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King's Garden, Copenhagen
Tuesday, September 3 2024
location: somewhere over the North Atlantic northwest of Scotland
Save for the occasional fart, I slept fairly well the two or three times I did. Once I was fully awake and see that we were entering Scottish air space (meaning we'd already flown most of the way to Copenhagen), I started watching stupid shit on the airplane's entertainment system: a series called Tracker about a swashbuckling guy of indeterminate age who professionally collects rewards for finding missing people, and House Hunters (HGTV porn where everyone dies and ends up in a heaven of muted greys.) It bears mentioning that I never once left my seat for the entire flight to use the bathroom or otherwise exercise my legs, though I had an aisle seat and could've easily done so.
Once we'd landed and were disgorged by our fat transAtlantic airplane, Danish immigration was about as fast as you'd expect and there was no apparent customs at all for people like us who only had carry-on luggage, so my homegrown ghost peppers were now safely inside the EU.
On this trip Gretchen wanted, for once, to have a working phone (as opposed to what we usually do: relying on what WiFi we can find). So we bought a SIM card from a 7Eleven-branded SIM card vending machine in the airport. But we didn't have the pokey thing to actually install it.
It turned out that getting from the airport to downtown Copenhagen was a simple matter of riding in a subway. It's what would make the most sense, but for most cities one ends up having to take a taxi (or perhaps, these days, an Uber). From the subway station, we walked for fifteen or twenty minutes through the city, marveling at all the people riding bicycles and the massive bicycle parking lots (they weren't all that big, but they held hundreds of bikes). On the roads, most of the people moving about were on bicycles, with only a smattering of four-wheel vehicles (usually delivery vans) amongst them. There were forms of pedaled vehicles we'd never seen before, particularly a kind with a long, low bed in the front for transporting other humans (usually children or mentally-challenged adults) or cargo.
Our hotel was the Bella Grande, and when we arrived, we could check in immediately. The woman at the front desk was very smiley and perhaps a little too friendly, a pattern of excellent service we would encounter throughout Copenhagen (which makes it a very different place from, say, Mexico City).
The temptation upon flying to Europe from North America is to check into a hotel and immediately fall asleep, but Gretchen had said we would only have two days in Copenhagen, so we had to make the most of both of them.
We managed to get a paperclip from the nice lady at reception and attempted to get our SIM card installed and working in Gretchen's phone. But it proved impossible. Our phones are on the Cricket network, which allows one to "unlock" one's phone for use on other carriers, but they only allow that after one has had a device for six months. Gretchen had only had her phone for a couple months at the most, so that wasn't going to work. I've had my Cricket phone for over three years now, so that should've worked. But when I tried to use them, the reliably-infuriating Cricket app and website seemed to only allow logins from within the United States, and setting up a proxy on the chance that I could get a login (assuming something else wouldn't go wrong) was too great of a hurdle for me to want to attempt. So we eventually gave up on the SIM card, figuring that working from whatever WiFi we can find has worked well enough so far. Perhaps we could decline paying for the SIM card later when it appears on our credit card bill.
Soon thereafter, we were out on the street, walking first to a vegan bakery Gretchen knew about, probably Landbageriet. I was hungry and particularly excited about the pizza-like focaccia on display, though of course Gretchen got many other things, including some with lots and lots of seeds. We ate one of the things and it was so seedy it reminded me of the disembageled seeds at the bottom of a bag of bagels, which I often pour into my hand and eat once the bagels are all gone.
I needed some caffeine, so we went into an Espresso House, which turns out to be a chain, and I got an Americano.
From there, we entered the grounds of the King's Garden, an overly-formal park where even full-sized trees had been pruned into popsicle shapes. The rigorous formality included a rose garden that had been pruned and trained into sharply-angled forms, though there had been enough growth since the last pruning that it looked a little rough.
The biggest attraction on the King's Garden was a pond full of carp who were so accustomed to being fed by humans that, when humans were around, they would mass on the shoreline until it was more fish than water. You could reach down and pet them on the back and they didn't care at all.
We found a place in the grass that was partly in shade and partly in sun to lie down and eat our bakery items. And, because we were in Copenhagen, one of the cleanest, most orderly cities (at least outside of Asia), we didn't have to worry about lying in dog shit. It was a very nice place to lie, but the baked goods were all disappointing. The savory focaccias was particularly bad, perhaps because they were also gluten-free. I took one bite and knew I would never be eating any more.
The only wildlife we could see in the park were a number of jackdaws, some of whom strode by fairly closely on the chance we had something for them. There were also some mallards who had just been in the pond with the carp and had flown over a fence and some bushes to graze on the lawn. But they were there only a few minutes before flying back to the pond.
We found our way back to the hotel from there, noting the beautiful (and varied) colors the Danes use for their buildings. These colors happen to be Gretchen's favorites: sage green, bluish grey, and orangish red. At some point we came upon an unusual sight in Scandanavia: two fresh-faced young men dressed in military fatigues carrying automatic rifles. They were there to guard a synagogue where, a sign said, one such guard was killed in 2015.
Back in our hotel, I pretty much went directly to bed, though Gretchen forced herself to stay awake. She went out into the neighborhood and everything while I slept fitfully, waking with every hourly chiming of a nearby church. Later in the night, there was a lot of noise from a nearby club that I was able to sleep through, though Gretchen had much more difficulty.
A sculpture of what I must imagine is a queen in the King's Garden.
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Gretchen in the King's rose garden.
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Gretchen at the shore of a pond churning with excited carp.
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A strange seemingly-allegorical sculpture not in the King's Garden.
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A macabre sculpture about a woman losing her baby to death in a small courtyard on our walk.
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On old buildings throughout Copenhagen there are a lot of little faces on the façades. Here the faces are all little animals like elephants, lions, and rhinos.
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Hopefully you can make out the little critters.
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But in case you can't.
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Gretchen taking pictures of façades painted some of her favorite colors.
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