HOME

           

 

And so we end our travels as we began them, on a long flight across the Atlantic.  Going home.  The word “home” has taken on new meaning.  For a third of a year, we have moved from one family’s home to another, occupying it for a week or two, making it our own temporary “home.”  But what turns a house into a home?  When does a structure of walls and ceilings become the intimate core of a person’s life:  their home?  We call them house exchanges but in fact they have been home exchanges because we have exchanged far more than a house.  We have exchanged kitchens and the homey smell of dinner cooking and coffee in the morning, and beds with someone’s favorite sheets put on them, clean and crisp.  We have exchanged neighborhoods.  We have exchanged corner markets, and the knowledge of which aisle has milk, which has bread.  We have exchanged seats on the subway and trolley, the local train and bus; views from the windows as we go by blocks and neighborhoods on our way to the city’s heart.  We have exchanged urban areas that appear at first incomprehensible and utterly foreign, and then morph into streets we have walked, museums we have visited, cafes where coffee and wine have been drunk.  We’ve learned the art of landing in a foreign place and unveiling its mysteries a day at a time.  We have learned the art of constructing a home out of other’s homes and other’s cities.

We have also brought home with us.  Our little netbook computers have let us do homework, write blog entries, do emails, research travel options, order tickets, pay bills.  They have been our traveling library, checkbook, classroom, podium, soapbox.  But the home we have carried has been far more than what electronic gizmos can bring.  We have created home through our shared adventures – the laughter and irritation, confusion and elation of traveling as a unit through one new experience, one new adventure, day after day.  Each morning we have known that we’d see something and do something we’d never done before.   This is what we will miss the most.  The thrill of stepping out the door into something new, every . . . .  single . . . .  day.  We have been our own core, our own little country, moving through time and space, unconstrained by jobs and workloads and daily obligations.

This trip has been one of circles.  Some have been planned intentionally, while others have emerged as surprises along the way.  I planned a trip with history at its core since we are history buffs and Europe is the historical mother ship for a family that is part German, part Austrian, part Norwegian, part Irish, a bit of this, a dash of that.   

We went to the farthest northern reach of the Roman Empire and walked the wall built by Hadrian to delineate the known from the unknown world.  We found remnants of this same empire in Sardinian fields where the round remains of a Roman bath sat, surrounded by grasses and silence.  We walked the streets of antiquity in Ostia Antica, peered into fragments of ancient Rome’s living rooms below the streets of modern Rome, stared across the still awe-inspiring expanse of the Coliseum, saw the heating apparatus for the Roman baths in Bath, and saw memories of the Empire scattered across Italy.  Everywhere we went the Romans had been before us, even up to Denmark, where Roman goods had made their way through trade.  

            When Rome fell, other cultures claimed the stage.  The Vikings launched their ships from Denmark, and after sailing for three days landed in England, which became part of their Empire for a few hundred years.  Then a millennia or so later, the remains of a Viking village – a silent, entombed ghost town – were found below the streets of York in England.  An archaeological dig turned into an underground tour where four-seater cable cars slowly carry you down the streets of the reconstructed Viking town while above you, on terra firma of the 21^st century, buses and trucks honk and rattle their way.   We sailed in a reconstructed Viking ship in Denmark, moving across waters that they’d sailed on when they were bound for the island of Britannia, on which they would build their wooden town whose remnant beams and streets we would see, hundreds of years later, exhumed in York.

            But the Vikings fell when William the Conqueror rose, sailing from the beaches of Normandy to England to claim it in the fateful battle of 1066.  We walked the fields of Battle where the conflagration took place; saw the White Tower that William built in what became the Tower of London; walked along the walls of his home castle in Caen, France.  And read the story of his triumph in the Bayeux Tapestry, woven with such precision that its images of ship-building and carpentry were studied by historians and wood-workers alike.

            William’s rule gave way to medieval times, through which we traveled again and again.  The half-timbered houses of Rennes in France, the walled beauty of Alghero, Sardinia, the lovely narrow streets of Izola and Piran in Slovenia, the fabulous cathedral of Salisbury, England, and of course the countless hilltop villages and towns of Italy – all are places in which the medieval and the modern peacefully co-exist.  And from the medieval to the 17^th century opulence of Amsterdam’s canal houses, rising three, four, five stories high in proud gables and arches along the canals.

            Then we skipped a few hundred years to land, once again, on the beaches of Normandy for a different invasion, this one not composed of horses and Normans headed to England under William the Conqueror’s banner, but Americans and Canadians and Brits headed to liberate German-occupied France.  Rusted German bunkers dot the clifftops along Omaha Beach and the other beaches of the great D-Day Invasion.  On the wall of Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam is a fragment of a map that her father drew of Normandy, the beaches carefully named, the scenes of clashes noted as he followed the course of the invasion on BBC radio broadcasts smuggled into the attic where he and his family and friends hid, almost successfully, from the Nazis.  Peering at the bit of map on the garret wall, I could picture the beaches, and the German bunkers, and the photos I saw of the battles that raged there.    

 

Circles and circles.  Along with the loops of history that we encountered throughout our travels, there was the constant circle formed by we three.  Before this trip began, I read articles about families who were changed by the experience of traveling together. I wondered if this would happen with us.  On our last night in Amsterdam, just before ending our travels in Europe, we strolled home to our house exchange apartment after a lovely dinner out.  We had just had the 115^th consecutive dinner together of just the three of us.  We walked down the street, talking and laughing.  We linked arms, falling in step together, utterly delighted to be in each other’s company, our steps as synchronized as our lives had become after four months of non-stop connection with each other.  When we talk about the things we’ll miss from traveling, what tops the list is just being together, the three of us, stepping out the door for a new adventure every day. 

 

Most trips are conscribed by necessity. They must align with school holidays, or a vacation of a week or two from work.  We have had the luxury of time.  And the luxury of homes.  Other people’s homes.  And the home we created along the way. 

And now, the home we return to.

 

 

 

 

 

DEAR GOD

           

 

I have been in a lot of churches over the past four months.  Not because I’ve had a religious conversion – though there was one cannelloni dinner in Tuscany good enough to make the angels weep.  My church-going has been in the nature of touristic gawking.  I have been in search of interesting art, not the lord, which would no doubt doom my soul to everlasting perdition if being a fallen Catholic hadn’t already accomplished that.

