On a Train to Berlin

When I first got onto my train to Berlin, I was in the wrong car.  Unlike most trains, this one didn’t have doors at the end of the car providing access to other cars.  I realized both these things bothering a lot of nice German people when I began trying to figure out where my seat was.  Even once I was settled in the right car, I wasn’t confident that I was in the right place—the signs around the train station were confusing. But the conductor seemed to think I was, and since he got quite annoyed with someone else who showed up on the train without a reservation, I assumed he wasn’t just being nice.

There was one other girl sitting with me—all that was left to reserve that first day in Copenhagen was a two-person sleeper.  The compartment was quite nice—three plush seats, dark blue with red, white, green, and yellow confetti patterned on it, behind which was a wall made of three flat yellow rectangles stacked long-ways which I thought would fold down into beds.  I hoped I might get some sleep that night, something which jet lag and then a blaring alarm which the hostel staff assured me was both false and related to water, not fire (what water-related emergency on dry land warrants an alarm?), had so far prevented. 

I noticed as I took my seat that the compartment had a mild but relentless odor of mold.  Self-consciously, I leaned over to subtly sniff my suitcase to see if it was the source—it had spent the day in the basement luggage room of my hostel (was it a false mold alarm last night?).  I didn’t want to offend my compartment mate with my potentially moldy possessions.  She was a pretty German girl with pretty German features who had asked me what my “mother tongue” was when I first joined her in the compartment.  While she could clearly get by in English better than I can in German (I can’t get past “excuse me, hello”), she didn’t seem very comfortable in it—when the conductor was checking her ticket, he spoke English to her, with which she gamely tried to keep up, until her traveling companion—a boyfriend or a brother—came in and told him she preferred German.  The conductor switched immediately. 

What a skill these polyglot Europeans have.  I wonder what it’s like growing up and living in a world that expects you to routinely switch between languages.  And how fortunate for my laziness that I was born to English.  Yes, I actually know another language, but not one I can exactly go visit in a foreign country. 

The train left the station and chugged rapidly across the country.  We stopped several times as the hours passed to take on more passengers.  At one point the track ran along the ocean, a beautiful blue just beyond a highway.  My compartment mate and I both took pictures through our window, though I suspect her DSLR camera did that better than my point-and-shoot or phone did. 

When it got dark out, I wanted to get ready for bed.  Trying not to be a disaster, I managed to wrestle my toiletry bag and pajamas out of my suitcase, and spent some time in the train bathroom washing up.  The bathroom was surprisingly well-appointed—there was actually a small shower, which I was tempted to make use of.  When my compartment mate went for her turn in the bathroom, I brought my suitcase out into the passage, and realized with relief that it was the carpet and upholstery in the compartment and not my things that were the source of the moldy odor—at least I wasn’t causing the problem for us both. 

I was trying to read, sitting sideways to stave off sickness, when my compartment mate asked if we wanted the beds down.  I was just beginning to wonder when such a thing was going to happen, but I’m not sure how much of a choice we really had; the conductor made it seem obligatory when she went to get him.  He laid down the three blue plush seat backs, then their ladder-like under-support, and lowered the first yellow panel, revealing a pillow and folded comforter atop a tidy white mattress.  My compartment mate examined the seat numbers and her ticket, and determined that I had this lower bed, and she the upper.  She seemed quite disappointed, gazing at the upper panel.  There were actually two, oddly enough, one shorter, cut off by the corner of the window.  There didn’t seem to be a way both upper panels could have been lowered at once; the middle bed would have been scant inches beneath the top one.  The conductor had to hop off the ladder he had hung to determine which of these bed panels he was meant to lower, and settled on the full-length, middle one.  I thought my compartment mate would feel better about it, seeing it wasn’t any shorter, but she didn’t seem to, so I offered to switch.  She seemed quite pleased and appreciative, and so was I after she went off to the bathroom and I climbed the ladder to the now-top bunk.  I think my greatest joy in Europe really is climbing all over it. 

