I admit that I wrote my last email a little half-heartedly, even getting the day of my travel wrong. I wrote that email mostly out of a sense of duty to do so and had to search for things to say. I hope that this one goes a little better, but I suppose that I should also be less critical of my writing in these letters.
Roskilde was too insignificant to even be considered a town of German standards. If I had known how interesting Helsingor would be, I would have skipped Roskilde entirely, spending all of Sunday in Copenhagen and saving my money to splurge on food today. Alas, I did not know, so I went there, seeing the whole town in an hour and coming right back. I had my first and only shawarma dinner yesterday; while the shawarma was more interesting than canned fish and canned vegetables, it was also so greasy as to be barely edible. I decided, yesterday, to save the money that I was going to spend on another shawarma dinner and instead spend it on more groceries and, perhaps, a little delicacy.
That delicacy turned out to be fresh fruit, which was good but overpriced. My trip to Helsingor took longer than that to Roskilde, which I liked, as I enjoy long train rides and spent most of my time in the train reading a passable translation of Natalia Ginzburg, a step up from the terrible one that I finished recently. It had rained lightly before my departure, leaving little wells of white sediment on the window, like the salt left behind by dried sweat. The landscape was densely wooded as we went north, with houses nestled between the trees and even a few of the half-timbered houses, or those with colored timber frames, of which I have grown so fond of late and which are so common in the north of Germany.
Helsingor itself was fascinating and well-deserving of Hamlet's having been set in it (It is transliterated as "Elsingore" in the play, I believe.). It was full of old houses and banners over the streets with Danish flags, and it had an excellent war memorial, town hall, and pair of churches, in one of which I listened to some organ music for awhile (I am ashamed to admit that I am coming to like it.). It also appeared to have excellent ice cream and pastries, in which I would have loved to indulge, but I had already pent 32 kroner, or five dollars and change, buying a quarter-kilogram or cherries and four plums. I had seen a fruit store with fresh-looking fruit and prices that did not see over-the-top intimidating until I had filled my two bags with more fruit than I expected; such is life.
My trip across the Oresund (with a crossed-out 'O' -- one of the busiest straits in the world, according to Wikipedia) was very, very rainy. The rain had started up perhaps fifteen minutes before I left Helsingor, and it continued for the rest of the afternoon. On the plus side, I met some Ukrainians and chatted with them all the way to Helsingborg. I have a claim to make that is meant to affront Russians: Ukrainians are friendlier than Russians. Of course, I may have merely met some kindly Ukrainians, just as one can meet kindly people in any part of the world; my sample size was small; but it still strikes me that Russians have the same mentality as American rednecks: they sit on their plots of land with shotguns figuratively in hand, looking suspiciously at anyone unfamiliar who comes anywhere near them.
Helsingborg was a pretty town, with a fantastic castle (like Helsingor itself), a beautiful town hall, and some woefully new-looking buildings, such as the theater, center for the arts, and central library. I spent an hour and a half in it, climbing the keep and then wandering through the town, then decided to curtail any further wandering, as the rain was too heavy. The views from on-board the ship would probably have been quite good; Helsingor and Helsingborg are close enough that one can easily see the one from the shore of the other.
That more or less concluded my Danish adventure. When I returned to Copenhagen, I went back to the local supermarket to see how much food I could buy for 31 kroner and discovered that I could cover my lunches and dinners in Stockholm. My impressions of Denmark have, obviously, been negative on the whole. Copenhagen is the only city in which I have so far felt any sort of danger, not for my own personal safety, but for my wallet and other belongings. This reflects not so much Denmark itself as the size of the crowds here: one is surrounded so much by other people in the center of Copenhagen on weekends in the summer that theft must be fairly trivial. On reflection, this is almost surely true of many other major tourist destinations that are also big cities; I have just happened to have the luck not to be in too many of them.
People here bike a lot, even more than in Germany, though less than in the Netherlands. I learned, upon my visit to Roskilde, that a major music festival, the Roskilde Festival, at which people camped out for a couple of days and partied all night long, had just finished, and it turns out that it is jazz week here. It is interesting to me that so many people travel specifically for the sake of visiting festivals, going to concerts, and the like, while I showed up in Gdansk during some major European soccer tournament without even knowing about it in 2012 and did not bother watching a single one of the soccer games that were broadcast all over Europe, even when I was in countries that were playing; it is interesting that people's travel interests differ so much.
I am afraid that I have to leave you with a rather watered-down image, as it is the last one in my notes and the last thing that I want to say about Denmark. I regret that I was on the very periphery of town when the 6:00 PM knell sounded on Saturday, as I expect that it was spectacular in the city center. I have heard some very nice church bells ever since I was in Hanover and am coming to appreciate them as a little more than pleasant background noise. They are solemn and can be even more majestic than the sights of churches themselves, reminding us that we are small, weak, and, if not subject to some sort of overpowering force without ourselves, at least very insignificant, individually, compared to the rest of the world, mere specks in the history of mankind. I am the millionth person to have voiced this very thought; to feel it in the knelling of the bells themselves, to stand and feel their vibrations and focus all of one's senses on them, somehow hammers this home more than merely thinking about it.