            For centuries in Europe, the Catholic Church was the only artistic venue in town.  It set the terms of what was acceptable art, and was often the only institution with enough money to showcase artists.  Think of it as an ecclesiastical Broadway.  It was where everyone wanted to perform.  Or perhaps a religious MGM, holding the stars of the day under contract.  Not Clark Gable but Michaelangelo; not Judy Garland but Titian.  It told the heavy-hitters what and how they could perform: all Bible, all of the time.  The Bible was to the Church what musicals were to MGM:  widely understood and widely accepted topics of entertainment.  Who doesn’t like a good musical?  Who doesn’t like a (a) fresco, (b) tapestry, (c) sculpture, (d) painting of the Slaughter of the Innocents?  Sing alleluia, c’mon, get happy!

            The great cathedrals of Italy are like those “That’s Entertainment!” compendiums in which The Great Stars Of Yester-Year are feted, a cacophony of images culled from the crème de la crème.  Walk into St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice and you witness a Renaissance version of the “Best Of . . .”  The walls, ceilings, floors, every crack and cranny is covered with gilt, gold, or paint, and the whole lot is carved, sculpted or frescoed with religious images produced by an artistic chorus line of epic proportions.  It’s like those Bugsby Berkeley dance routines where women dancers synchronized their movements to form twirling circles and flower patterns, or dove in unison off the sides of swimming pools, or tap danced en masse down glass stairs backlit with flashing lights while a brass band played a snappy tune.  It’s overwhelming.  In the same vein, you enter St. Marks and you want to clap your hands over your eyes or scrape a small square of wall clean of all embellishment and stare at it until your pupils quit vibrating from the visual overload.

            Those churches that aren’t an explosion of decorative splendor tend to the opposite extreme:  dark and foreboding.  The Gerona Cathedral in Spain is a huge, brooding cavern of a church.  Its side chapels are poorly lit, and hung with canvases whose grime-of-the-ages patina is so thick that only ghostly images emerge in the paintings.  A painting of some saint whose name and back story is known only to the most devoted Catholic hung in an alcove and inexplicably, the dark canvas had small squares across it that looked like someone had taken a piece of adhesive, briefly affixed it to the canvas, and then ripped it off, thereby removing the layer of grit and revealing a lighter, brighter background.  I called Max over to look at it.  He had been busy fashioning a makeshift noose out of his shoelaces to try to hang himself with:  anything to avoid another moment in a church looking at Catholic art.  He staggered over and stared at the canvas. 

I said to him, “Do you know who this is?” 

I saw him fingering his noose longingly.  “Somebody who died a million years ago in some horrible way?”  he replied. 

“No,” I admonished him.  “It’s St. Sticky Note, the patron saint of Staples and Office Depot.”  Because the small squares dotting the canvas were just the size of sticky notes. 

Max immediately perked up.  “He died from a thousand sticky notes, and you can pray to him when you run low on office supplies!”   he said.  “Let’s get a picture of him and tape it to your computer to keep it from mysteriously crashing!”

            But of all the churches I’ve been in, nothing quite compares to Amsterdam’s Oude Kerk, the oldest and largest church in the city.  Initially constructed in the 1300s, the church was Catholic and was the recipient of considerable burgher bling from the rich Dutch merchants and town fathers.  It had more 38 altars and stained glass galore, and its beautiful wooden ceiling was painted with rich, vibrant pictures.

            Then the Protestants – specifically, the Calvinists – came to power and they ripped the church apart in the late 1500s.  They pulled out the altars and painted over the ceiling and got rid of every drop of gilt and color they could lay their hands on.  They even took away the pews.  They were the Grinch, sweeping into Catholic Whoville, removing all the frippery and decorations and leaving only a shell of a building.  When the church re-opened under Protestant management, church-goers had to bring their own chairs.

            One of the few things in the church the Calvinists didn’t haul away or deface were the choir stalls, hand-carved in 1480 from a dark, brown wood.  Maybe it’s because the choir stalls are so inconsistent with any decorative motif I’ve seen in any Catholic church I’ve been in that the Calvinists figured it wasn’t worth their valuable time to chop them up since the choir stalls weren’t really Catholic-ish to begin with.  The stalls are composed of small fold-down wooden seats that are attached to one long wooden wall.   When they are folded up, the bottoms of the wooden seats are flush against the wall.  The choir members had the bottoms of their seats carved with different images.  It being a church, the images often were little parables, little religious teachable moments carved into the seat of a chair.  One carving shows a Dutch man in a hat and coat of the 1400s, his breeches about his ankles and his bare butt spewing out a large stack of coins.  The parable, according to the free guide to the church that is handed out to all paying visitors?  “Money doesn’t fall out of my arse.”  I don’t know which I liked better:  the carving of a 15^th century Dutch man shitting coins or the translation into English of the message?  Or the fact that both occurred within a church.  Angels, cherubim, saints undergoing the pains of sainthood, the occasional Belzebub . . . . all regular carvings in any run-of-the-mill medieval Catholic church.  A bare-assed merchant pooping money on a choir stall?  Only in Amsterdam.

            Another carving I liked was a creepy version of a two-headed person, grinning maniacally.  The face had three eyes, two noses, and one very wide, toothy mouth.  The caption?  “Two drunks under one roof.”  Eh?  The translation provided in the hand-out:  “Two people in agreement about everything, especially what’s wrong.”  In today’s modern parlance, this would be Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh.

            Another good one was the carved image of what appeared to be a brick wall, with the image of a man apparently banging his head against it. And that’s exactly what it was.  The caption?  “Banging your head against a brick wall.”  Finally, a clear translation!

            There was something very odd about wandering around this picked-over shell of a building.  In recent years it has become an art venue, more than a church – another example of Amsterdam’s quixotic approach to many things.  Build a medieval cathedral to rival those in Italy . . . and decorate it with carved images of pooping burghers and 14^th century head-bangers.  Tear it apart by anti-Catholic forces and yet still let it stand as one of the city’s most recognizable monuments that has been, in effect, pantsed.  Take the city’s most famous church and turn it into an art venue.  In one of the side chapels, which was stripped down to bare walls by the marauding 16^th century Calvinists, a video loop plays of a woman peeling an apple.  The video is without words or music. The woman grips the apple and peels it in one long peel.  Scattered on the floor in front of the video screen are artistically-rendered bits of material that look like rotting apple peels.  I tried my best to get the meaning behind it all.  Was the woman a latter-day Eve, peeling the apple of temptation?  Was the woman more likely the girlfriend of the videographer making her first arty cameo appearance?

