My arrival in Copenhagen was much more interesting than my trip there. As I left the train station, I briefly feared, since I had essentially entered Scandinavia, that I would suffer the ignominy of knowing where I was going, but I quickly discovered that I was still in Europe and that none of the roads had signs above them. Luckily, the tourist information center was right outside the train station -- I am not sure why they put it in a logical place -- and I was given straightforward directions to my hostel.
Copenhagen reminds me a little of Paris in that it is an essentially unpleasant city with excellent architecture and interesting monuments. Its sidewalks are narrow, often forcing one to walk in the street, and the streets themselves are two small to handle the amount of pedestrian traffic that they face. Much of the center of town appears to be under construction, which is probably more a problem of timing than an innate shortcoming of the city, and it is composed principally of expensive shops. Copenhagen has a more relaxed, laissez-faire feel to it than any city that I have visited in Germany (like Hamburg on steroids), which I find disagreeable: the city is full of music, which is a plus, and people lie around drinking beer, which is, perhaps, a plus, and the combination of these conditions creates a bit of a festive atmosphere that does not sit well with me. Perhaps because this is a Saturday, many of the city's male citizens appear to be drunk from he afternoon onward, and they grow loud and overexcited when they are drunk.
When I checked into my hostel, I discovered that it was better than I had expected, its only real shortcoming being its lack of a fridge and kitchen for guest use. I also discovered that everything here was incredibly expensive -- garbage Thai food sells for something like fifteen dollars per reasonably-sized dish, perhaps three times what it would cost in Germany. Thankfully, one of the hostel employees told me that I could get food plenty cheap at a grocery store around the corner and that I could get shawarma here for six or seven dollars. Having worked out that I would need 310 kroner for transportation, had only 490 kroner left, and did not want to have to take more money out of the bank here, I decided to spend up to 100 kroner on groceries and save 80 or so to treat myself to a pair of donair dinners, a real luxury around here. I managed to buy more food than I could eat in three days, all non-perishable, for 77 kroner, even including a half-kilogram of grapes that I got as a treat as cheaply as I could have done back home, oddly. I am going to buy a liter of milk tomorrow evening (for 7 kroner, or just under a Euro) to make up for not having any to drink with breakfast, beyond which I will be subsisting on my traditional meals of canned vegetables, canned fish, fruit juice, and, in this case, horrible-looking, healthy, whole-grain bread, which went for two dollars per kilogram. I can make myself Turkish delight sandwiches with the bread if I grow truly sick of it, as I have a bunch of Turkish delight left over from Hamburg.
Food is not that interesting, though, except to the traveler himself. In its favor, Copenhagen is a city in which one cannot spit without hitting a church. The statuary and museums here are fantastic, and the citadel and palace gardens are very pleasant places to walk; the waters themselves look excellent for sailing. Copenhagen is the least European city that I have seen so far: while the requisite percentage of its citizenry smokes, I have seen several people exercising, and four of them have even smiled at me, as a result of which I believe that Denmark should be removed from the European Union for cultural treachery. As much as I prefer the Germans' sobriety to the Danish's joie de vivre, I have to admit that it is kind of nice to be surrounded by people who are not quite so sour as in, say, France.
My plans for tomorrow are to see Roskilde and the parts of Copenhagen that I still have not seen, while in two days I plan to see Helsingor, where Hamlet was set, and Helsingore, which is 15 kilometers away from it by boat (and is in Sweden). I think that Denmark will not be so bad now that I have enough food for the trip and know that I will not need more money to see it; while I left Germany regretting that I had left a relatively cheap country in which everything was reasonable and worked as it was supposed to, and while I felt that I had been fleeced by a German railway employee who sold me a reservation for the train that turned out to be optional, I realized that the reservation was a form of insurance to make sure that I would at least have a seat, while many people had to stand or sit in the train's aisles for roughly five hours, and I should get plenty of work done over the next few days, as the WiFi here is good. It also might not hurt to experience a different culture for several days, as too much sobriety can make people unoriginal, though the risk of its doing so is vanishingly small, to my mind.
I have to shower soon and go to bend, and I will not have time to write tomorrow; I am going to wrap this letter up soon. I forgot to mention that the Indian girl whom I met the other day, the one who was studying medicine in Essen, said that she would be happy to help me plan a trip to India in the future, that her mom's relatives are all from Amritsar, one of my eventual destinations, and that there is a saying in Punjabi that translates as, "Guests are gods." I met a young man, an engineer who had been living in Copenhagen for three years and was originally from Romania, who told me all sorts of things about Denmark, including how crazy its language was and how Roskilde was the country's former capital. In fact, "Copenhagen" translates directly as "purchase port" -- the city was merely a harbor in which people could buy things. Naturally, its prominence as a port eventually made it more important than Roskilde and led to the capital's being transferred, but it had modest beginnings.
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| Copenhagen sucks. These old houses, however, do not. |
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