It’s been just over two months since I returned from Scandinavia, where I spent three weeks educating myself at a television conference, travelling to the far north of Sweden, and conducting research in Copenhagen (well, some research, and a fair amount of pastry sampling and photo-taking). It took me a good week or so to stop being completely exhausted after my 26 hour flight home to Sydney. I was simply too busy/tired/distracted to write any blog posts, and even now I have spent the last hour googling demonic possession because I watched The Exorcism of Emily Rose last night instead of committing my hand-written diary entries to this blog. Suffice it to say, I just do not prioritise writing for fun like I used to.
My fatigue overshadowed my expected joy at being back home after three weeks away; by the end of my week in Copenhagen, I was all set to head home and buy a (good) coffee for less than $6. I love Denmark (and I like Sweden, especially Gothenburg, though it’s not quite the same as my adopted spiritual homeland) but I was relieved at the prospect of sleeping in my own bed, seeing my friends and (would you believe?) sitting down to actually work on my PhD (I do love my PhD, but at times it can feel like a lazy teenager that I get sick of nagging). A lot of my memories have blurred, and I’m glad I took my good DSLR camera along with me, to capture the incredible scenery of Lapland and the charismatic neighbourhoods of the Danish capital.
Memory is a funny thing: when I was wandering through the streets surrounding Christiania, the notorious freetown, I was awoken to the memory of a story that my friend relayed to me last time I was in this same area. It was a strange story about a time that she had been in a supermarket and was solicited by a mostly benign man who engaged her in an unorthodox conversation. Simply being in the same street where I had heard the story brought it immediately to my mind, even though I had actually forgotten all about it. It seems that I certainly have a far better memory than a very, very drunk Danish man who stopped me to ask me where he was while this memory was replaying in my head. “Christianshavn,” I told him reluctantly, eager to create distance between myself and the drunk people celebrating Sankt Hans Nat.
“Where?” he insisted.
I had doubts about my pronunciation but tried again. “Christianshavn.”
“Is that in Sweden?”
I tried not to laugh. “It’s in Denmark,”
He turned to his friend: “Are we in Denmark…?”
I left them to it.
Some memories from this most recent trip have melded with experiences from the time before when I travelled to Copenhagen for a different conference, which was in October of 2017. Despite the fact that one trip was in autumn and the other in summer, the weather was mostly equally grey and rainy. I adore the rain, but not when I only packed t-shirts.
Aarhus, though, where I began my most recent journey, had perfectly lovely warm, long days, and the locals spilled out onto sidewalks and street corners to drink coffee and beer. On the Friday night before I left the city I wandered into a lovely restaurant set back from the street in a charming courtyard. As I really didn’t feel like enduring the heavy-headedness that would accompany the consumption of alcohol, I opted for a light beer: a Mikkeler in the Sun 3%. Turned out it was actually 0.3%, so I really had no worries at all. I had a burger with lots of yummy salad, and a raw egg yolk in a little cup. I had to ask what I was supposed to do with this egg, and I was told to pour it over the burger, if I wanted to: the locals do, but the tourists usually choose not to, apparently. Determined to not be classed as simply a tourist I tried the raw egg, and it was perfectly fine, though I tried not to think about it too much. [edit: I am now vegan, so this egg-burger scenario is, frankly, unfathomable to Djuna 2.0.]
Gothenburg, as mentioned in a previous post, was very rainy the whole time I was there, and it didn’t feel like summer at all. Out on the Southern Archipelago it was cold and wet and the water was quite rough in parts. It was these conditions that made the smell of honeysuckle blossoms more acutely noticeable. There’s nothing that says “spring” like the sweet smell of flowers in the late afternoon; I remember noticing this when I was walking back to my apartment in Sydney and passed by a jasmine vine tumbling over a fence into the street. The fresh and delicate scent took me by surprise when I was on this cold and quiet island, and just for a moment it felt like summer after all.
By the time I reached Copenhagen, for the tail-end of my holiday, I had almost forgotten the warm, carefree days in Aarhus from a week earlier: the Danish capital was heavy with grey clouds but it was the Copenhagen I knew from all my previous trips, and so I felt right at home.
The Chaos Children 