            Elsewhere there was a contraption hanging from the ceiling made from gauzy white linen. It was like a little cabana, hanging a few inches above the floor.  What?  How about the folding table at which 3 women and 3 men were self-consciously being waited on by a waiter serving them lunch and wine?  Last supper? Last lunch?

Check, please!

           

 

MEMORY STICKS

            

Some places you travel through are like a pool you dive into, swim across, and then exit.  You drip for a minute or two and then move on, dry again, as the water behind you smoothes back into an even sheen.  Other places give you memories that come at the mention of their name, like an obedient dog returning at your call, carrying with him a memory like a stick in his mouth.  There is the name of the place – “Good dog!” – and there is the stick of memory deposited at your feet.  The name of the dog the past few weeks has been Denmark, and the sticks he has brought us have been many.  And will continue to bring us since once you name the dog and toss the stick, it will come back to you.

 

            The stick that lands at my feet now, when I think the name “Denmark,” is water.  And swans.  Ribe, the oldest city in Denmark and indeed, in Scandinavia, has a lovely park with ponds and wetlands that are dotted with swans.  The swan babies – swanlings? – are a frumpy gray until their white plumage comes in. No wonder the Danish author Hans Christian Anderson wrote his allegorical fairy tale, “The Ugly Duckling.”  He was surrounded by the allegories, swimming around the lakes and canals of his home town, Copenhagen. 

Denmark is a land bordered by water:  by two seas, actually, the North and the Baltic.  From Hamlet’s castle in Elsinore you look across a narrow stretch of the Baltic Sea to Sweden.  To the south Denmark stares at Germany.  Trains criss-cross the seas’ many inlets and bays, tying together the islands of Denmark like a steel lace threading through the many hooks and eyes of the country. 

The water is also rain, which has fallen in a Novemberish sluice for much of our time here.  Consequently, another image that comes to mind is green:  fields of corn, fir trees, farmer’s fields.  There is no sprawl.  None. A town begins and ends in a tidy grouping of houses, and then the farm fields and forests take up again where they left off.  No billboards, rarely a piece of roadside trash.  The only non-green image is politically green, if not biologically so:  energy-generating windmills.  They are everywhere:  in fields, beside roads, on the waterfront in Copenhagen, by the sea, even in the sea.  Usually in groups of 3 or 4, the big three-bladed white fans rotate in the wind.  Denmark gets about one-fifth of its energy from the wind, which lights lamps and illuminates homes across the country.  Mounted on huge white posts, the windmill blades rotate about 10 stories above ground.  The rotating fan blades emit a loud, low hum, like a giant humming an ancient tune beneath his breath. The windmills harvest air, yielding crops of luminescence. They create man’s oldest talisman:  the power of light against the darkness.  They light the flickering fire within our caves, holding off the long dark night.

Another stick drops at my feet, retrieved by the good dog Denmark.  It is an image of fields of wheat, and other grains I do not recognize.  In the midst of the fields are strange crushed circles as if a herd of buffalo had rested there.  There are no tractor tracks out to them, no cause-and-effect linkages I can figure out.  Just random flattened spaces in the otherwise tall fields.  I could ask one of my fellow Danish train travelers, and they would undoubtedly understand my English and if I spoke in German, probably it, as well.  But another image of Denmark are the Danes themselves, who I found to be either intensely friendly or coldly standoffish.  On one end of the spectrum was the bike shop owner in Copenhagen who gave us three bikes to use for a week for free, and at the other end, the woman in line behind me in the drug store who screamed at me because I couldn’t understand what the clerk was saying.  When I whipped around to the yelling woman and said, through gritted teeth, that I was just asking a question, she immediately changed gears and was conciliatory and smiling.  Variations of this happened again and again.  Human nature, I guess:  some people are nice, some are not, not much of a lightening bolt insight there.  But what I observed was that nastiness was infrequent and when it occurred, short-lived, and dourness yielded to smiles fairly often.  I read somewhere that Danes typically like to avoid conflict, and maybe that’s part of it.  Perhaps it’s a result of their Viking heritage in which armed, marauding conflict was the name of the game.  Interestingly, the Viking plunder-and-pillage past is downplayed in Danish museums, including the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen and the Viking Ship Museum in Rothskilde.  The Viking as explorer, as expert mariner – you bet.  The Viking that terrorized villages and laid waste to them and their inhabitants – not so much.  Not surprising, really, when you consider how many museums in the American West display the guns and chaps and saddles of the U.S. cavalry with reverential awe, but discuss its reign of genocidal terror against Native Americans?  Not so much.

Vikings and gunslingers aside, a stick that drops before Max when he thinks of Denmark is Legoland.  We spent the day there, a two-week-late birthday present for Max.  The Danish Legoland is the Mecca to which all true lego-philes must make a pilgrimage at least once in their lego-playing lives.  It is amazing.  Monuments from around the world, along with entire villages and cities, have been re-created in miniature with millions of lego blocks.  This sounds like the kind of weird road-side attraction you expect to find in some guy’s garage off Route 1 in Podunk, America.  But the Denmark Legoland is something to see.  Here is Copenhagen constructed from a bazillion lego bricks, complete with canals and a wee version of the canal tourboat that we actually rode on.  Here’s Ribe, with a sidewalk restaurant equipped with tables and chairs and diners – just as it was when we sat at this same restaurant in the actual town of Ribe.  Here are windmills, powering a Danish town – with real solar panels installed on the roofs of lego houses, generating part of the energy that’s used to make the little boats sail down the canals and the miniature lego trains roll down the tracks. 

Along with the miniature worlds created from lego blocks, Legoland has, of course, rides.  A few of the baby ones I rode, but Max and Jeff braved the scariest, careening down roller coasters, blasting on log canoes through flumes of water, rotating crazily on circular rafts – all in the pouring rain.  About half-way through our day in Legoland it began to rain in earnest, moving from a drizzle into a cold, drenching downpour.  We were undeterred. We’d looked forward to Legoland for a loooonnnggg time and by God, we were gonna enjoy it!  So Jeff bought a bright yellow plastic slicker decorated with lego figures and Max huddled into his raincoat and I used Jeff’s raincoat (mine having been stolen off the bike in Copenhagen) and we did Legoland.  Until at nightfall, when we staggered off to a nearby hotel at which 200 Finish families had just arrived, revved up and excited for their day at Legoland the next day.  Let me tell you, the hotel’s breakfast room the following morning was something to behold with 200 Finish families  tanking up on calories before their day out at Legoland.  Platters of sliced ham, troughs filled with hearty rolls, whole loaves of bread, bins of yogurt, and as the crème de la crème, a bowl filled with chunks of cod:  to paraphrase Shakespeare, this is the stuff of which a Finn’s breakfast dreams are made of.

So our Danish dog retrieves many memory sticks for us.  For Jeff, Denmark brings to mind the blocks of four- and five-story high apartment buildings in Copenhagen, street after street of them.  And the bicyclists, moving in streams down the Copenhagen bike paths, each one of them representing a car not driven that day to work or the grocery store.

And for me, a favorite memory stick of Denmark falls at my feet.  The image of a little blonde girl, not much more than a toddler, gripping none other than a big Danish pastry, the coil of golden baked dough topped with white icing, the center filled with a custard dollop.  The little Danish girl clutches the big Danish pastry and peers at it lovingly.  Then, she plants her entire face in the middle of it, licks a big swathe of icing off the top, and raises her frosting-laced face with a satisfied grin as if to say, “That’s how you eat a Danish if you’re Danish!”

COPENHAGEN FROM THE INSIDE OUT

           

We’ve been seeing Copenhagen from the inside-out.  For the vast majority of our travels, we have had amazing weather.  A few days here and there have been drizzly, but for the rest of the time it’s been blue skies and sunshine.  Until this week in Copenhagen, where it rained off and on, in buckets or in cloudbursts, while the temperatures hovered in the 60s.  This changed the way we saw the city.  We have been primarily outdoors for months, exploring cities and countryside from an exterior perspective.  London, Rome, Venice—we saw the buildings and monuments from the outside-in.  But when it’s raining, you shift your focus indoors.  This has led us to see places that we might not have otherwise experienced, while inspiring us to take advantage of every sunny moment to get on the bikes and explore.

            Luckily for us, not only does Copenhagen have some interesting museums, but it is also an easy day-trip from other places of merit.  We took the train north for an hour to Helsingor, otherwise known as Elsinore, in the far north of North Zealand Island, at the very tip of Denmark.  From here you can see Sweden, only 2 ½ miles across a shimmering strip of sea from the Danish coast.  Elsinore is the location of Hamlet’s famous castle.  To be sure, there is a castle in Elsinore but it’s called the Kronborg Castle, and it is as much a palace as it is a fortification. 

We joined an English-language tour of Kronborg Castle from a funny young Danish woman who didn’t appear to take the castle, herself or Danish history too seriously.  She delighted in regaling us with toilet-oriented facts about the castle.  Nothing apparently tickles a Danes’ funny bone more than bathroom humor.  And if it involves a pooping royal, even better.  The guide told us that the long, elegant banqueting hall at Kronborg hosted many popular banquets since Kronborg was regarded around Europe as a sort of party castle, a Florida-beach-at-spring-break Euro-fortress.  Built in the 1590s, the castle was the equal of any in Europe and word of its beauty soon spread.    The king and queen threw open the doors for parties galore.  You know how it is when you’re in the middle of a great dinner party:  the food is delicious, everyone’s talking, the music is just right, beverages are flowing.  You hate to leave the table when nature calls.  And if you were a Danish royal, you didn’t have to.  The king and queen had specially made chairs with holes in the seats and buckets below that allowed them to . . .  er . . . . go with the flow, one could say, without interrupting their at-table merry-making.  The other male guests could go out a special door and down a few flights of stairs to use the facilities, but the women’s enormous skirts prevented them from navigating the narrow stairway. So instead, alcoves ringed the room in which hay and sweet-smelling herbs had been sprinkled on the floor, and the women would go there “which added to the enjoyment of the dinner guests,” our guide said, beaming.  Evidently, nothing makes a feasting Dane happier than watching Helga pee.

            While defacating royals isn’t exactly the story line of Hamlet, it is very likely that Shakespeare knew about Kronborg Castle and quite possible that he visited it and the town of Elsinore.  There are years in the 1590s in which Shakespeare’s whereabouts are unclear, and it is possible that he traveled to Kronborg Castle , perhaps even acting in one of his own plays for the king’s enjoyment.  There are lovely old medieval streets in Elsinore that date back to Shakespeare’s time, providing yet another example of how the past is present in Europe.

            We went even further back into Denmark’s past when we did a day-trip to Rothskilde, which was the capitol of Denmark until Copenhagen rose in importance in the middle ages.  During the Viking era, Rothskilde was a strategic port.  During a battle against intruders, the seamen of Rothskilde sank five vessels at the mouth of the harbor to block the intruders’ warships from sailing in and taking over the city.  The submerged vessels were discovered and exhumed from the harbor floor in the 1960s, and then subjected to decades of painfully slow treatment and restoration.  A museum was built to house the reconstructed Viking ships, and now they are on display in an airy, bright building on the harbor’s edge, which has views of the sea on which the ships once sailed. 

To help modern-day visitors imagine life as a Viking sailor, reproductions of a few of the ships have been built, and for a fee, you can don life jackets and help row and sail a Viking ship around the harbor.  We of course did just that, marveling at the length and weight of the massive oars and the durability of the hand-made sail as it caught the wind and sent the boat skimming across the water.

The town of Rothskilde, where the Viking Ship Museum is located, has lovely old medieval houses lining cobblestone streets.  The houses are low, with thatched roofs made from layers of tubular grasses compressed into a foot-thick roof that is held in place with carved wooden beams interlaced across the roof.  The thatched roofing curves around the windows, and is a dark brown against the white-washed walls of the house.  Hollyhocks grow in front of the homes, bearing pink and red blossoms, and the whole effect is so charming that you expect to see hobbits popping out the front door to go about wee-folk chores accompanied by a sprightly musical background.

