Danish Swim

There’s a big public health-club type place downtown called DGI-Byen. “Byen” means “town” or “city” so this name means something like “Danish Gymnastic Institute City”—you get the idea. It’s kind of a mega-gym.

They have all sorts of facilities and different types of pools there, including a really cool one that’s shaped like a donut. It’s sort of like swimming in an indoor canal, with walkways overhead. One circuit is 100 meters, so if you swim ten times around that’s one kilometer. I’ve bought and used two 10x entry cards so I’ve been there 20 times over the past six months or so. Louis has come with me a few times.

The swimming is fine—I’m the slowest swimmer in town, at least among that part of the population that has the use of all four limbs. But the locker room is a cultural experience all by itself. On a busy Sunday it’s packed—lots of fathers with young children. There are always plenty of naked toddlers (boys and girls) running up and down the aisles calling out “Far!” (Dad!). Along with the Danes there are Turks, Russians, and any number of other ethnicities represented. In the shower area there are typically 20-30 people: old, young, fat, thin, really fat, tattooed, circumcised, uncircumcised, hairy, bald. Babies in little plastic tubs line one side of the room.

This is about a close as I’ve gotten to the “communal” Scandinavian experience. There is a certain collective trust that applies here—a sense of “we”-ness, that allows Danish parents to park their baby carriages outside cafes while they go inside for coffee—leaving the babies in the carriages. The parklands north of town, along the way to work, are full of individual people strolling along the paths and there is not that sense of mistrust and anxiety you might experience if you met a stranger along a forest path in the US. And there are so many more pedestrians here that the byways all feel somehow…convivial.

But for a family of Americans working for an American company and sending their child to an international school, most of our exposure to Danish-ness is superficial. That’s why we still take Danish lessons—Michael is Denmark’s unwitting ambassador to our family, a role he seems to relish. So when he brings tabloid magazines featuring pictures of the royal family and starts explaining who’s who, we listen intently though a day or two later we’ve forgotten all the names.

There are some Americans at work who came here a decade or more ago, by themselves, in their 20s. They met Danes and got married. They speak Danish, take Danish vacations, visit Danish in-laws, and complain about the kinds of things that Danes tend to complain about. Part of me is jealous of them, or at least jealous of the transition they’ve been able to make that I never will make. But it isn't specific jealousy--a sense that this is something that I *should* have done. Just a regret that I can't absorb and know all that there is to know and absorb about Denmark and being Danish.

Final Winter Trips: Prague and Hamburg

It’s hard to be a tourist in Northern Europe in the winter. All our winter trips over the past two years have been accompanied by Arctic cold and snow.

Louis and Jonetta went to Prague for a few days during the mid-winter school break (Feb. 15-18)—I stayed behind because I had no vacation time left. Some pictures:

Kafka statue

Louis as vampire

Louis had a basketball tournament in The Hague March 4-7. Twelve hours in a bus each way! Jonetta and I made a small excursion of our own and took the train down to Hamburg Friday afternoon. It’s about a five-hour trip. We arrived as a brief but intense blizzard was raging. As soon as we stepped out from under the awning of the train station we were blinded by snow. We were able to hail a cab that took us the 100 or so meters to our hotel—the Atlantic*, perhaps the poshest hotel in Hamburg though currently in the process of being renovated and therefore available at very reasonable rates. Nice lobby.

We stayed put that night, enjoying cocktails and listening to a very mediocre but strangely affecting lounge singer. (Pick hit: The Fiddler on the Roof medley. Germany, land of ironies.) The next day it was cold and very icy. We spent a few hours in the art museum and then walked west, past the gigantic Rathaus, past the bombed-out cathedral skeleton (apparently a staple of every major German city), through the warehouse/canal district, past the waterfront with the big cruise ships, past the big statue of Bismarck, and along the infamous Reeperbahn, where the Beatles played in the early 60s. (I’m not sure what I was expecting, but a sleazy porn district is just a sleazy porn district, and there was nothing to do but keep walking.) We continued west for a few more kilometers as the sun and the temperature dropped. We aimed for a semi-industrial fishing terminal area that was supposed to have some good sea-food restaurants. We were lucky to find one pretty quickly—a Portuguese place, as it turned out.

The next day was Sunday and there was absolutely nothing open—at one point we passed through a shopping mall that was packed with people, but they were mostly just walking up and down. There was nothing open except the Starbucks and a couple of fast-food places. So we walked the better part of the day once again, trying not to slip on the ice patches. The sun was bright and the awnings were leaking melted snow along with occasional wet avalances.

Our train back left late in the afternoon and it was nice to sit back in our seats and watch the snowy fields of Holstein slip by in the dusk. In the fields were large hares and small deer—it was rather difficult at times to distinguish the one from the other.

The ruins of St. Niklaus kirke (above and below), which was the world's tallest building during part of the 19th century.

*About the Atlantic: I had a hunch and checked once we got home. Yes, Hitler used to stay there.

