION KIOSK.

So I go back to the girls at the tourist information kiosk and they say I should go to the automated ticket vending machines for the pass. I go to the automated ticket vending machine and even on English mode everything is listed in cryptic options such as "deluxe" "standard" "full fare" and with destinations that I have no idea how they relate to where I'm trying to go. I do my best to push the buttons I think are appropriate and it wants to sell me a 48 euro ticket ($64.54!)!!!

I go back out to the bus stops but there's still no sign of bus 192. I go back to the train information kiosk, they send me to the train ticket sales counter again, and this time I get a ticket for the train the internet had originally told me to take.

I go down to the train station (directly under the terminal), but no train is labeled "sprinter" and once again the destinations listed are things whose relation to my desination I cannot decipher. Can't even find my destination listed on the route map, or for that matter a label saying which line is "sprinter"

After watching a few trains go by hoping for some clues I return upstairs to the train information kiosk. She says "train number 2 in 2 minutes!" I ask what track and what it'll look like and she just repeats what she just said.  

So I go back down there and a train just like all the others rolls in but it says 2 on the side, so I jump on it and hope it's the right one. It's about 09:24 by now

<p>From their the trip proceeded smoothly again. At the train station they were able to give me simple clear instructions for the bus I needed and the bus driver was also very helpful. 

But for a good two and a half hours there I couldn't figure out for the life of me how to leave the airport!! ): I kind of wanted to kill myself or break down and weep.  

My room in this hotel is pretty nice. I'm gonna sit here and recover from my harrowing morning for a few more minutes before I start thinking about venturing into the city. d:

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

Oh I love that museum!

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

I have to go back a third time to see the part I didn't get around to now!

[sea_thoughts]

I loved Flow, such a beautiful film. Enjoying your photos!