            Copenhagen doesn’t have many of these traditional Danish houses but it does have a few streets of half-timbered homes and hollyhocks growing in the cracks of the sidewalks before them.  There are also buildings from the 1700s lining some of its canals and clustering along the long pedestrian shopping street that snakes through the center of town.  The pedestrian shopping street was carved out of the old part of town in the 1970s, a combination of a few torn-down buildings and commandeered car lanes.  It was hailed as the world’s longest pedestrian street and to celebrate this accomplishment, a party was held.   Tables were set up along the length of the winding street, and coffee and rolls were served to the city’s residents.  Yes, this was just how DC celebrated the opening of the Verizon Center:  we set up a mile’s worth of tables and served coffee and buns to the District’s residents.  Yah, right.  The tables would have been stolen before the last one was set up, and the coffee-and-bun servers would have been mugged. 

            Little about Copenhagen is similar to DC or for that matter, to many American cities.  When it finally quit raining and the sun came out, we took to the streets on our bikes and spent two enjoyable days biking around the city, visiting parks and side streets and enjoying the amazing network of bike lanes.  But Copenhagen isn’t Shangri-La:  I had a coat and sweater stolen off the rack on the back of my bike when I left it unattended for a few minutes, and Jeff was sent flying off his bike when he swerved to avoid a crazy bicyclist going by too fast.  But for the most part, the bicyclists go at a reasonable pace and given the thousands of people on bikes using the bike lanes, it all works very smoothly.

            The country of Denmark, for that matter, seems to work pretty smoothly and to have some things going for it that distinguish it from Amurka.  For one thing, pregnant women are given a month off work before the delivery to prepare and rest.   Then, after the baby comes, they receive 9 months of maternity leave – at two-thirds of their pay rate.  This is so far from the norm in America that I felt like I was talking to a visitor from another planet.  A full 10 months of partially paid maternity leave, with your job guaranteed upon your return.  It’s almost as if the Danish government recognizes that it’s in the interest of society in general, and the mother and child in particular, that a new baby Dane has a chance to get to know his mother, and she to know him.

            We stayed in Copenhagen longer than we’d originally intended, and I’m glad we did.  While it offers plenty of interesting history, it’s the present and the future that’s the most interesting aspect of this city.  Granted, the population of the whole country of Denmark is less than that of New York City’s:  Denmark has 5 ½ million people while NYC has more than 8 million.   It may be easier to implement progressive policies for a lightly populated country.  On the other hand, Copenhagen has more than a million residents, which makes it larger than the city of Washington, DC.  Yet Copenhagen has a subway and bus system that is brilliantly efficient, and bike lanes used by thousands in the long cold winters as well as the warm summers.  Consequentially, Copenhagen has neighborhoods that are virtually car-free and therefore, incredibly quiet.  It’s a city that’s put considerable thought into how people can co-exist in the most efficient, least polluting and most comfortable way.  Washington, DC – and indeed, most American cities – could learn a lot from it.

GREAT DANES

            

 Denmark is a bit of a Rodney Dangerfield country:  it gets no respect.  If you say you’re traveling in Europe, images of Italy, France, Germany, England come to mind.  If you say you’re traveling in Scandinavia, images of Norway or Sweden pop up.  But Denmark?  Neither European fish nor Scandinavian fowl.  I had to look it up on a map to see where exactly it was, and was surprised to find that part of it – Jutland – is actually part of the European continent, sharing a border with Germany. The other parts of Denmark are islands between the heavy-hitting Scandi countries and the heavy-hitting Euro countries.  This makes Denmark Scandi-pean.  Or Euro-navian.  Or neither.  Because Denmark is uniquely itself, and what a nice self it appears to be.

            You have to admire a country that you enter through an utterly unique form of transportation.  We approached Denmark – specifically, the island of Zealand – by train, having spent 8 hours going by train from Rennes to Cologne, Germany, and another 10 hours by train from Cologne to Copenhagen after the Germany railways, in a most uncharacteristic burst of inefficiency, were beset with delays that caused missed connections and additional travel hours.  Every second on the train was worth it, however, when we came to the end of Germany and confronted a section of the Baltic Sea separating Denmark’s Zealand Island from the European mainland.  The train slowed to a stop at the shore where a huge car ferry was anchored.  Then slowly, the train chugged onto the ferry.  There were train tracks on the lower deck of the ferry, and the train slowly made its way onto the ship.  Passengers were asked to de-train.  A very chatty German man whose company we’d been enjoying snuck us out a forbidden door into the bowels of the ship, next to the berthed train, and we marveled at the sight of it stretched out like a long metal snake.  Then we made our way to the ship’s upper deck, where we watched the sea go by for a pleasant 45 minute crossing, and then down we went again to where the train waited. We boarded it, the ship docked on the shore of Denmark, and the train slowly made its way off the boat and onto terra firma, where it slowly picked up speed and then zipped along to Copenhagen.  I wanted to applaud the entire operation.  Imagine laying train tracks in a ferry; imagine coordinating the entrance and exit of the train from the ship with such pinpoint accuracy that the train didn’t derail either coming or going; imagine coming up with the idea in the first place?  It was the ultimate mass transit moment:  taking a train onto a ship.  How many carbon offsets happened there?

            We arrived in Copenhagen at 10:00 at night and realized right away that we’d made a few errors.  One was neglecting to get Danish Kroner in advance, so we arrived with empty pockets.  It’s so easy now to travel from country to country with the common currency of the euro that it came as a shock that there were still countries proud enough to use their native coin of the realm, euro be damned.  Besides being empty-pocketed, another teeny tiny error was that we didn’t have a map of Copenhagen, nor a clear idea of how to get to our house exchange apartment other than some directions our house exchange partner had emailed me.  Hmmmm.           

But at this point in our travels, we have become adroit at adapting to entirely new cities and countries.  Jeff went off to find an ATM, and Max and I went in hunt of tickets for the Copenhagen subway.  Max tackled a ticket machine with gusto, managing to not only get us tickets for the subway and figure out the cost in kroners, but to do so in Danish!  Off we went on the subway, followed by locating the correct city bus, followed by climbing the 5 flights of stairs (with our 40 pound backpacks on) to what has turned out to be quite a lovely apartment.

