A Family Reunited, Plus One

Gefion Fountain

Monday, September 28. Copenhagen, Denmark.

The day dawned rainy but the skies cleared into pretty tattered clouds in time for us to return to Plan A. Randy would do the final clean up at his work, then meet us after I biked the girls to the Little Mermaid statue and the changing of the guard and returned the bike that was due by one.

All worked like clockwork although I could feel Nora's cold in my lungs and had to breath through my nose to keep cooler air out of my throat. I smile as I pedal, despite this. What a city. What a country.

As I take our last bike ride through the city, I worry the puddles will splash up at the girls from my rear tire but they are happy to be out of the hotel room and sing "Potato Butt, Potato Butt!" until the song is interrupted at a stop light by their roller-coaster screams. I look behind me and the plastic rain cover that they refused at the beginning of the ride has flopped down over them. They punch at it and scream happily while the Danish man on the bike behind us smiles.

I do slip in the wet at the Radhaus though, second guessing a yellow light and nearly take a tumble off the bike. I manage to stay upright, straddling my fallen Wonder while the trailer scarcely shivers.

"Are you alright??" asks the Danish woman who rushes to help. "What happened?"

"I stopped too quickly," I reply and explaining to her and knowing she understands as so many of these intelligent Danes (more Nobel Prizes per capita than any other nation, same with candy consumption) is as comforting as her question.

We pass the closed Tivoli Gardens on Hans Christian Anderson Boulevard and catch glimpses of the pleasures waiting inside for our next trip. Ny Carlsberg Glyptoteck has a mask exhibit from the late nineteenth centure to Picasso. Sally said the garden cafe inside is one of her favorite places in Copenhagen. Will we get here later?

Near the Parliment building, Daddy passes us in a taxi and waves. Later, at lunch he'll tell us he thought, "Why that Danish woman looks a lot like my wife." We'll boat together later after lunch in this canal we're passing now. The captain will navigate the low riding tour vessel under a bridge that clears mere inches overhead and to the sides, then negotiate a pivoting turn in a corner only slightly wider than the boat.

"It's a Willy Wonka city," I tell Randy and Ken, his coworker who joins us in the afternoon. "We've got the boat ride through the scary tunnel and a candy factory and even a glass elevator." The last was a tiny three-person round capsule of windows that the girls and I rode at Duckling, Randy's work. It rose through the middle of the spiral staircase all the way to the top of the building, then dropped us with a bouncy thrill on the second floor.

But we aren't there yet. We're still on the bike, heading for our mermaid. The rain spits a little but the girls are tucked in and I have my warm gray beret. I'm wearing a dark dress and textured tights and my purple coat and my lovely Naot Mary Janes so I'm feeling comfy and Euro.

We pass the Royal Theater that displays a banner for the West Side Story Suite ballet - oh for more days and a trusty babysitter.

It's 11:30, half an hour to see Den Lille Havfrue before the changing of the guard at the queen's residence. I plow up to the surprisingly beautiful Kastellet park - a star-shaped set of ancient ramparts are now grassy hills surrounded by a picturesque moat. The magnificent statue of the goddess Gefion plowing the channel between Sweden and Denmark with the four sons she transformed into oxen has Mia begging to get out.

"Look at the snake!" I tell her. Its fanged head is bigger than mine. When we pass the fountain on the way back, water will be gushing from the oxen's heels as Gefion whips them on. Spectacular.

Further, further, the girls are cold and asking when we'll get there and we put on coats and hats and gloves and when finally beyond the huge National Geographic Explorer ship and a curve, I spy her, tiny figure on a rock near the shore, I burst into tears. I'm so happy and relieved and she looks so small and defenseless and the movie got it all wrong cause she failed to win her prince's love.

As we get closer we can see her face is forever turned toward the sea and away from the hordes of tourists taking her picture. Mia climbs down onto the smooth and wet rocks with my helping hand because she wants to get close to the girl.

We go back to Amalienborg Palace and watch a few minutes of the black hatted soldiers presenting arms and clicking their heels. The guard who waits in the rain to be replaced stands in front of a a tiny guard house that resembles a giant upright red crayon - round with a pointed roof and most enchanting and Danish of all, tiny heart-shaped cutouts on the side.

Goodbye bike! Goodbye Wonder, the Amazing Rental Bike, with your single powerful gear and your ratty little trailer! Thank you for your faithful service and speed and ease. Riding you showed me so much of this magical city, up close and personal, and made our last three days an adventure. Thank you for the warming and steady exercise, that stirred my jetlagged blood and cheered my foreigner's heart. Thanks for the intimate views of the city at our own pace. Thanks for floating us past anonymous blocks whose beauty would be too subtle and length too arduous for my little ones.