The bed was very comfortable, and I thought the rolling train would help me sleep, but no such luck.  I dozed a bit, and tried to lay facing the way the train was going, but a pulsing pain in my right leg, a relic of my Bill Bryson syndrome, which only went away when it was bent prevented this from being comfortable.  On top of that, the train’s motion seemed to change direction, going first one way, then the other, then seemingly sideways.  I probably did doze a little, but I was conscious much of the ride.  When my alarm went off at 4:30, I hurried to the bathroom, and found the conductor at our door when I returned.  He carried two paper bags with breakfasts, and I tried to eat mine in my bunk, feeling sicker and sicker as I did so.  The food may have been partially to blame—it wasn’t German; maybe Turkish?  Two rolls, one sweet, a meat spread that smelled like cat food, and some margarine, and an oddly-flavored juice box.  There was also a cup of black tea too hot to drink.  When the train finally stopped and I rushed to the door, I was mostly just relieved to be on level ground, but in the train station in Berlin I found that the motion had followed me, though I didn’t feel quite so sick.  I sat on a bench waiting for the world to stop rolling under me and for a reasonable morning hour to arrive so I could go find my hostel and deposit my luggage.  

Bill Bryson Syndrome in Copenhagen

Something I should mention as I describe my travels: I have Bill Bryson Syndrome.  In his many brilliant travelogues, Bryson, an avid walker from his years living in England, writes that, upon arriving in a new city, he will look over his maps, find that his destination doesn’t seem to be that far from his hotel, and decide to walk to it.  Inevitably, he finds himself wandering miles further than he’d planned, often along highways or other less-than-pedestrian-friendly routes.  I have the same problem.  I walk quite a bit in my everyday life, and I like how much of an area walking it allows me to see—I don’t feel like I’ve really been to a city until I’ve walked in it.  I try to balance this urge with a little good sense, but no matter how much I try I find myself in similarly ridiculous predicaments to Mr. Bryson’s, and my second day in Copenhagen turned out to be one of those occasions. 

I had an excellent plan.  Over coffee and croissant at a café, I planned out a day of activities beginning nearby, looping around the city, and returning to the hostel to retrieve my luggage and catch a train.  I thought it was a good plan, with plenty of places to rest built into the day.  On my map, the distances looked small and doable.  Walking, I reasoned, I would get to see more of the city and get an idea of what I wanted to do when I returned at the end of the month.

Sitting here safely at home, Google Maps has helped me to calculate that my planned route and final return to the hostel totaled nearly seven miles, and that doesn’t include any of the wandering in parks, wrong turns, or meanders through buildings that were intended to be part of my day.  It was also going to be unseasonably hot.  But, that day, blissfully ignorant of all of this, armed with my map and my plan, I paid for my coffee and headed out across the cobbled plaza towards my first destination. 

I walked a more direct route than I had the day before to get to the Rådhus, passing a huge department store with displays of amber jewelry in the windows.  This time when I walked through the Rådhus doors, no guards shooed me back out—instead, they let me enter the spacious, sunny stone room along with a few other early tourists. 

Interior of the Rådhus, Copenhagen

            

The building was gorgeous—high, bright windows, tiled mosaics, statues of famous Danes like Niels Bohr and Hans Christian Andersen, art by Thorvaldsen, and murals abounded.  It was airy and largely empty, though, even of informative plaques.  I found the few guards seemed content to let people wander most of the place, smiling and nodding encouragingly as I turned down hallways and examined office doors.  A group, seemingly a future wedding party, was being shown around, possibly planning to rent the place.  I did find one open stairwell which led to more offices in which I was not welcome—as a man rushed in to tell me to leave, but not before I’d had a look around and enjoyed an aerial view of Thorvaldsen’s Jason in the back hall.

Jason, by Thorvaldsen

Gammeltorv

Having wandered my fill, I made my way from the Rådhusplads to Gammeltorv, a square full of restaurants and produce stands with a beautiful fountain decorated with monstrous fish spraying in the center.  The city was beginning to be busy now as it got closer to midday, and I felt a little self-conscious as I circled the plaza, squinting at my map and then peering up at walls looking for street names of the roads that spoked off in different directions.  After a couple of circuits, and a few darts along the diameter, I found the street that I thought would lead to the Vor Frue Kirche, which Rick Steves claimed had an impressive organ and some more Thorvaldsen art. 

I found the church readily enough, and stepped gladly into its cool white foyer.  Heavy wooden doors, presumably leading to the sanctuary, were shut.  A few tourists milled about the hallway, speculating on why it was closed, but a sign directed visitors to ascend some wooden stairs off to the left.  I jogged up the three flights, and found myself in an empty wooden balcony.  It seemed like an area in which artifacts might be displayed or a view might be had, but the place was deserted and view-less.  Puzzled and disappointed, I returned to ground level and left, having seen nothing of interest. 

My next church was rather disappointing as well.  I returned to Sankt Petri to see the interior, hoping for great things after its beautiful yard and wall marked with venerable graves.  But the inside was white and modern, with only a few rooster decorations and a very shiny chandelier alleviating the tedium.  I left quickly. 

A rooster at Sankt Petri

My next stop was planned to ease my sore feet—I found the public library and sat at a table, enjoying the free (though slow) wifi.  The building itself was disappointingly modern, but the rest was welcome.  I saw someone, probably a library patron rather than a tourist, carrying a reusable tote that said “Recycle or die.”  The message seemed comically threatening until I thought about it, and then it just seemed chilling.  I ceased my efforts to snap a clear photo of him, chastened. 

Leaving the library, I followed the crowded roads to Rosenborg Have, the large public park around the royal summerhouse now open to tourists.  I planned to have a leisurely stroll in the park, see the outside of the castle, and decide whether I thought it might be worth an indoor visit with a ticket later in my trip.  I planned to leave the park by an exit nearer to my next destination, too, to avoid some road travel. 

Rosenborg was beautiful and busy.  Locals strolled around the lawns, sat on benches by fountains, fed ducks, and sunbathed.  Tourists crowded near the gates to the small palace, joining the line for tickets and admission.  I strolled through, people-watching, admiring the greening bronze statuary, and enjoying the trees.  I found a huge labyrinthine garden full of lavender and roses, presided over by a statue of a queen, with a nice view of the palace over a hedge.  Heading away from the crowds and toward the corner of the park at which I planned to exit, I found a huge spreading tree that I climbed and rested in for awhile. 

Rosenborg

Leaving the park, I had to walk along more streets to get on the right path to Kastellat Park and the obligatory Little Mermaid statue all Copenhagen visitors must see.  The stretch on the map looked short, though a maze of streets meant I couldn’t walk a direct path.  I headed briskly past houses, apartments, and various statues for what seemed a very long time (Google Maps says two miles), and felt thoroughly relieved to finally arrive at a corner with a gate surrounded by greenery to plunge through, getting off of the hot and shadeless roads. 

Not having planned to visit Kastellat except as a path to the Little Mermaid, I didn’t know much about it.  My map showed a simple circuit of paths through it that I thought would be easy to follow, and at first that seemed to be correct.  A broad gravel path ran along what looked to be a man-made moat dividing me from a hill on the top of which there was another path, and some windmills.  A hobbit-hole-like door opened into the side of the hill.  I followed the path on my side of the moat a ways, peering at the paths on my map to try to locate myself. 

By sheer luck—my map was little help—I got further into the park.   The moat become more river-like and, to my delight, had swans swimming on it followed by their very own ugly ducklings, which they have apparently decided to raise themselves rather than depositing them, cuckoo-like, into ducks’ nests.  A bridge crossed the river to big gates into the hill opposite, which surrounded a fortified little town.  It seemed Kastellat was a military base open to the public. 