            A few things about Denmark became immediately clear.  First, everyone speaks English.   People always say that:  “Oh don’t worry,” they assure you, “everyone there speaks English.”  This usually translates to people at the front desk of expensive hotels speaking English, but everyone else either doesn’t, or resents the fact that you expect them to.  In Copenhagen, not just the tourist office or Danish railway staff speak English, but the woman on the bus, the kid walking down the street, even the 7-11 employee speak beautiful English – and in the case of the 7-11 employee in the Copenhagen central train station, speak much better English than the guy in my local 7-11 in DC.   They practically answer questions in iambic pentameter, working in a Shakespearean sonnet if they can.  Or in the case of a conversation I had with a Danish guy, they intersperse sentences with allusions to arcane American geography:  the man described a small place in Denmark that we’re planning on visiting as “the Montana of Denmark:  ranches, farms, wild places, you know.”  Yes I do know, but line up a dozen people from the east coast of America and ask them to rattle off three characteristics of Montana and they’d spit at you.  Here this Dane is throwing Montana at me and I had to look up his damn country on a map to find out where the hell his country was, much less areas within it.

The second thing that leaps right out at you is that people in Copenhagen are extraordinarily nice.  Not just “oops, you dropped your scarf” nice but “here are three bikes you can use for free for a week” nice.  We walked a few blocks from where we’re staying to a small corner bike shop and were immediately greeted by the hard-working owner, up to his greasy elbows in bicycle repairs, who chatted animatedly with us:  where are we from, what are we doing in Copenhagen, etc.  After about 3 minutes, he declares that we are nice people “because he can tell from people’s eyes” and when we ask about renting bikes, he goes out to the group of bikes parked outside his shop and spends the next 30 minutes picking out and adjusting 3 bikes for us.  When Jeff asks how much it is to rent them for a week, he waves Jeff off and says, “that’s okay, bring ‘em back in a week, I’m too busy now to deal with it.”  That’s it.  No deposit required, no imprint of our credit card, no exorbitant weekly rental fees, nothing.  We have honest eyes: here are the bikes. 

So off on the bikes we went.  To have a true Copenhagen experience, you have to bike.  On any given day, more than one-third of the Copenhagen population bikes somewhere: to work, to school, to the grocery store, somewhere.  I have never seen so many people on bikes in my life.  Copenhagen prides itself as being the biggest biking capital in Europe, even more so than Amsterdam.  The city information website has a link to a video about how you can be well-dressed and bike.  The clear message is that you can still look elegant or appropriate for work and ride a bike.  And it’s true.  Today we saw a woman biking, in the pouring rain, wearing heels and a fetching black business suit with a color-coordinated rain poncho.  The city is laced with bike lanes, and these aren’t the piss-ant bike lanes in DC, which are basically bull’s eyes drawn on the pavement so the hostile motorists can get a cleaner shot at you.  The Copenhagen streets have demarcated car traffic lanes, then on both sides of the street, coming and going, bike lanes that are on raised pavement above the street level and indicated with broad white stripes.  Next to the bike lanes are wide sidewalks for the pedestrians.  So as you bike, your lane is slightly raised above the street traffic and is adjacent, but separate, from the pedestrians.  This is an urban biker’s dream come true.

The bike lanes are everywhere, and they are PACKED.  We made the mistake of biking back to our apartment from downtown yesterday during rush hour, and it was intense. The bike lanes were filled with commuters.  One woman pulled up short to take a cell phone call and there was nearly a 10-biker pile-up.  But it’s not like the C&O Canal Path in DC where biking becomes an adventure in risk-taking because the bikers are treating the path like a speedway.  People ride their bikes at a respectful rate – and they obey the traffic signals.  When it’s a red light for cars, it’s a red light for bikes, and everyone stops, waits for the light to change, and then starts up again.  It’s not like DC where bicyclists speed through red lights, zip through intersections, run up on the sidewalks to take short-cuts.  Bikes are real modes of transportation, and are viewed as such.  The bicycle parking lots at the subway and train stations are filled to the brim, with several stations having installed double-decker bike parking devices to accommodate the crush.

Copenhagen is a fascinating city for its modern-ness.  Where we’ve been immersed in the grand dame old cities steeped in history, Copenhagen is a model for what we could and should be now and in the future.  From the dining room window of our house exchange apartment, I can see a windmill rotating in the harbor, not a cutesy wooden throw-back but a sleek white generator of energy.  Windmills line the coast, clustering in groups of five or six, sometimes more.  The streets are quiet at night, even in the area where we are staying, which is marked by apartment blocks.  In our own apartment quadrangle of four buildings facing each other over a common outdoor space of playground, barbeque and –yes – a covered shed for bicycles, there are probably 100 apartments.  Yet by 10:00 at night, it’s quiet.  There’s no music blaring from apartments, no honking horns, in fact, no cars driving down the street.  Yet up and down this same street are hundreds of parked bicycles, leaning against the walls of the apartment buildings.  There seems to be a spirit of communal living that is almost palpable, an awareness of being in close proximity to others and being okay about it.  Whether it’s lines of bicycle riders waiting patiently for the red light to change, not running it in the interest of mutual safety, or people offering to help, or the general feel of relaxed friendliness, Copenhagen feels like something we urban dwellers should be clamoring for.   Viva Denmark!  It’s not just a breed of dogs that are Great Danes!

FOOD IN BRITTANY, FIGHTS IN NORMANDY

           

 

 One of the challenges of traveling this long is to keep up the energy to go out and do things and not simply lay on a house exchange couch reading trashy novels and refusing to tackle one more travel challenge in one more foreign language in one more unfamiliar country.  Thankfully, we are a high-energy group.  And since I spent more than a year planning this trip, I am highly motivated to get out and see the things that made me want to travel in the first place.  Plus there is something intoxicating about this part of France that encourages you to go out, and rewards you when you do.  There is a quality of air that takes me back to southern Oregon summers.  The air is glitteringly clear and even in the heat of the day, it retains undertones of coolness that linger from the night before.  The day’s shimmering air also has a preternaturally long life:  it is light outside until 10:30 at night so people dine late, the outdoor cafes crowded with folks young and old lingering over meals, chatting over drinks, enjoying the profusion of light.  How can you not be beckoned outside with this air and light calling you?

            So Rennes called and we answered, spending a few days exploring the city by foot, particularly the old part with its streets of half-timbered buildings; its huge public park with an old-fashioned carousel, a painter’s palette of flower gardens, and an aviary filled with twittering exotic birds. 