Nearly Isvinter

February is over and winter has shown signs of weakening, though it is supposed to get colder and snowy again later this week. But in the meantime, the dirty piles of shoveled snow are shrinking, revealing pavement that hasn’t seen daylight since mid-January.

Louis goes to Den Haag on Thursday for a basketball tournament, so Jonetta and I will take the train to Hamburg to explore and spend a couple of nights in a hotel while he’s gone.

In the meantime, I have a final batch of winter pictures. First are a couple of pictures I took while cycling home one afternoon about two weeks ago.



I think it was easier to ride back when it was very cold and snowy. They actually plow the bike trails with little tractor-plows. And where they don’t plow, the packed snow is often reasonably passable. Now there’s black ice most mornings.

An ‘isvinter’ in Denmark is when the Øresund and other coastal waters actually freeze so that they have to use icebreakers to clear the shipping lanes. There have been 15 isvinters in the past 100 years. This winter was not an isvinter, but it was close. The water froze for several kilometers out from shore. Here's a picture from Feb. 10 right after the water first froze—you can see how thin and smooth the ice is:


And then here are some from a few days later when the ice had thickened up some:



If you double-click the last picture you can see that the upright object at the end of the jetty is a six-foot beer bottle. This is the entrance to "Tuborg Harbor," you understand.

Here's one where I tweaked the colors a bit.

Snevejr

Five inches of snow Sunday morning, on top of five on Friday afternoon, and about five more the middle of last week. About the same forecast again for tonight.

And the thing is, it won’t melt for a long, long time, because the temperature never goes very far above freezing. Not since the third week of December, anyway. The Danish Meterological Society reports that January was the coldest month in 23 years.

Ice on the Øresund between Denmark and Sweden comes and goes. One morning it’s solid and gray out for a quarter mile—looks like you could walk right out to the edge. I can imagine a polar bear hovering over a bloody seal carcass. The next morning it’s rectangular ice floes jostling against each other; the morning after that it’s open water and choppy waves. Nobody can figure out why—something to do with currents or tides or wind.

Saturday we took cross-country skis up to the Dyrehavn on the train and skiied around for a couple of hours. It was 19 degrees but the sun was out, the wind wasn’t too bad. Plenty of people out on their skis, so there were nice “tracks” to follow. First time I’d been on skis in about four years.



Louis gets 50 kroner each time he shovels the sidewalk. It’s starting to become expensive.


Saturday was shopping day, and we had to decide whether we would finally abandon the bicycles and walk or take the bus on the 1 km trip down to SuperBest. I went out to reconnoitre: our side street was impassible, but the avenue (Landskronagade) was a flat white sheet that had been pressed nicely by the car traffic, and on the boulevard (Østerbrogade) the bike lanes had been plowed. So we cleared off the bikes and gave it a go. And it worked out OK. But if you’d bet me two years ago that I’d be seeing Jonetta on a bicycle in the snow with 19 degrees I’d have felt guilty taking your money.

Dyr:

All You Need Is Gloves

It was bloody cold in London. Not to mention snowy. No colder or snowier than Copenhagen, but the Brits, on their island out in the warm ocean, aren’t used to such weather. Schools were closed, trains weren’t running, and the newscasters were blathering about how it was the coldest winter since 1911 when the ponies froze standing in their harnesses, etc. Jonetta and Louis flew over Tuesday; I was supposed to follow on Wednesday but my flight was cancelled. I rebooked and they cancelled that one as well. On my fourth try, I finally got out on Thursday afternoon.

We purchased a mountain bike for Louis in London; they will be shipping it here. This has been a key discussion topic in the house since November and I’m not sure what we’ll have to talk about now that it’s settled. It’s a vacuum that Louis will certainly fill with proposals for subsequent purchases.

We stayed in north central London, near Marble Arch and Oxford Street. I think your second trip to a major city can be much more interesting than your first—you can dispense with the big postcard sites like Big Ben or Notre Dame, but then of course you have to start thinking a bit more about where you want to go and what you want to do.

Despite the cold, we walked all over. Friday we took the tube to Liverpool Station and then meandered back west over the course of several hours. Outside Liverpool station you’re in Bishopsgate (where the celebrated Mr. K / performs his feat on Saturday), on the border of the major Pakistani neighborhood around Brick Lane, which is an actual street:


This neighborhood also goes by the name Whitechapel (or at least it did), and it’s where Jack the Ripper prowled 125 years ago. Some of his victims used to quench their thirst at the Ten Bells pub:


Moving westward we had a nice English lunch—fish & chips for Louis and bangers and mash for the adults at the The Pulpit on Worship Street. Having warmed ourselves we proceeded to Bunhill Burial Grounds where William Blake and Daniel Defoe are keeping company:


Across the way John Bunyan is napping under a clean white blanket:


London is a theme park for English majors, music lovers, and history buffs; within a single block of streets you can find places associated with Wat Tyler, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Paul McCartney.