I crossed the bridge and went a little way into the fortification, climbing to the path at the top of the hill for a view.  I could see a church steeple from there, and I decided it must be one of the churches marked on my map, hopefully Kastellskirken, which was halfway into the park.  Leaving the fortification, I walked to the church, hoping to get my bearings more firmly. 

St. Albans, Kastellat Park

It wasn’t Kastellskirken.  The church was St. Alban’s, which looked on my map to be hardly a few steps from the gate by which I had entered the park.  I began to wonder whether I had time to make it to the Little Mermaid even if I could find it.  I was further disheartened by the fact that my feet were starting to ache enormously.  Nevertheless, I pressed on a ways.  Past the church I found a large fountain surrounded by tourists.  I enjoyed its cool spray as I walked past.  I just kept going away from the church and the way I’d entered the park, eventually coming across a garden area with flowerbeds, statues, and a view of the harbor.   It was thronged with tourists, which seemed to be a good sign, as did the appearance of vendors selling Little Mermaid statuettes.  I kept going, and suddenly, a knot of people down by the rocky shore told me I was there.  I scrambled down the bank, and there she was, the Little Mermaid hunched on her rock, gazing out to sea, her lower limbs something between legs and fins.  I joined the crowd to get the requisite number of pictures (eighteen). 

The Little Mermaid, Copenhagen

Having only a hazy idea of how I’d gotten there in the first place, retracing my steps was a challenge, and I decided to leave the park by a closer exit to be back among city streets that were reliably marked on my map.  Walking against the crowds, I found a way out, and headed towards a conglomeration of palaces which I thought I could take a glance at before finding the botanic garden.  They were slightly disappointing from the outside, though—low, sprawling buildings with a dome and rather fewer statues than the parks all had.  They were also lacking trees, and the sun was baking by that point.  I kept going, pushing through crowds at Nyhavn, happening across an unexplained bust of Franklin D. Roosevelt at the head of a row of ornamental trees planted on a large median in a road, and along a bicycle-thronged street.  I passed an entrance to Rosenborg, which is next to the botanic garden, and decided to cut through there for a rest—my feet were screaming. 

In Rosenborg, I sat under a tree.  Having heard for years about all the topless sunbathing that goes on in Europe, I watched the many sunbathers in the park closely.  None of the women were topless, but many of them were wearing bikinis.  Or were they?  Looking more closely, I realized some of the women were, in fact, actually just in their underwear.  Matching underwear—black bras with black panties and such—but underwear, not a swimsuit.  I started playing Guess Which-Bikini or Brassiere?  One woman had simply pulled her dress over her head and laid down on the grass.  Brassiere.  Another girl was wearing jean shorts and a lacy thing, clearly also a bra.  But many girls did have swimsuits—things with bulky ties in the back and such, never intended to hide smoothly under a shirt.  Why the different choices of sunbathing attire, I wondered?  Did the women in bikinis plan to sunbathe today, and the women in underwear made a last-minute choice?  How is it that their bras and underwear match if they weren’t planning to show them off?  My own undergarments rarely manage to match well even when I try to plan it that way.  And why was nobody actually topless? 

            Then I got my comeuppance.   A bird, hopping around in the shady branches above my head, dropped a deposit on my foot.  Disgusted, I cleaned myself up as best I could and continued on my way out of the park, across the street, and into the botanic garden. 

            The botanic garden was everything I had hoped it would be—trees, flowers, a huge pond full of lily pads so dense that birds nested in them, a giant greenhouse, shady paths.  Unfortunately, even after my sunbather-watching rest in Rosenborg, I was so exhausted and sore from my walking that I could only briefly explore before I slumped on a bench to rest and rub my feet. 

Botanisk Have, Copenhagen

            When it got late enough, I left, limping on sore feet on my long walk back to the hostel (one and a half miles).  I stopped again at the Jarmers Plads ruins for more pictures and a little rest, and finally made it back to my luggage.  Cursing my Bill Bryson Syndrome, I hobbled my way to the train station, dragging my heavy suitcase over the cobbles.  It was time to catch a train! 

