Welcome to Wrongsideofthecamera, worldwide media juggernaut, those of you who have landed here because of a search of the word “Albertslund.”  I hope you enjoy the prose and the pictures.

Well, there will be some prose on what Albertslund is, where it is, what part it plays in the life of this blog writing person and how it is connected to a lot of poop.  Stay with me. I’ll make a point eventually.

So in 1997, which seems like yesterday and a long time ago, both at the same time, I boarded a plane from Newark Airport bound for Copenhagen, Denmark and a really uncertain future.  I had departed for my long dreamt of study abroad semester.

I had seen images of the seaside Copenhagen, slick Scandinavian architecture and the like.  Imagine my surprise when I happened upon this:

What on earth is that you ask??  Well, this is Albertslund, the student town I lived in in Denmark.  No, it does not usually look like that.  Usually it is not covered in fog but that’s how it lives in my memory.

Now round about the time of the actual anniversary of my departure to Denmark and a detailed account of all the interesting folks and things that happened to me will be detailed in an entry in August.  I’ve already gotten most of it written out.  It just needs photos to dress it up.

I bring up Albertslund here not because of a sudden fit of nostalgia, but hey, nostalgia isn’t terrible.  Albertslund was a kind of an interesting place because there were these giant smoke stacks in the middle of it, kind of beckoning to you from all points.  The little student town was built around these smoke stacks and the whole rest of the place just kind of lived around them.

When I moved to Boston, it reminded me a lot of Copenhagen.  The two places share a lot of the same qualities.  On Saturday, I visited the Deer Island Waste Water Treatment Plant in Winthrop or as I like to call them — the poopie tanks.

That saying was pioneered by one of my favorite students of all time, when we passed by the sewage treatment plant.  He goes “hello poopies” when we sailed by the tanks.

Now here’s how the poopie tanks are connected to Albertslund.  Albertslund had its huge smoke stacks and they were kind integrated into the town, while the poopie tanks were integrated into the surroundings of this little park in Winthrop on Deer Island.  You could walk, jog or bike around the poopie tanks.  There was something egalitarian and kinda Danish about the whole thing that I really admired.  And from what I remember of my time in Denmark, my Danish friends would have loved to visit a park that contained a poopie tank.

Danish friends, express yourself in the blog commentary section if you disagree.  Anyway, you want photos from the poopie tanks??  You get photos from the poopie tanks: