So! A few weekends ago I went up to Copenhagen with a few friends to check out the city for the weekend and see the sights. I won’t give you the whole trip in full, I’ll let the pictures and captions speak for themselves. I WILL say, however, that Copenhagen is an absolutely amazing city. Having traveled to a reasonable number of cities on this continent, I’ve found that there’s definitely a “type,” if you want to call it that, to your standard big, old European city. There’s always the 600-year old cathedral right in the center of town, there’s always a river or some major body of water (great places for lunch and journal writing, btw), there’s always the huge ritzy shopping street, etc. Not to say that this diminishes my appreciation of them at all—we’re not talking like Anywhere, USA syndrome—but a lot of medieval city planners took their moves from the same book. Copenhagen, however, belongs to that rare class of city that stands out and grabs your attention completely. It’s got an unmistakable character and flair to it that absolutely blew me away, and I was totally taken with it for the three or so days we were there. It was nice in January, but walking around you could tell that the place is astonishingly beautiful in spring or summer, so a return trip is definitely in order.
Anyway, what I will dedicate the majority of this post to is my return trip back to Hamburg. Once upon a time I came across the phrase, “It’s not an adventure until something goes wrong,” in some forgotten book or magazine, and it’s been a recurring and persistently accurate motif in my life ever since. But anyway, the back-story: this particular trip to Copenhagen has actually been in the works for about a month, so everybody else who went bought their tickets pretty early. I got in on it too late though, so I had to book a different return train than everyone else. Which wasn’t bad at all—the solo train trip is actually a great place to just sit down and do whatever you want for three or four hours, completely disconnected from the rest of the world. You can read, write, sleep, watch the scenery, sleep, absolutely whatever, so I was actually kind of looking forward to it.
Anyway, the trip started out normally enough. I stocked up on some croissants for the trip and stuffed them in my backpack, seeing as the train didn’t have a restaurant car, and waited. There are big electronic billboards on railway platforms that let you know when trains are coming and going, and even though I don’t speak Danish, the big red “15 Minut” I saw pop up on the screen was easy enough to understand. At first I was a little concerned. After all, the thing that the whole European railway system hangs on is efficiency and punctuality. When one train is late that messes everyone’s connections up, then other trains can’t get to their platforms in time, so on and so forth. I had about a ten-minute connection between my first train and my second train, so I probably wasn’t going to make it. But it’s usually the case with these sorts of things that you can catch a later train. For a route like Flensburg-Hamburg (my connection) there’s a train every hour, so I wasn’t so worried.
So I sat down, enjoyed a croissant, snapped a few photos of the absolutely breathtaking fiery orange sunset out of the window, and didn’t worry myself. The entire time announcements in Danish were happening over the intercom and people were moving seats. Speaking no Danish, and not having the benefit of bilingual train announcements (standard on any German train), I moved seats when I was told (Why? Who knows.), not really sure of what was going on or what I needed to do. At some point I stopped a ticket checker to ask what the deal was, and she said there was some problem with the final destination. The train was supposed to run between Copenhagen to Flensburg, Germany, but the train wasn’t going the whole length of the journey because of the delay, so I had to switch to a bus at some point, which would take me the rest of the way to Flensburg. “Great,” I thought, “Busses are really not the greatest, but at least we should get there in a reasonable amount of time, right? They wouldn’t dump me off in some backwater German town on the Dutch border in the middle of the night without any way to get home, right?”
Wrong. What would have been about 45 minutes by train translated into about three hours by bus. Part of Denmark consists of islands between the Baltic and North Sea, but there’s a big chunk of it attached to the European continent as well. Looking back at a map after the fact, we pretty much drove from the very tip of mainland Denmark, on the edge of the ocean, to the German border. Tired and a little overwhelmed, I walked up to the bus driver after about an hour and a half into the trip:
Me: “Hallo, können Sie Deutsch? Wissen Sie, wieviel Stunden gibt’s noch?”
Driver: “Umm..”
Me: “Ok, do you speak English? How much longer do we still have to go?”
Driver: “Uh…”
All I could get out of him was, “Not long, not long,” which translated into almost two more hours of bus travel. Every half an hour we would stop at some random destination, and we were on actual highways for a very small portion of the trip. Not to mention the fact that the bus driver announced at one point that he had “sich verfahren” (got lost, took a wrong turn), so the trip lasted even longer than it would have otherwise.
Having stowed my backpack in the storage area, and having nothing to do or read, I started chatting up the passenger next to me. She was actually really nice. Her name was Eva, and she was a professor in a university in Berlin. We talked about her travels in Argentina, hitchhiking to Romania, what I think about Germany, Utah history and culture, the different things I’ve seen and done and the trips I’ve been on in the USA and in Europe. A hefty amount of complaining was to be had as well, but for the most part it was actually a great conversation, all in German too. Once we got to Flensburg we bought a few Flensburgs (locally brewed beer) and sat on a bench in the train station waiting for the next train to Hamburg to come. We ended up waiting there about another two to three hours and had to snag seats on the overnight train to Hamburg since it was so late. When all was said and done I didn’t get back to Hamburg until about 2:30 in the morning.
Even though it was a huge extension to my return trip (the whole thing took about six hours longer than it should have), and I had to be in school by 9:00 the next morning, all in all it was actually kind of nice. Eva and I befriended some other travelers in the same predicament, we got to sit around and just talk and get to know each other for a while. I would have never met any of those people otherwise, so our collective predicament was a good excuse to make new friends.
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