Then there are the markets of Rennes displaying food like artistic masterpieces, especially the bakeries with concoctions that make me – a person who has made baking an avocation and who appreciates a well-presented dessert the way a musician appreciates a perfectly executed solo – almost weep from a combination of joy and envy at the baking skill displayed.  Crusts composed of fragile layers of paper-thin pastry, custard-filled rounds that manage to be simultaneously creamy and light, and tarts embossed with slices of apple, scatterings of chocolate, pockets of jam.  I stood outside of one patisserie window and offered a quiet round of applause for the anonymous baker who had created the beauties before me and displayed them as the tiny pieces of art they are.  The Picassos of pastries, the Monets of muffins, the Cezannes of crusts:  I doff my baker’s hat to you all!

            The commitment to food that is well-prepared and beautifully displayed is evident at every level, including – brace yourselves – at highway rest stops.  These are not the drab and dispiriting assemblages of smelly toilets and microwave burritos that dot the American highways.  We discovered French rest stops on our way up to Normandy, which lies along the northern French coast and is a little more than a 2-hour drive from Rennes.  Motoring along the highway, we saw a sign bearing the tell-tale emblem of a fork and spoon.  The sign was noticeable since a sign of any kind is a rarity:  there are no billboards on this long highway between Brittany and Normandy.  Nothing to distract the viewing eye from the corn-laden farm fields, the bales of cut hay shaped like cake rolls lying in the fields, the black and white spotted cows.  Appearing periodically along the road are large brown posters with stylized drawings that advertise the next town’s castle, or apple orchards, or creameries, or whatever the historical, gastronomical, agricultural or cultural attraction might be.  But no billboards with the dreaded golden arches or pictures of cut-rate hotels or any of the other commercial schlock that clutters both the highway and the eye-way of America.

So the fork-and-spoon poster got our attention.  We headed into the rest stop’s complex of buildings.  As is the case with American rest stops, the first thing we encountered was a museum.  Comfortable chairs were grouped around informational videos on the culture and attributes of Brittany. Literature was laid out for the interested visitor.  It was as if people actually cared about the countryside they were passing through and didn’t just view it as a speedway to their destination.  We moved from the museum into the restaurant/café area.  Two big vending machines stood side by side.  Ah, I thought, the usual chips/candy/soda dispensaries.  No.  The machines were entirely devoted to different kinds of coffee you could purchase:  espresso – one or two shots, with or without sugar; cappacinos – short or tall, with milk or without, sugared or not.  Dozens of caffeine options presented themselves. 

While I lingered, nose pressed against the glass of the vending machines, Jeff forged ahead into the restaurant. He returned with fantastic tales, like the traveling sailors of yore.  There were no microwaves stained with the remnants of exploding burritos; no lingering aroma of microwaved popcorn; no aisles of plastic wrapped danishes or supersized potato chips; no swirling colored dispensers of slushies or Big Gulps.  Instead, there were plates of salmon and rice pilaf; there was a child tucking into a steak across the table from his grandfather who was working his way through baked chicken to be followed by what appeared to be a lemon soufflé.  There were half bottles of wine for sale.  Cheerful women served the food.  It was as unlike an American rest stop as you can get.  It was truly a stop for rest, a place of road-side refreshment for travelers, not road hogs. 

Armed with refreshments we made our way to Caen in Normandy, and its excellent “Museum of Peace” that covers WWII from a horrors-of-war perspective that is markedly different from the hail-the-valiant-soldier approach taken by most war museums.  Over the next day we visited Omaha Beach where thousands of Americans fell on the D-Day invasions.  It is a long beach backed by cliffs where the remains of German bunkers are scattered, cement walls and roofs still intact.  In one a massive gun is still mounted on a swivel stand.  Further down the shore is a long pebbly strand where the American soldiers once crouched in terror, seeking any shelter they could find from the barrage of German bullets.  Children now run on it; there’s a playground and surf shop, a restaurant and hotel behind it.  If there are ghosts, they are not seen by the holiday-makers at this beach.

Older history beckoned us.  Another battle launched from Normandy nearly a thousand years earlier had also changed the course of history, and we went to Bayeux to view the ancient tapestry that told its story.  Here, told in the voice of colored thread and stretched linen, is the tale of William the Conqueror’s successful assault on England in 1066.  The unknown stitchery artists of nearly a millennium ago rendered the battle in detail so meticulous that historians know from the tapestry what the armor of the 11^th century was like; how soldiers wore their hair; how their arrows were fashioned, their horses outfitted, their lances deployed.

The odd juxtaposition of events in Normandy has not gone unnoticed.  The French king William subjugated the English in the 11^th century, launching his successful campaign from the shores of Normandy.  Nearly nine hundred years later, the English landed in Normandy to liberate their former French masters from the grip of the Nazis.  A memorial in Normandy notes that the conquered came to save the conqueror.   The circle of history twists and curls, the D-Day beaches a short drive from the Bayeux tapestry. 

Once again, our efforts to see and do all that we can, to sally forth into the unfamiliar, is rewarded. 

THE TRAVEL DATING GAME

           

At times, traveling can be a lot like dating.  Some places seem like they’ll be oh-so-right, the perfect match – maybe even true love.  You read their bio and they seem right up your alley.  Other places you agree to see because, frankly, nothing better has come along.  

But sometimes, Mr. Right turns out to be Mr. Pain In The Butt, and Mr. Not So Great sweeps you off your feet.

On paper, Barcelona and I should have been a great match.  Many of my friends loved it so it came highly recommended.  Reading about it made me think that this could be the Great Travel Love:  the architecture, the location by the warm and beautiful Mediterranean, the culture and lifestyle.  I could see it all.  Barcelona and Beth, sittin’ in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g.

Rennes, on the other hand, was one of the last-minute add-ons of this trip.  It was chosen solely to accommodate Max’s burning desire to visit France since he has been taking French in school since his pre-kindergarten days.  I confess that I’ve never had a great desire to travel in France.  The only time I’d been in France was as a graduate student when I didn’t have a spare cent, and I went to Paris with a friend in January and stayed in a nasty cheap place that was freezing cold and got even colder when it started to snow.  France, Schmance.  Plus I don’t speak French and anticipated haughty condescension every time I opened my mouth.  Haughty condescension I can get plenty of in DC.   I don’t have to travel to find that.

