Well despite my last post (newsletter? writeything?) about scaling back for a bit, here I am right on schedule. Last week I spent about ten hours in Copenhagen, and I feel like ~travel stories~ are the sort of content you’re supposed to generate when you’re an American doing the whole living-in-Europe thing. Not that I have a ton to say about Copenhagen after only ten hours, but I do have a lot of experience at this whole content-generation thing so I can probably bullshit my way through a Substack post.
(Sadly I do not have many pictures, in part because it was the kind of very grey weather that makes photos come out flat, and I didn’t take my good digital camera with me so I knew the results would be mediocre. I did take my instant, which was a bit of a misfire because instant film really needs bright light.)
Anyway.
This was, as mentioned, a very brief trip. My friend Claire needed to go to Copenhagen on some personal business and asked if I wanted to fly there with her for the day - it’s 45 minutes each way, so you can day-trip it if you’re feeling ambitious and don't mind waking up at 4am. I generally find air travel torturous, so same-day round trips aren’t something that would feel worth it on my own. But since I had someone else to hang with during the miserable parts, I figured why not blow off my four different deadlines and take a wee jaunt over to Denmark on a random Wednesday? Aren’t €50 EasyJet deals the whole point of living in Europe?
So the verdict is: Copenhagen is very charming. I’d heard this from a lot of people, and even exhausted and with shit weather, I was not disappointed. I feel like at least half the people I know from Berlin fantasize about moving to Copenhagen if they could land a job with a Copenhagen salary, and I get it. Having spent ten hours in the place, I might now be one of them, which is hilarious because the climate is actually worse than Berlin. But then you wouldn’t need the hygge, now, would you?
It’s truly tragic that I didn’t take more pictures, because Copenhagen is one of the more aesthetically pleasing cities I’ve been to. It’s very clean and the architecture is lovely - big windows, lots of cobblestones, lots of historic buildings in brick or white stone or pastels, and new buildings whose modern architecture actually works with the cityscape. Waterfronts, bridges, green spaces, a palace or two, etc. And the streetscape is cute - in the trendiest parts of town, every single store and restaurant you pass seems to have been arranged just so, both inside and out front. I walked by one store with floor-to-ceiling windows and spent a solid 30 seconds examining the colorful window display before it dawned on me that I was looking at sex toys. You know, the high-end kind that could double as art objects before you start to really process what shape they are.
The taste factor isn’t exactly shocking given that CPH is well known as a design capital, but I was still a bit taken aback by how inviting much of the city felt given that the weather was SO shit. The hygge is real, guys. But it’s rich people hygge. After one day of immersing myself in the local cute, I concluded that the governing aesthetic made sense as a byproduct of having a wealthy city located in an extremely awful climate: you need the whole vibe to be warm and approachable, but also very chic because you’re the heir to a shipping fortune or some shit. People generally dress well too, in way that like the rest of the city, is tasteful without being stiff.
My immediate reaction was that Copenhagen is a place where I would very happily spend a lot of money. Clothes, textiles, handmade jewelry, vintage lighting, local ceramics, beautiful sex toys, all the things. And of course food, which was not something I prioritized due to timing and (lack of) planning - though I did sample one of the famous cardamom buns from Juno the Bakery. I didn’t photograph it, sorry, but here is their instagram if you like to ogle pastry.
Since I wasn’t going to make this a “gastronomy” sort of trip, I stopped for lunch at a cafe my friend Robyn recommended where the tables were scattered all through a sprawling second-hand bookstore. It was, of course, extremely cute, and I needed some time off my feet because they were already wrecked by noon.
The book I had brought with me was In the Cut, which is a fantastic book but also, like, so filthy and violent that when it came out in the 1990s a lot of people didn’t know what to do with it. Reading graphic sex scenes in a public place tends to make you feel like you’re getting away with something scandalous, which wasn't any sort of deliberate intention on my part - I brought it with me because I had already started it, and it’s small and weighs very little.
But anyway I was sitting in this cafe reading this book for a solid 90 minutes, next to a very round-faced and rosy-cheeked elderly Danish woman in a pink pullover who was having a lunchtime beer with her own book. Not long after reading a scene whose content I will definitely not be describing in this family-oriented publication, she saw me look up (probably to make sure no classy-looking Danes could see the text printed on my forehead) and decided to ask me in a friendly and slightly drunk way about what I was reading.
I wasn’t going to explain to this storybook grandma that I was reading a novel about sex and murder, and I also wasn’t sure I wanted to wade into “confrontational feminist take on power and the knotty relationship between erotic liberation and danger” without knowing my audience - in Berlin that would go over just fine, but the capital city of hygge is a more conservative place, and I’d only been there four hours and didn’t want to scandalize the locals or something.
So I was just like “errrr it’s about a woman who maybe kind of witnesses a murder and then starts having an affair with the cop who is investigating it? So kind of a crime novel?” Which is a really terrible explanation of In the Cut. Poor Susanna Moore, it’s been three decades and people are still selling her short because her work is deliberately uncomfortable.
The slightly drunk elderly Danish lady let out an “oh!” as though this was in fact a salacious thing to be reading, but then she started talking to me about Nordic crime novels, and then we pivoted to the necessity of living in a house full of books, and then she started telling me about the neighborhood and a storied local rooming house for unmarried women, and then we somehow started talking about horror movies and how she used to go to them alone and come home and make her boyfriend cuddle her (😏), and I wound up telling her that after I watched The Ring in high school I was so freaked out that I wouldn’t go into the bathroom alone and made my best friend come watch me pee. And then she started quoting Shakespeare at me, and I humiliated myself by being like “isn’t that Hamlet?” when it was actually As You Like It.
At some point late in the conversation she offhandedly goes, “you know, when I was young I used to be very very shy but now I talk to strangers all the time, because you never know what will happen. The younger me would never imagine I could be like this.” She kind of shrugged her shoulders at the strange thing of life, and I started to feel rather bad that I hadn’t told this rosy-cheeked lady whose name I never got more about In the Cut.
All the details of this interaction are accurate by the way, by the way; I really had some tipsy Danish elder in a pink sweater drop stealth existential wisdom on me in a bookstore during my one day in Copenhagen. God, what a charming city.
Eventually she gathered her multiple bags and left me to read my dirty literary novel in peace, before I headed back out in the cold damp to traipse around a very cute cemetery and do more window shopping.
So yeah, Copenhagen was charming. I would very much like to go back in a few months and spend more than a day there, when it’s warmer and I’m feeling a bit less tight about money. I will add it to my list of European cities that I would conceivably be interested in moving to after Berlin, if I could land a job there. Or when I marry the heir to a shipping fortune. Whatever happens first.