By accident we stumbled upon the 12th century St Bartholomew-the-Great church. This is a building that is hidden away almost invisible in a maze of side streets. We could not tell if we were coming in the front way or the back way. Once inside, though, we found a wonderfully ornate old gothic church:


On Saturday we spent part of the morning in St. John’s Wood which is where Abbey Road is—in case you could not recognize the initial picture. Here’s another shot showing where the studio (the smaller white building on the left) is in relation to the crossing.


Behind the white building is a larger hulking box of a building, which is where the actual recording happened. The soundtrack of my life.

Sunday we had a few hours before our flight so we took the tube up to Camden Town. Forgot the camera, so no pictures. But you can google it. An amazing circus of hippie shops alongside a canal with locks. Hundreds and hundreds of shops selling t-shirts and other junk. Louis got a wallet and a Radiohead t-shirt. We found a pretty good Indian place for lunch. Then it was back to Copenhagen.

Speaking of Copenhagen, here are Jocelyn, Jonetta and Louis at La Glace just before New Year. La Glace is Copenhagen’s elegant old Konditorei (cake shop). Jocelyn is demonstrating the correct way to hold a tea cup:


And to conclude, a couple of bonus shots of Copenhagen in winter.

Easy for Some; Not for Others

Can Brad do it? Not unless they've discovered a way to pump CO2 into his ego.
The sun has been out this weekend so we ventured downtown to look for traces of the Climate Conference. They were not particularly hard to find, but nor were they all that interesting. But once we got away from the main squares it was actually fairly quiet, with a couple of cameo appearances by the sun:


The big demonstrations were over by the centers of government, about a kilometer away.

It’s been a peaceful few months for us here—not a lot to blog about. We’ve been working pretty hard on the Danish lessons. For our weekly lesson, my assignment is usually to try to read a newspaper or magazine article in Danish; last week I read one of the Hans Christian Andersen’s fairly tales. I read at a snail’s pace, marinating in each sentence for several minutes and flipping through the dictionary ever 30 seconds. Google translate is also useful in some cases, though it can embarrass you if you trust it blindly.

When I hear Danes conversing my level of comprehension is like a dog’s—I pick certain words out of the flow (the way a dog can pick out “walk” and “eat” when people are speaking), but it’s only occasionally that I can even determine what the subject of the conversation is. I can understand perhaps 75% of the words when I read, but maybe only 40% when I hear people speak. But then I have to try to link the words together and recreate the meaning of the sentences, and since the world doesn't have a "Pause" button, I usually give up after a few seconds.

Commercial transactions are always interesting. You have the advantage of being able to plan your initial presentation, and you can often anticipate possible answers. When all goes well it’s quite a rush —like the time I went into a music store and ordered a 150 kroner gift card, without using a word of English. It made my day.

But more often than not the salesperson will ask a question that I haven’t anticipated, and I won’t be quite sure. Sometimes you guess: “Nej.” And sometimes it works. But sometimes it doesn’t and you have to bail: “Taler du engelsk?” I hate that moment.

So why bother? Indeed, some of our colleagues don’t. But we do. The desire to understand what people are saying around us is our privilege, and the fact that we will never actually be able to speak Danish is unfortunate but not fatal to the exercise. And despite all the drudgery and futility, we enjoy do it.

Last visitors of the summer

The Taylors visited from Baltimore in September, and stayed with us for a little over a week. Here they are with Jonetta and Louis in Ystad, Sweden, a quaint little town on the Baltic. We’d rented a car for the first time in Denmark. Since we don’t have Danish licenses, we’re technically not supposed to be renting cars here. We’re free to rent in any other European country, but as Danish residents we’re supposed to have Danish licenses. Unfortunately, getting such a license requires a ridiculous expenditure of time and money. So we risked it. As long as you don’t get stopped you’re OK.

Anyway, we set out across the Øresund bridge ($55 each way) and into the wilds, or rather the milds, of southern Sweden. At which point it promptly began to rain. And we began to realize that five adults (or rather, five adult-sized humans) in a compact car does not make for happy motoring. So we reined in the itinerary and headed for the coast, which is how we wound up in Ystad. Beautiful old church and, miracle of miracles, there was a coffee bar open on a Sunday.

This part of Sweden looks a lot like Denmark, which is not too surprising because it used to be Denmark, until King Christian IV suffered a series of professional setbacks in the mid-17th century and wound up hocking a lot of real estate.

On the way home we stopped to see the “Turning Torso” building on the outskirts of Malmø:



You can usually see this building across the water from Copenhagen, though you usually can’t see how weird it is, unless it’s an exceptionally clear day.

I think John and Joyce enjoyed their trip. They took the bus downtown most days and shopped around. We also visited Tivoli one evening and had dinner in a peculiar old Danish restaurant. The weather was good.

Now Tivoli is closed and the days are growing colder and shorter. In Dyrehavn park, the stags grow restless and amorous. Fall has arrived.