Leaving the train station to begin the enjoyable part of my day, I found that even after a night of sleep, the streets near the station remained confusingly or not at all marked.  I finally determined where I was when I noticed the skeleton frames of amusement park rides towering around a large brick building—Tivoli, the amusement park for which Copenhagen is known.  I peeked at it a bit through a gate—the horrifyingly tall rides look a bit like construction equipment until you see the cage of people being hurled around, all of it old, giving off a steampunk air of venerability, unlike Six Flags, which gleams new paint and advanced technology.  I didn’t really have any interest in the place—possibly an active disinterest—but the notes I’d taken from Rick Steves led me to believe that Rodin’s Thinking Man resided in a garden there, and after having endured impressionist after impressionist at the Musée d'Orsay several years ago hoping he would be there, I certainly didn’t want to miss him. 

A shot of Tivoli through its fence

Passing Tivoli, I came across a gate into a garden by a large and impressive building.  The garden looked free, so in I went.  Immediately I was taken with a copper goblin statue, appearing to chase something from his pedestal, hand outstretched to grasp his quarry.  He was delightfully demonic.  His pedestal sat on a lawn surrounded by a wide border of flowers growing together pell-mell, rich pink foxglove prominent among them.  Naturally, I went camera-mad. 

Trold der Lugter Kristenblod
 Niels Hansen-Jacobsen

 





Moving around the goblin to photograph him from every possible angle, I noticed a statue in the middle of the garden.  A huge, hunched, seated figure, green oxidized bronze like the goblin.  I went nearer, excited.  There he was, the Thinker, by Auguste Rodin, outside of the amusement park after all (I must take Rick Steves notes more carefully!) and free in the middle of a public garden.  He, too, was surrounded by foxglove, his pedestal placed before the pillared gable at the center of the impressive building attached to the garden.  No disappointment was he, either, as compared to reproductions and photographs I’d seen—massive, he towered over me, an impressive presence above the wildflowers.

The Thinker, Copenhagen
Auguste Rodin

Now, of course, this is not quite the original Thinker.  The statue with that honor is in the Rodin Museum in Paris, but, as any bronze version was cast based on a plaster figure which Rodin made, it could be argued that none of the bronze versions are “original” in the way that the painting of the Mona Lisa or the Last Supper are—I’m quite happy to consider Copenhagen’s Thinker as original as any other version I might have seen. 

The garden was comfortable and pleasant, with benches and several more less-arresting statues, so I stayed awhile, watching tourist families and locals with babies in strollers come through.  I found a toy dinosaur lying on his side on one of the low hedges bordering the flower plantings—a souvenir I did not take with me, hoping that the original owner, disconsolate without their T. rex, might return for it.  

T. rex on a hedge

Foxglove behind the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek

Leaving the garden eventually, I wandered around the front of the building (I rarely manage to come at anything from the right direction), examining and photographing statues along the way.  It turned out to be the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, an art museum which had made it into my Rick Steves notes without a ticket price.  I decided to save it until I knew more about the cost, and headed on my way towards the Rådhuspladsen, which was free.

Walking along the boulevard towards the Rådhus, I found double wooden doors leading into a courtyard containing the Rådhusets Gårdhaveanlæg, the Town Hall’s garden.  Some sort of special roses—pink, and past their prime, resembling wads of expensive tissue paper—grew in a hedge around a high fountain sprayed by a statue of a bear, sitting upright, mouth wide open as though waiting for a fish to jump in. 

Courtyard of the Rådhus

I spent so much time in the courtyard that by the time I left it to see the Rådhus itself, it was closing.  I consoled myself by watching a child climb on the odd bronze gargoyles spaced in a semicircle before the front doors and by visiting the famous larger-than-life statue of Hans Christian Andersen around the corner, his knees rubbed shiny by visitors climbing up to sit on his lap. 

