Sod's Law says it is much easier to write a thousand words as part of a blog than as part of a thesis. Despite this I have shunned the one in an attempt to pour the writings into the other. But occasionally I cheat thus :D This year some my family moved to Copenhagen. This is the branch that has the littlest grandkids so the rest of the family naturally congregate there at any excuse, ignoring the cold. For it is cold in Copenhagen. It is so cold that their Christmas color scheme is red and gold, the colors of fire and warmth. Or perhaps the edges of the visible spectrum of light when you squint at them through the icicles that were your eyelashes.
Now Copenhagen in summer is delightful, if not very warm. It has cute cobbled streets, and charming stone buildings shaped like gingerbread houses, colonized by earnest, thoughtful people that dress in black and speak flawless English and ride bikes (unless they are jogging). Everything sits on the safe side of the boundary between the clinical and the picturesque and looks like a non-scary advertisement for the Truman Show. Gentle men with Ken cheekbones and a sense of egalitarianism push prams, and fair haired children smile and are spoken to softly by their mothers. Except for the unreal obsession with licorice (ice cream...ice cream bars...soft, hard, chocolate coated...an entire shop with glowing balls and jars and tubes and soap and cream), and the Danish death glares whenever a tourist pedestrian strays into the bike lane, it is easy to see why Denmark regularly tops the list of 'happiest countries'. No corruption, no pollution. Clean, with just enough salt to keep it from becoming saccharine, and just enough moss and jellyfish on that freezing sea floor to keep all the natural real. If you Image Search 'Copenhagen' you probably won't see the overgrown hippie freeland of Christiania (which made my aunt cry, since it was everything young people dreamed of achieving in the Sixties) but rather the tranquil harbor waters of Nyhavn. Haven, is the key word here in Kobenhavn. Cold hands, warm hearts.
Even Elsinore (Helsingor), with Hamlet's castle an hour away, isn't depressing or forbidding, but merely thoughtful. Kronborg should be sad but it struggles to be pensive. It straddles a crag with cheerful cannons. There is a moat with serene seabirds and a coast that is not stormy but wistful, biding its time till the next seismic shift restores the Swedish landmass just across the way back to the Danish bosom. The castle's patient carved stone over the entrance seems aware of the fact that Amleth's agony occurred before its rebuilding, and that his suicidal sweetheart's stream and grave must be far off in the distance. It is not too cold for the domestic tourists to sunbathe and tan on the cross-country harbor ferry, while enjoying their duty-free licorice liquor. The ice cream sellers are doing a brisk business at the Helsingor cafe outside. 'Horatio' (in full costume) gives a good tour of the strategic spots in the castle, complete with Hamlet's history, embellished by producing a skull out of a cupboard while trying his best to look more like a depressed Dane than sunny and theatrical tour guide. Kronborg's chilly chapel is too chaste for incest; its turret morning room too bright and sweet for frailty; the chessboard marble-floored grand hall too generous for revenge.
If Copenhagen is delightful in summer, it's magical in winter. It snows when it's not supposed to. People look even more thoughtful and produce an extra layer of black clothing. Everything is awash with swells of frost, crisp smells of roasted almonds and wood fires overlaid with a frozen salt tang, faint music and muffled footsteps on ice, all alit in a glow of red and gold (Image Search 'Copenhagen Christmas'). Over the four or so days of Jul (little and big Christmas and several eves?), the streets get quieter and the content more pronounced. On day 3, all the Christmas trees in the harbor get set aside, along with the once cozy frozen bales of hay and the layers of ice that melt to produce striated evidence of limited Christmas life in reverse chronology: Metro ticket stubs, bits of dropped, crushed chocolate, maps of the city, cigarettes smoked down to the filter and ignored by enterprising seagulls. On day 4, there is a great surge of humanity as everyone ventures outdoors to exchange greetings and unwanted gifts at the mall. The stores and cafes reopen. All of these stock tulips; Ikea, en masse. None of these popular flowers are to be seen through the customarily curtainless rear apartment windows, so multiple they make one feel like Jimmy Stewart with a hangover...presumably the bouquets are presented to beloveds in secret. The cafes have a hierarchy of chocolate snobbery: the most common one provides hot chocolate in the form of dip sticks -- dark, milk, white, or all three. It is so cold that after melting and dissolving in the frothy hot milk, their dregs harden all over again into edible dessert.
For a true ramble, ignore the Little Mermaid tour shuttle and take bus 11A from outside Copenhagen Central/Kobenhavn H. The minibus creeps like a snail through the back and side streets, waits for no one at the Tivoli Hotel and then loops back by San Francisco cafe with its cheesecake, the driver playing 70s rock in the empty cabin and listing the landmarks as they pass in slow motion. Or, get a citypass and ride the harbor water bus up and down; or stroll through Tivoli, with its markets, fake and real snow, screaming thrill-riders and turtle play scupltures, popcorn smells and Japanese pagoda, lake boats, glowing swans and light ropes. Or go to the national museum and chill by its ancient runed grave stones, chariots, Viking ships and elk skeletons, then warm up in the neighboring Glyptotek with its tropical winter garden, Impressionist paintings and desert mummies. Watch the nighttime fireworks, or the 9am sunrise. Or go sledding in the park and then have a 'Danish' pastry, if you can choose one. Or just sit inside with glogg by the fire. For it's Copenhagen, Baby, and it's cold outside.
For a true ramble, ignore the Little Mermaid tour shuttle and take bus 11A from outside Copenhagen Central/Kobenhavn H. The minibus creeps like a snail through the back and side streets, waits for no one at the Tivoli Hotel and then loops back by San Francisco cafe with its cheesecake, the driver playing 70s rock in the empty cabin and listing the landmarks as they pass in slow motion. Or, get a citypass and ride the harbor water bus up and down; or stroll through Tivoli, with its markets, fake and real snow, screaming thrill-riders and turtle play scupltures, popcorn smells and Japanese pagoda, lake boats, glowing swans and light ropes. Or go to the national museum and chill by its ancient runed grave stones, chariots, Viking ships and elk skeletons, then warm up in the neighboring Glyptotek with its tropical winter garden, Impressionist paintings and desert mummies. Watch the nighttime fireworks, or the 9am sunrise. Or go sledding in the park and then have a 'Danish' pastry, if you can choose one. Or just sit inside with glogg by the fire. For it's Copenhagen, Baby, and it's cold outside.