We take the bus from the Central Station to Kongens Nytorv (costs 21 Kroner, about $4, free transfers within two hours) then I carry Nora to Randy's work. We meet up for lunch with Randy and Ken, who's been my husband's great help through the four day sleepless marathon of cutting and recutting. Ken's easy-going, relaxed about my sometimes demanding girls and funny.

"We must have seemed like machine-animals to the Danish," he said over lunch at an Italian cafe on Nyhaven, the canal-side street lined with bars and restaurants that must be Copenhagen's most visited spot. "We trashed their rooms and broke their espresso machine and never stopped working."

"Did you have sleep deprivation effects?" I ask.

Ken says, "I had to avoid soft surfaces. I would pass out."

When I tell him my wallet story, I include the bit about asking the help of the woman at the front desk to translate the recorded message on the art museum's phone. She had listened for herself, then told me the museum would be open on Sunday, but no one would be answering the phone. Ken says, "that would never happen in America. We'd answer the phone but you'd never get your wallet."

Everyone's elated after lunch. The girls get ice cream. Nora's cone is topped with unsweetened whipped cream that I lick off when she says she doesn't like it. The richness catches me off guard. "I'm licking whipped fat," I tell Randy and Ken. Their adult and familiar companionship feels good.

Randy says, "I finally feel like I'm on vacation" and asks if I want to stay a few more days. Sweeeeeet! I'm jumping up and down and hugging him. Who knows where we'll sleep. The original plan was to leave town before the Olympic delegates arrived since they had booked the town solid. Perhaps they'll leave by Sunday so we'll find a room when we return from Sweden.


Randy and Ken and the girls and I take a boat tour. Fun and interesting, but a bit long for the girls who only want to go back to the toy store I had promised after a visit without any purchase. I'm amused at how the tour guide describes the Nyhaven channel as being dug "by Swedish prisoners of war" with a tone that is so unapologetic it approaches pride. We see the mermaid from another angle, an eye-popping immense yacht that looks like it was designed by Donald Trump for Captain Nemo, the opera house, the new "Black Diamond" library and a crazy twisty church steeple in Christianshavns that Ken wants to climb. He has the opposite of Randy's fear of heights. He does it, too, in a couple of days, climbs the tiny metal staircase that spirals around the outside of the steeple with barely room for one person, let alone the other brave tourists coming down the opposite direction.


After the tour and a visit to a spotless underground pay toilet, it takes us two cabs and one wrong destination before we're all reunited at Gammeltorv Square.

We have dinner at a generic buffet on the Stroget (once again, the wait staff treats us as gently as loved family) and cab home. The girls walk with us through the rain to get dessert of candy at the quickie mart across the street from the hotel.

Words Fail Me

As I've been blogging our trip, I feel like there's an essential quality of Copenhagen I've failed to convey here. I kept getting flashbacks to other cities - the island skies are England; the classic architecture reminds me a bit of Paris, but without its formality and fustiness. The charming squares are Roman or Florentine. Randy confirms my suggestion of Amsterdam, although I never been there. I got flashes of Austin, Texas and San Francisco in the pocket pleasures of luxurious parks and cute shops. The appreciation for both clean modern design and child-like whimsy evokes Japan. But there's an unapologetic pleasure in comfort and company that seems at odds with what I think of as typical Scandinavian austerity and is perhaps uniquely Danish.

At Valbyparken, I saw an unfamiliar structure with open walls and a steeply high roof of dark shingles. Once inside, I saw the benches ringed around a fire pit and the hole in the roof. I saw other smaller versions of this in the backyards of houses next to the canals and I could imagine the heat and light on snowy nights. Bonfire culture is big in Denmark. So is that of the cafes, where coffee drinkers hang out in the late September chill, wrapped in blankets printed with the restaurant's name and warmed by overhead heat lamps. I can find nothing of Lars Von Trier's anguish here, but the life-affirming portions of Swede Ingmar Bergman's films come to mind - the happy celebrations of Wild Strawberries and Fanny and Alexander.

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Valbyparken

Sunday afternoon, September 27. Copenhagen, Denmark

I left an exhausted Nora with Randy to sleep together in the hotel and put Mia in the bike trailer to find Valby Parken. I'd found an article on the web (your first clue this will not go well) that raved about the park's natural playground and the fun sound of the name was making the place bigger in my mind than it probably needed to be.

