my dansk holiday

i am back in my edinburgh after a 4-day adventure in denmark. many things of many sorts happened, and aside from the unforgiving cold, i would say they are all good things. i will tell you all about them, and if you'd like to see some things as well you can look at my updated photo website.

the journey began on december 26th, which in the uk is a public holiday as universal as christmas day itself, called boxing day (curious?). on this day almost everything is still closed and many services aren't running. i had booked a flight from edinburgh to london gatwick because a train couldn't get me there in time to catch my danish flight, and this one-way plane ticket through british airways to london, ordinarily quite an inexpensive place for me to travel to, was almost the same price as the flight to denmark through a danish airline, sterling, simply because of boxing day - 80 pounds. so, when it is announced during my increasing anxiety/impatience that this flight to get me to london is being delayed from operational difficulties for three hours - until PRECISELY the same time that my flight leaves london for copenhagen, meaning there is obviously no way i could catch that flight, i naturally freaked out a little bit. there were no other flights going to london gatwick but this one now leaving at that fated time 14:20, and sterling said that arranging a different flight to copenhagen with them would cost me about 160 more pounds, so i thought that 190 pounds was down the drain and my entire trip could not take place and that i would be stuck in my room for four days depressed about my relationship to those all-powerful stars. but, there is hope yet. british airways is to come through in the end. a nice old ticketseller man punched in a bunch of numbers and scurried me along to a flight to london heathrow, where i could catch an evening flight still through british airways to copenhagen, meaning i would forget about the sterling flight altogether. this was all totally fine with me, i was just happy the world wasn't crumbling before me. so, i made it to heathrow and spent several hours waiting there as i seem destined to do whenever i pass through there, but they were well-spent in a swanky cafe with my renewed appetite well met with a panini and much time to devote to reading mr. franzen's the corrections in its 560-odd page entirety.

i made it to copenhagen - the airport there is extremely nice - and was greeting by maibritt, my close friend who lives in my flat building here in edinburgh and who i and almost everyone call by a nickname of mandy. her mom drove us to their flat, which is in a very closeby and nice suburb of copenhagen called frederiksberg, perched atop six flights of stairs. it is a tiny apartment, lived in usually only by mandy's mom and her scottish husband joe and all of their millions of stacks of books. oh, and their very sweet kitty. mandy's mom and joe met at a mensa function - strangely this organization seems often used for dating purposes - so you can imagine that they are quite interesting people. mandy's mom was full of historical facts about the city of copenhagen, and is also an interesting lady - she lived in america and studied english at carleton college (one that i applied to back during that time), but ended up falling in love with a danish man while studying abroad and then went to live with him in kenya and got pregnant. now she works with computers..and reads millions of books. strange trajectories life brings sometimes.

anyway we made to get up fairly early to have brunch in the city at its most posh cafe, and i had a wonderful meal of danish pancakes and fruit, really good fruit, and orange juice that actually tasted like oranges. man i do miss good orange juice. mandy and i parted ways with her mom to spend the day seeing the city. we originally had a plan all set out for the order in which this would be accomplished, but everything quickly fell into disorder as a pretty fierce snowstorm descended on our walking tour. when your experience of the city is based on walking around and looking at things and taking them in, and the snowflakes are flying so fast and horizontally at you that you can't even look up at all, one might consider the sightseeing a little thwarted. but we took some breaks, finding refuge in a pub with tea and the like, and managed over time to see it all. mandy showed me the copenhagen library, called the black diamond, which is a ridiculously nice building and i can't believe people can just go study there all the time. we also went to this really fascinating place called christiania, which was more or less a commune taking up a square mile of the city centre. there the "hash" as mandy called it flows freely, there are daily police visits to make sure nothing is out of hand, and the little village has its own supermarket and blacksmith and recycling centre and little shops and cafes and all of it. there were lots of dredded pregnant women there, and the commune famously sells these carts that one attaches to the front of your bicycle, for schlepping around children of yours or groceries. the citizens of the city are fighting to keep this place going, because it is quite singular.