So I looked forward to Barcelona, elegant city by the sea, and shrugged my shoulders over Rennes.  But Barcelona turned out to be a place that was difficult to love, mostly because it was just plain difficult.  It was one of those vexed travel experiences where everything is hard and nothing goes easily.  We stayed in Barcelona a few days on our way down to our house exchange on the Spanish coast, and we stayed in it on our way back up from the coast.  The troubles ranged from the irritating – having trouble finding restaurants that were good in the neighborhood around our hotel – to the potentially catastrophic:  Jeff and I, on separate occasions, nearly being pickpocketed on the metro.  I’m urban savvy to begin with, and I also knew that pickpockets were rife in the Barcelona subway, so I kept a firm grip on my travel purse and Jeff put his wallet in his front pants pocket to keep it safer.  Nevertheless, I still found a woman’s hand on my purse unzipping it and reaching in, and gave it a good slap.  Jeff found a man’s hand in his pocket pulling out his wallet – the front pocket of his shorts, no less.  Jeff grabbed his wallet out of the man’s hand, the guy jumped off the train and car and ran into a different train car, Jeff followed him onto the train and thumped the guy in his chest and called him colorful names while issuing dire warnings.  Face it:  It’s hard to truly love something that keeps trying to steal you blind.

Then there was the imbroglio of the train tickets.  I tried to get tickets from Barcelona to Paris on the Spanish train website and couldn’t do it because the Spanish site couldn’t book French trains.  The French website advertised the train and walked me through the entire booking process only to refuse to allow me to purchase the ticket on line because they wanted to mail me the tickets, not allow me to print them off their website. We went to various train stations in Spain to try to buy the tickets; we tried calling and buying over the phone – no dice.  We went back to the Barcelona train station and couldn’t buy the tickets because there were so many people trying to buy train tickets that they’d overwhelmed the clerks, who responded by closing up early.  When confronted by high customer demand, go home – there’s a motto to work and live by!  So we returned to the Barcelona station the next day and found, to no one’s surprise, that the day we wanted to travel was already booked, so we chose the next day, went through the ticketing process and got to the end only to have the clerk smirk and inform us that we had to buy the tickets in cash, which amounted to roughly $500.  Like I’d walk around Barcelona with $500 in cash – I’d be robbed before I had a chance to pull the money out of the ATM machine. Of course, the sole ATM in the station refused to issue money; we searched the neighborhood and found one that would; and finally bought the tickets. By this point, I was longing to leave Barcelona.

And so we did.  So much for Beth and Barc, kissin’ in a tree.  It could kiss off, as far as I was concerned.

Off we went to Rennes, via Paris.  It was a lovely train journey.  We got seats on the top floor of the double-decker high-speed train, which rolled through gorgeous country on the 5 hour journey to Paris.  Up the coast of France the train chugged, literally going through estuaries and shallow bays – the tracks went through sheens of water on either side, the Mediterranean stretching out on the right hand side while tranquil back bays and marshes stretched out on the other.  Then the train turned and headed up the Rhone River valley, and kicked into high speed.  Farms rolled by, and once again I saw the colors that I had seen through the train windows in England as we traversed its spring-time fields. 

But we have traveled from one season to the next.  We began our trip in early spring, and now we are in the full heart of summer.  The aching green of spring fields in England are now replaced by the shining green of corn fields in France.  The purple of England’s wisteria is now the shimmering purple of fields of lavender.  Acres and acres of golden sunflowers are the bright yellow that the mustard seed of England was before.  The colors are the same but the terrain, the season, the countries, the time of year are not.  We have traveled through the time in which the days were just beginning to get longer, into days of almost endless light.  At 10:00 at night it is still light outside.  I get tricked into thinking it’s only 7:30 or 8:00 and then realize that the day is nearly done and yet still, the sun shines.

Up the Rhone River valley we traveled, the fields going by in brilliant patches of color, the occasional castle appearing on a nearby hill, mountains appearing and disappearing in the distance.  Into Paris we rolled, and we carried our massive packs through the metro to a different station, where we boarded the train to Rennes.

And now we are in Rennes, in a house exchange apartment that is absolutely gorgeous and is located in the heart of the equally gorgeous medieval town.  The apartment is two stories and renovated last year by our house exchange partner, who is an architect.  It is straight out of architecture magazines beautiful:  exposed old beams, cunningly placed windows, skylights, glass stairs floating between downstairs and upstairs.  And right outside of the door is a remnant of the medieval town’s old city wall, a massive stone turret.  Rennes is so lovely, so friendly, so filled with wonderful elements of city living that I am swooningly, head-over-heels in love with it.  I blush at the thought of my earlier infatuation with Barcelona.  Rennes is true love.

It has streets lined with half-timbered buildings, the brown wooden beams interspersed with white plaster.  Some of the plaster is colored red, or pink, or green or a burnt umber.  The houses lean at a bit of an angle, a combination of age, gravity and settling causing their former right angles to assume less straight-edged poses.  Rennes was once the capitol of Brittany which for a thousand years, was its own nation until its unwilling annexation by France.  Everywhere are signs of the power it once exercised:  a plethora of churches, massive abbeys, formal gardens, grand plazas.  Now it is a vibrant university town, with modern touches that are interesting and forward-thinking.  Like its free bicycle ridership program, its cheap and effective subway, and a network of city buses I can only dream of.

Rennes is also a city of great food markets that present food as an artistic statement.  We shopped in a market similar to Eastern Market only twice as large and twice as pretty with a selection of fresh and prepared foods that was like pages from a high-end foodie magazine come alive.  We bought artichoke pasta and salmon tarts and local new potatoes, and lots of French wine.  Then today we went to the Saturday outdoor market, which spreads out over a big plaza where jousting tournaments were once held.  The plaza and adjoining street are lined with vegetable and fruit stalls, and edged with buildings that hold cheese, meat, poultry, bread, wine and you-name-it shops.  There were cheeses wrapped in pretty dried leaves; a display of home-made preserves that would make an artist cry; breads and butchers galore.  And outside, stand after stand of lovely fresh fruit and veg.  Max has dived into the challenge of using his French, and I am very impressed by what he is able to ask for and negotiate – and with real vendors selling real food, not picking up pre-packaged antiseptic packages in a Safeway.

So Rennes has emerged as my true travel love.  Or should I say, “a” true travel love?  Because I have not been faithful to Rennes.  I have also loved Slovenia, and swooned over Sardinia.  But Barcelona?  Nah.  Turned out to be more frog than prince.