Mia in the trailer and I huffed and puffed up that beautiful Frederiksberg Alle to the lovely park Frederiksberg Have, once the palace grounds. Mia ran down the steep grassy hills behind Frederiksberg Slot, a yellow stucco palace that she refused to believe was a king's castle - no moat, I suppose fueled her doubt, nor turrets. I ooed and ahed at the ancient alle of perfectly groomed lindens. Once we were at the zoo next door, my map ended and the man I asked said it was a distance.

"A kilometer?" I asked, all Euro.

"More like three or four," he replied.

But the days are long here - dusk doesn't come until eight and Wonder the rental bike still feels great so we head out.

Mia was a trooper with few complaints. Whenever the neighborhood looked a little sad, (we were far from the ye olde tourist district) we would pass a beautiful furniture design store or a cozy pizza sandwich shot or a home with a sweet garden. Industrial suburbs and enormous soccer fields, a few wrong turns, but I was determined to make it. After the second time I asked for directions and had to turn around, I started to think of the Youtube video of the man who runs Ironman triathalons with his son - who has cerebral palsy and must be carried and towed the entire way. That tear-inducing image was hardly helpful; I replaced it quickly with a more cheering memory of carrying Mia on my back in the Tetons when she was nine months old.


We approached the park from the opposite side of the playground, I was steering sort of by instinct, but once we sighted the overgrown hills and child-sized towers, we cheered. The nature playground here was designed by Helle Nebelong, a Danish landscape architect and artist.

Mia ran across a soccer field to reach it while I rode parallel to her down a gravel path lined with narrow trees. Although she was 50 yards away, I could see her laughing, like I was, at our race.


The playground had teepees of reeds and willow, canoes roughly carved out of logs in sand lakes, climbing poles and ladders and rope steps to help you up the steep hills. A tower of light with slots of colored plastic that let in cathedral light and feel inside, an aluminum two-story tower with a slide from the second floor. One tower with a tree growing inside.


I wish I had my bird book that Kristen gave me. Strange black and white birds and the largest dove I've ever seen - it that what a rock dove is?

Squirrels with pointy upturned ears and shaggy brown fur.

We played until nearly dark and the ride home, of course, was much shorter when you know the way to go.

Happy Birthday, John Adams!

Born today in 1735.

"I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States--Yet through all the Gloom I can see Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will triumph...." John Adams, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, July 3, 1776

The Day the Wallet Was Lost

Sunday afternoon, September 27. Copenhagen, Denmark.

Yesterday morning, Saturday, Nora kept sleeping as Mia and I puttered around the hotel room, taking baths, eating breakfast and playing with her new paper fairy treehouse. My little blondie radiated heat and slept on as I changed her out of her diaper and jammies, gave her a sponge bath and put her in warm clothes.

Our room has a four poster bed with beautiful Balinese details, pillow-like white feather duvets that housekeeping fluffs and makes into long rectangles, one on each side of the bed. At the foot of the bed there is room for a tiny desk, which sits against a room divider, hung with a beautiful silver-framed mirror. Beyond the divider is a futon on which the kids sleep. We have a sweet balcony with table and chairs, an enormous armoire for clothes and a small fridge packed with organic sodas.

I checked my handy map, already well-used, put hats and gloves in my backpack and hoisted Nora to lug down to our rental bike.

The trailer was left overnight in the courtyard. We were lucky with clear skies last night. Next time I'll fasten the plastic cover in case of rain or heavy dew.

Nora slept on on the lobby couch as I struggled with the trailer lynchpin on the sidewalk. Mia stood by, then volunteered to go back to watch Nora. I let the girls out of my sight. What else to do, honestly? The women at the front desk have all been very warm and helpful. I am steps away.

We finally took off down Frederiksberg Alle, a lovely street tree-lined that was once a private drive to the king's palace, then east down Gammel Kongevej, a street of beautiful shops and restaurants, then turned at the dramatically brickworked Planetarium towards the lakes. (Or are they canals? I've heard these lovely lakes were dug as water reservoirs, but another more romantic story says they were a means of hiding ships during take your pick of the Danish-Swedish wars.) Swans and ducks.

Left turns are still difficult. Friday I nearly got caught in a stream to traffic while trying to negotiate a crossing.

A man passes me on the left in our narrow bike lane and says something in Danish, his hand weaving like an unsure snake. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," I call and try to keep evenly to the right.

I count no helmets yet but for one woman and an adolescent in a German soldier style one.

