Life, with the garden
Location: Copenhagen, Denmark • • • Visit: August 2013
The last city I visited on my 2013 Eurotrip was Copenhagen. I got one wonderfully sunny July weekend in the coolest of the Scandinavian capitals. It is also the only city that I didn’t get a map of. I didn’t need one, I had a great, full-time guide in Markus.
Markus and I were in the same class at the international school when I lived in Tanzania in my early teens. We weren’t close, but friendly, and when Facebook spread out over the world like a pandemic, we became Facebook friends. When I wrote to him about maybe grabbing a beer or something during my stay in Copenhagen, he offered me to stay at his place – and that, my friends, would have been rude to refuse. And it was a great decision, because he and his three roommates were so laid back and made me feel at home – completely confirming my prejudices about Danes.
Having a personal guide is great in most ways – but what I realized afterwards, when going through the photos, was that during this trip, I’ve very much attached my memory of the names of places and guidebook texts to those maps. Now, when I didn’t have a threadbare free tourist map covered in notes to glance at, I no longer remembered the names of the places that I had been to. So, I’ve had to guess and google. In case of mistakes, forgive me. I was completely whacked by this point, and just floated along in the heat, happy to be able to rely on Markus knowing where we were.
We walked from Nyhavn to the Danish Royal Palace, to Strøget and Christiania. The Royal Danish Library (called the Black Diamond, an exquisite piece of modern architecture), and finally to enjoy the evening sun at the beach, with a view of the Öresund Bridge – and Sweden, in the distance.
To give Markus a break from guiding me, I went solo to the University of Copenhagen Botanic Garden on the second day of my visit. The garden is a wonderfully calm place, with greenhouses, a pond and people sitting on the grass, reading in the sunshine. If I lived in Copenhagen, this would definitely be one of my favorite spots in the city. To come here on a sunny day and spend a lazy afternoon lying on the grass, reading a good book. The garden is relatively small, but the pond creates a feeling of space. Water usually does.
The garden also has a beautiful old greenhouse. With butterflies fluttering around among the rainforest trees in one of its rooms. I sat there, in the humidity, while touristing Swedish families tried to catch the flighty butterflies on camera, amused at their efforts. And it was very nice, on this last stop of my long trip around Europe, to rest my feet and breathe in those wonderful greenhouse smells.
Leaving Copenhagen on a misty Monday morning, arriving in Stockholm by midday: I realized, that Stockholm must have one of the most beautiful first impression glances of a city through the train windows when approaching the central station. The train tracks arriving from the south run straight through the heart of Stockholm, on the low bridge crossing the Lake Mälaren with the Old Town on one side and City Hall by the water on the other. Especially if it’s a sunny day like today, the colorful buildings of the Old Town shine and the waters of Mälaren glitter. It might just be the strong feeling I’m having of returning home, but from all the train arrival views that I’ve seen during the last five weeks (and they are MANY), Stockholm is the most beautiful. In most other cities, the train tracks run through industrial areas and the first impression of a city through the train windows is often pretty bleak. But in Stockholm, you can see our very best already from the train tracks.
Epilogue, on a slow day lying on my bed in Skarpnäck:
I’m reading ”The Lover’s Dictionary”, and Levithan uses the phrase geographies of wandering, how he took the ‘you’ in the novel to Seattle, San Francisco, taught her to appreciate it. And it got me thinking. Why do I do it? This traveling. Why?
Is it just about the list? Sometimes, that’s what it feels like. I’ve been to 35 countries in my life now. In that sense, this Eurotrip of mine was an big success. Seven new countries in 38 days.
But there are other things that I like about traveling, too. I like parks and gardens. Libraries and narrow streets. Food. Getting lost, but with the safety of a map in my back pocket. Finding new things about myself in places where I’ve never been before. Perfect moments. Meeting new people to share those perfect moments with.
This past trip has had all of that, but there has also been the list. Maybe too much of the list. I didn’t plan it like that, it just turned out that way. There was so much I wanted to do, and, in the end, too little time. Some of the places I visited, I did not at all feel done with. Münich, Budapest, Zagreb. Sarajevo.
Next trip, I’ll have to plan for more planlessness. Time to get lost. Exploring the geographies of wandering.
Katja Malmborg 