Roskilde was too insignificant to even be considered a town of German standards. If I had known how interesting Helsingor would be, I would have skipped Roskilde entirely, spending all of Sunday in Copenhagen and saving my money to splurge on food today. Alas, I did not know, so I went there, seeing the whole town in an hour and coming right back. I had my first and only shawarma dinner yesterday; while the shawarma was more interesting than canned fish and canned vegetables, it was also so greasy as to be barely edible. I decided, yesterday, to save the money that I was going to spend on another shawarma dinner and instead spend it on more groceries and, perhaps, a little delicacy.
That delicacy turned out to be fresh fruit, which was good but overpriced. My trip to Helsingor took longer than that to Roskilde, which I liked, as I enjoy long train rides and spent most of my time in the train reading a passable translation of Natalia Ginzburg, a step up from the terrible one that I finished recently. It had rained lightly before my departure, leaving little wells of white sediment on the window, like the salt left behind by dried sweat. The landscape was densely wooded as we went north, with houses nestled between the trees and even a few of the half-timbered houses, or those with colored timber frames, of which I have grown so fond of late and which are so common in the north of Germany.
Helsingor itself was fascinating and well-deserving of Hamlet's having been set in it (It is transliterated as "Elsingore" in the play, I believe.). It was full of old houses and banners over the streets with Danish flags, and it had an excellent war memorial, town hall, and pair of churches, in one of which I listened to some organ music for awhile (I am ashamed to admit that I am coming to like it.). It also appeared to have excellent ice cream and pastries, in which I would have loved to indulge, but I had already pent 32 kroner, or five dollars and change, buying a quarter-kilogram or cherries and four plums. I had seen a fruit store with fresh-looking fruit and prices that did not see over-the-top intimidating until I had filled my two bags with more fruit than I expected; such is life.
My trip across the Oresund (with a crossed-out 'O' -- one of the busiest straits in the world, according to Wikipedia) was very, very rainy. The rain had started up perhaps fifteen minutes before I left Helsingor, and it continued for the rest of the afternoon. On the plus side, I met some Ukrainians and chatted with them all the way to Helsingborg. I have a claim to make that is meant to affront Russians: Ukrainians are friendlier than Russians. Of course, I may have merely met some kindly Ukrainians, just as one can meet kindly people in any part of the world; my sample size was small; but it still strikes me that Russians have the same mentality as American rednecks: they sit on their plots of land with shotguns figuratively in hand, looking suspiciously at anyone unfamiliar who comes anywhere near them.
Helsingborg was a pretty town, with a fantastic castle (like Helsingor itself), a beautiful town hall, and some woefully new-looking buildings, such as the theater, center for the arts, and central library. I spent an hour and a half in it, climbing the keep and then wandering through the town, then decided to curtail any further wandering, as the rain was too heavy. The views from on-board the ship would probably have been quite good; Helsingor and Helsingborg are close enough that one can easily see the one from the shore of the other.
That more or less concluded my Danish adventure. When I returned to Copenhagen, I went back to the local supermarket to see how much food I could buy for 31 kroner and discovered that I could cover my lunches and dinners in Stockholm. My impressions of Denmark have, obviously, been negative on the whole. Copenhagen is the only city in which I have so far felt any sort of danger, not for my own personal safety, but for my wallet and other belongings. This reflects not so much Denmark itself as the size of the crowds here: one is surrounded so much by other people in the center of Copenhagen on weekends in the summer that theft must be fairly trivial. On reflection, this is almost surely true of many other major tourist destinations that are also big cities; I have just happened to have the luck not to be in too many of them.
People here bike a lot, even more than in Germany, though less than in the Netherlands. I learned, upon my visit to Roskilde, that a major music festival, the Roskilde Festival, at which people camped out for a couple of days and partied all night long, had just finished, and it turns out that it is jazz week here. It is interesting to me that so many people travel specifically for the sake of visiting festivals, going to concerts, and the like, while I showed up in Gdansk during some major European soccer tournament without even knowing about it in 2012 and did not bother watching a single one of the soccer games that were broadcast all over Europe, even when I was in countries that were playing; it is interesting that people's travel interests differ so much.
I am afraid that I have to leave you with a rather watered-down image, as it is the last one in my notes and the last thing that I want to say about Denmark. I regret that I was on the very periphery of town when the 6:00 PM knell sounded on Saturday, as I expect that it was spectacular in the city center. I have heard some very nice church bells ever since I was in Hanover and am coming to appreciate them as a little more than pleasant background noise. They are solemn and can be even more majestic than the sights of churches themselves, reminding us that we are small, weak, and, if not subject to some sort of overpowering force without ourselves, at least very insignificant, individually, compared to the rest of the world, mere specks in the history of mankind. I am the millionth person to have voiced this very thought; to feel it in the knelling of the bells themselves, to stand and feel their vibrations and focus all of one's senses on them, somehow hammers this home more than merely thinking about it.
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| Shakespeare should have set Hamlet in a country that did not suck. This castle is the only thing that differentiates Denmark from Slovenia. |
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