We pass the Botanic Gardens and there's Staten Museum for Kunst, the National Gallery. Nora's still groggy, I carry her as much as I can up the entrance stairs. We get tickets and wash up and deposit my backpack in a locker in the whitewashed catacombs below.

I put my wallet and map in my pocket.

Lunch is in the beautiful Republic Cafe. The "kid's menu" offers fish cakes with remoulade or dark bread with pate. The room is part of a modern glass walled addition built on the back of the old brick building. They retained the old facade, so you walk out the old doors to an atrium of light, huge glass walls facing a lake and tall trees.

Nora put her head down on the table and Mia picks out chocolate milk with me. When the beeper chimes, we approach a counter where the man smiles and begins to explain our brunch, served on triangular plates and in tiny glass dishes.

"Cheese?" is all I can say.

"Oh, sorry," he smiles and explains again in English. What a country. They apologize for not recognizing your Americanness.

The girls' plate is a little man made of brown bread and butter with cucumber spear arms and legs, carrot stick hair and a cucumber bit face. When I cut off his head to eat, Mia says, "Give him a sad face." I turn over his cucumber curve of a mouth and we laugh.

Nora eats nothing and lays in my arms while Mia jumps on a blue and white striped platform in a kids' playroom on the same level. No cushioned walls.

On a chalkboard platform, Mia draws and smiles while a little nearly one-year-old in cords, vest and shirt climbs on her to touch her face. "I have to teach him woman like some conversation first," says his friendly father and we laugh.

Upstairs is an art workshop with hot glue guns set out. Mia glues beads and matchsticks to a square of cardboard and uses pastels to make a garden. Nora sleeps on.

When we go down to get my backpack from the catacombs, I throw my wallet in the pack instead of carefully zipping it in my purse as usual. It's the last time I'm aware of where it is.

We bike south to the Nyhaven district where Randy is working. I wonder at how compact this efficient city is. We pass through tiny St. Anne's Passage, a twisty bricked bike and pedestrian street laid between beautiful doorways. Dad's workplace, Duckling, is a warren of locked doors, alleyways and passages into a dim room of computers where he sleeps on a couch. Before this nap, Randy had been up for 56 hours. The film has been cut down to 5 minutes from 15, then back up to 6. Audio has it now. Dad can't give us much - he's a zombie. We only wanted to say hi, so we leave after a few minutes.

We reach two deadends as I try to leave with the girls - I need to reach through a locked gate and ring inside again to ask to be let out. It's fresh air outside where a playground in the middle of the graceful Saint Anne's Place waits for us. Nora sleeps on. Mia is sad I am too tired to be lively but more children appear and cheer her. The kids here stare at our strange talk but have the universal language of play. "I think this will work, don't you?" I asked the boy who stopped to watch Mia attaching a mini car to her tow truck. "Ja," he replies.


I return to the playground at Skt. Anne Plad in my memory, trying to realize some important detail that might give me more information about the wallet. But the pack in the park was on the bench next to the sleeping Nora. Did it bounce out of my pocket as we rode home down charming narrow streets parallel to the Stroet? (I have no Danish keys on my keyboard so you will need to picture struck Os and As with haloes littered here and there in the Danish names.) Did someone reach in and take it from the bag that I left on another bench in the late afternoon gloom as Nora slept on in the trailer and Mia played again at the Castle playground - her favorite, the one I had promised her? It was dusk now and this neighborhood, Vesterbro, is a tiny bit rougher than Duckling's by the Royal Family's residence. Again, I picture Wicker Park - there's graffiti on the back of the churches and boys running with jeers away from their friend walking his pit bull.

It's the only opportunity, the only time I turned my back and if I wove the story in this way you would stop wondering before I did. But I had no funny feeling. There were only families at the park. I never felt jostled or bumped. And this is Denmark. Incredibly helpful, kind, good-humored Denmark.

The bus driver essentially said, "your money's no good here" and waved us to sit down. And when security at Staten Museum for Kunst carries the wallet to me today around noon, two hundred dollars and five hundred Kroner, the three credit cards and my driver's license are undisturbed. I'm glad the man at the travel store at Old Orchard taught me "magna tak" (many thanks) before we left.

"We take care of each other," said the woman on the bus who offered help when she saw my map. Perhaps she has been reading about the 43 million uninsured Americans and the reluctance to reform. Perhaps Obama will get a breath of relief when he comes this week and meets some of the sensible Danish with their matter of fact shrugs, "Of course we take care of each other."