we saw many other things - the beautiful harbor, hans christian anderson style homes that are very picturesque, a church where the designer built one steeple with a spiral staircase on the outside accidentally, and out of embarassment climbed the top of it and killed himself. oh and millions of 7-11's - they are everywhere in copenhagen! which was very strange for me. we also saw a very beautiful church called the marble church that is themed with the 12 disciples, as a statue of each is placed in a circle surrounding the building and they paint the chapel ceiling as well. we went into the round tower to get an aerial view of the city. it was an interesting tower because instead of having stairs or a lift or something, the path up to the top was wide and cobblestone, like a street. mandy told me this was because the tower was built so that the lazy king could ride in his horse-drawn carriage up to the top instead of using his dainty royal feet. i didn't much like it at the top - it had been snowing and it was was slippery. compounding this with my fear of heights and the fact that there were all of these unruly children running around in this pretty frightening place seeming ready to risk their and my safety at any point in their antics, i didn't decide to linger. mandy and i then went shopping on the city's famous walking streets, full of very nice cosmopolitan shops as is expected - copenhagen is a more expensive place even than edinburgh. i tried hard but i didn't find anything i wanted and neither did mandy, so we went home to dinner. mandy's mom made spinach lasagne that lasted us enough for several meals, and then we prepared to go out.

mandy had arranged with several of her friends from high school to go to this shisha bar; many of them would be seeing one another for the first time in many months. i was worried a little that i would have no place amongst this class reunion, but i ended up getting along quite well with mandy's friends, especially piet and naz. all of them seemed like good people unquestionably, as in i had no concerns that they could be remotely rude or tactless, which was quite refreshing. we stayed there a long time before trying to head off to dance somewhere; however the group was frustratingly indecisive and we ended up in a bar where two acoustic guitarists were playing a set of cheesy american standards like brown-eyed girl and red red wine that i managed to endure. it was a fun night, and though i think edinburgh might have more of a definite night life to offer, it definitely seemed like quite the town.

the next day started over with a sleepy breakfast at a posher version of starbucks called baresso, then mandy and i headed to the city's largest art museum. it was a really lovely museum with some very interesting stuff in it (and some not so interesting), and it is always refreshing to drain yourself in the particular way that looking at art provides, i think. we walked through a beautiful park afterwards to make our way to see copenhagen's famous mermaid statue. it was one of those checkmark kind of things, as in i can't go to copenhagen and not cross off the to-do-list item of seeing this mermaid. however, getting out to it was a totally miserable experience. the snow was no longer, but was replaced by the bitterest cold and an unrelenting wind - being out by the harbor where nothing is the lee side of anything particularly enhanced this situation. anyway mandy couldn't remember exactly where it was, so we had to use trial and error and stop into some outlets pretending to shop so that we could regain feeling in our chapping appendages. but, i checked the box in the end, and the picture is posted to prove it.

we happily returned home, though stopped first at the supermarket - which is bustling and huge and like a department store except with mostly food -and then a bakery so i could try an actual danish. mandy fed me many doughy sweets that are quintessentially danish, which was fine because i needed to make up for weight unnecessarily lost during my food-less illness. for example, we went home and mandy showed me how to bake these extremely characteristic danish cookies than she calls peppernuts. i got the recipe, so now i can forever bake something, for real. i am making domesticated-self progress, it's true. then we planned to brave the cold again and head out to tivoli, which is sort of an amusement park world filled with rides and shops and decorations and restaurants and danish treats like licorice shops (i watched the guy make it, even). we became so cold that we didn't much want to shop or go on rides, and spent the majority of time in front of the little fire stands they had set up or inside this restaurant drinking tea and cupping our hands around the candle on the little table for warmth. but it was still a really festive, cool place and i'm glad i saw it - especially before christmas it seems like something very cheering to do.
we had plans to go to a jazz club, but people were still being irresponsible and we had to get up at 5 for the journey to the airport, so we just came home to get sleep. briefly and mysteriously the power went out in mandy's apartment, and the snow storm began and continued on through the night. the next morning mandy's mom tried to drive me to the airport, but her car was like a toy in the very, very uncleared streets and got such frighteningly little traction. mandy and i ended up in a cab and i made it to the airport, at which point, after boarding the plane, we sat for 2 hours in the runway before we could actually take off, somewhat inexplicably.
the point is, i made it to london in time to get my train at kings cross, i had a lovely train ride in which i finished the corrections entirely, which reminded me of how much finishing a book of literature is just so necessary to life. i've made it home, and the trip was full of many thought-provoking things that i sadly don't have the enegy to expound upon at the moment.
i will say that there was an interesting consensus that i look quite like i could be danish. others have pointed out to me that i don't really look like a typical american girl, so perhaps my features are just scandanavian and that's where i really belong. who knows.
anyway i am completely falling asleep. i will probably fix/change some of this later, because i have to get up for work so soon and i really need to crash. thanks for reading if you have. oh me, goodnight.