When I was a child growing up in Los Angeles, I had two friends who had been to Europe: Miriam and Jane. I regarded both of them as touched by great good fortune. Europe! I didn't quite believe in the place. On my first ever trans-Atlantic journey, to Israel when I was sixteen, I used up an entire roll of Kodak film (36 exposures) snapping pictures from the plane window. The English Channel! The Alps! They existed! I really hadn't been certain.
Many years later, living in England took some of the gloss off of European travel but I still thrilled to the various journeys I could take, alone, or with friends, and, eventually with my own expanding family. Amsterdam. Krakow. Dublin. Marseilles. Crete. All an hour or three away by boat, train, plane. Once, my parents and children and I went to France for lunch, because my mother wanted to see The Burghers of Calais. It turned out that we almost had to leave the middle child behind at the Calais ferry terminal because of a minor passport snafu, but that's another story. ("You'd like French boarding school," I assured him. "They have great food.")
Now I live in Canada. I've been to Thunder Bay, St. John's, Halifax. I know Buffalo and Syracuse, and a few other previously unimagined destinations. They all had great food too, but the trips lacked the romance of, say, a long weekend in Rome.
So I particularly enjoyed a sojourn to Copenhagen earlier this month, accompanying husband, who attended a conference (on "Economic Theology" since you ask. No, me neither). I'd never been there, never been in Scandinavia at all other than Iceland, which seems a sort of Scandinavian adjunct rather than the real thing. (Sorry, Reykjavik.) I have been to Helsinki and know that Finland, while Nordic, is not Scandinavian. I don't remember why, though.
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| Christiania, Copenhagen |
Listening to my husband speak at the conference was part of the pleasure. The man is clever. He knows such erudite words and how to use them. Someone sitting next to me in the conference hall whispered, "Are you connected with him?" I admitted it. "He is so wonderful!" the man said to me. "He's just amazing."
I agreed. We've been married twenty years and I still agree.
From our hotel window we could see the Oresund Bridge, famous now (apparently) from the television crime drama 'The Bridge', which connects Denmark to Sweden. In fact, from our window we could see Sweden. I felt a thrill, simply looking at the coast and the faint skyline of Malmo, because Sweden is a country where husband has spent a good deal of time conducting research. He has never taken me there with him before, but now, after more than two decades together, he agreed to let me in, albeit quite a distance from his own field site. So, after a hearty breakfast, we boarded the train in Copenhagen airport and descended, thirty minutes later, in Lund, a charming Swedish university town. Amazing.
Europe is a different country.
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| Sliver of Sweden, from Denmark (Amager Beach) |
We wandered medieval streets and the Botanic Gardens, and explored the crypt and caught the last of a free concert in the Cathedral. We ate fish soup and shrimp salad in the airy, polished food hall. Husband conducted transactions in Swedish and then we discovered our server spoke perfect American English. "I was an au pair in Westlake Village," she told us, which is a suburb of LA, a twenty-minute drive from my childhood home.
In bookshop, while husband looked for Agatha Christie in the unoriginal Swedish, I tried to buy him an anniversary card. There weren't any. I asked shop assistants and a few kindly schoolgirls to help me, in case I didn't know the right words, but apparently Swedes don't make, buy, or give anniversary cards. Husband had to settle for a plain old English one a few days later when we reached Durham, the city where, long ago now, he and I met.
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| In the beginning: Durham |