The front of the Rådhus 

H. C. Andersen
Henry Luckow-Nielson

The attraction of the H.C. Andersen statue faded after he was engulfed in a swarm of other tourists.  I left the square, heading towards a nearby church I had listed in my notes.  Along the way, I passed a shop with a rather incongruous window—“Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi” emblazoned in white letters over an elaborate Pippi Longstocking playset, complete with horse.  While Pippi is certainly surreal, and might at a stretch be fantasy, I have trouble casting her as horror or sci-fi.  Intrigued, I went inside.  It was a costume and gaming shop, with a startling life-size statue of Batman at the foot of a staircase decorated with giant furry spiders clinging to the rail.  I looked around awhile, amused, but the Pippi incongruity was never clarified. 

When I left, I managed to meander my way through the maze of dubiously-marked small streets to my original goal, the church Sankt Peders.  This late, the building itself was closed, but the yard around it, dotted with graves and statuary, was peaceful.  The church’s motif seemed to involve roosters—they were depicted in several places.  I spent some time resting on benches and gazing at the huge old trees that grew there, before moving on. 

Grave in the wall around Sankt Peders

A fellow holding a rooster

I no longer had a particular destination in mind, but, wandering through increasingly busy streets, I came upon the Rundetårn, a huge astronomy tower now open to the public for climbing.  I gleefully paid my 20kroner, dividing that to dollars in my head and deciding it wasn’t as expensive as it sounded, and headed up the ramp that wrapped around the hollow core of the tower all the way to the top, easing the trip heavy astronomical equipment had to make to get to the observation platform. 

The ramp floor was brick, the walls and ceiling a white tunnel arching overhead, interrupted at intervals by barred windows looking down on the ever-further-below city.  Partway up there was a small museum with cases full of Tycho Brahe’s possessions and instruments used in the tower.  Further up yet, a giant mouse-hole-like opening showed the hollow core of the tower, Denmark’s navigational point zero, now covered over at that level with a plexi-glass disk suspended around a metal pole.  Brave visitors could crawl through the hole and stand on that clear platform, twenty-five meters above the ground. 

Rundetårn

I waited in a loose line of tourists, reading a harrowing leaflet about a choirboy from the 1880s who had fallen down the tower’s core and been trapped at the bottom, relatively uninjured, for a day before he was discovered.  Having survived the sky boxes at the Sears Tower in Chicago, I thought the platform in a dim shaft wouldn’t be too bad, but when my turn came I found myself so dizzy I could scarcely put a foot on it.  I scrambled back out of the mouse-hole and made my way up the ramp to the observation platform. 

My foot on Denmark's Point Zero

Below, Copenhagen was stunning.  Red and green rooftops, brick buildings of many shapes and sizes, distant windmills by the sea.  I saw hydrangeas growing on roofs, ships in the harbor, clocks on high towers now beneath my feet, construction tarps covering the old buildings Europe seeks to keep alive rather than demolishing to replace.  My first height climbed of the trip; my reward Copenhagen a vast yet tiny model beneath my feet.

 

A satisfactory number of pictures taken, I descended by the ramp I had climbed.  Back at ground level, I found myself a beef sausage from a cart for dinner, which I ate under a huge tree that grew along the side of the Rundetårn.  I wanted to see the city’s botanic garden, which my map showed was near the tower, so I headed that way next, but found that it had closed almost as early as the Rådhus and Sankt Peders.  Instead, I finished my day with a visit to the vast nearby Ørstedsparken, full of classical bronze statues and city wildlife.  I rested there and read some Agatha Christie before finally deciding to make my way back to the hostel and bed. 

Ørstedsparken

 

I found I had wandered far in my sightseeing, and, having failed to learn anything about the city’s public transit that day, had to walk the whole way back.  I passed and played on some unidentified ruins in Jarmers Plad, and examined the footwear of the city’s many cyclists—evidently high heels are good cycling shoes.  Finally back at the hostel and exhausted, it was still a struggle to make myself go inside—though it was after 9:30, it was still as light as day, and there were roses to photograph in the hostel yard.  Finally, I dragged myself inside and slept. 

Jarmers Plad Ruins

High-heeled cyclist, center