Someone's Sneezing in the State of Denmark

Greetings from Copenhagen!

This time of year the weather is fa-reezing! The city is beautiful and delicate, but I only see basic shapes and vague outlines as I hurry through the ice-cold streets with my scarf pulled up to my eyes. Coffee shops and bageri (bakeries) are like those checkpoints on video-games that you must reach in time or you run out of lives. My danish speaking abilities are limited to asking for tea or water, and of course repeating tak tak tak tak to everybody I meet (Thank you! Thank you!) I feel like I’m doing pretty well for having been here only three days, and don’t even mind that one girl told me kindly “you speak well, except you sound a bit like a baby pig”.  Apparently danish piglets squeal and make “shk-shk-shk” sounds like I do. It does not help that I have a terrible cold and my voice is raspy and squeaky. 

Copenhagen is very still and spindly this time of year. Spires and thin towers stab the low-hanging sky, and the rivers are flaked with pancake ice and frost.  There is a generally sinister tone to the city, I think, perhaps owing to the fact that Hans Cristian Anderson lived, wrote, and died here.  Any place that can inspire the tale of a winter so cold that it would tolerate the tragic death of “The Little Match Girl” is a dark place indeed.  There is also a tower upon the Church of Our Savior outside the community of Christania that has an ornate spiraling staircase to the top.  The story goes that the architect designed the staircase to turn counterclockwise to enable swordfighting (that was an issue in those days, I guess). However, he traveled abroad for a time and when he returned he discovered that his construction crew had built the tower staircase spiraling clockwise—the wrong direction!  Distraut, the poor architect flung himself from the top of his imperfect tour and died.  This story is eerily reminiscent of other stories that take place in Denmark, such as Hamlet, the Little Mermaid, and the Red Shoes.  “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” as they say, though only in the winter.