Travelogue Denmark: The Happy Nation

Travelogue Denmark: The Happy Nation

The magical Tivoli Gardens at dusk

I think if my sister wasn’t living and working in Copenhagen for a couple of years, we wouldn’t have gone there on purpose. It’s a bit removed from the rest of popular Europe, and it’s a very expensive city. Yes, it’s one of the happiest countries in the world. They seem really happy. Always polite, smiling and are very friendly. Fit as hell too considering the number of bicycles there are, all beautiful and blonde and very young. If Danes were my type, I’d be ogling, but I think they may be a little too tall for me, plus I had a wonky eye, so I let my Dad and husband do the ogling as they saw scores and scores of immodest sexy young female Danes just with bare naked torsos and sexy bikini tops out in the summer sun, down by Islands Brygges’s harbour -front where my sister lives.

The Harbourfront at Islands Brygge

I am full of admiration for my baby sister( nearly ten years my junior). She’s an expat heading a change management department in a huge Danish shipping conglomerate, she is newly married, and has lived separately from the beloved other half for almost a year, had survived a winter bike accident, which saw her being operated on in Mumbai, and would cycle to work, like a native about 8 km away in her office suit and does all the DIY herself. And she makes chicken rice from scratch, and this is someone who has lived in Singapore since she was 14!

So Copenhagen was our most special destination. Our eldest girl, S, ever the sensible one, upon seeing Chinese food being sold by the weight in Paris opted for ratatouille, steaks, mussels & frites and double cheeseburgers & escargots for a week, and patiently waited till we got to CPH to have a taste of home. And it was truly home, as Nana and Kongkong were there waiting for us. They had just arrived from Penang via Singapore the day before we did and it was almost like Chinese New Year! Mum was dishing out all sorts of Nyonya delights in E’s compact kitchen- kapitan curry, dark soya sauce pork strips, sweet & sour fish, you name it! Dad, bless him, finally realized that I had had a delicate and an open, invasive eye surgery, not just a laser one, and we had many a long chats about my recent scare, and eye issues, from his 5 operations to mine and both of them fussed over me as any retired parents would their 40 year old daughter. I wasn’t allowed to do anything or lift a finger. It was as if I was suddenly an invalid, with a wonky eye! And at my sister’s apartment in Copenhagen, I slept and slept and my eye healed and healed.

On our first evening, we had the most magical evening at Tivoli Gardens, the world’s oldest theme park. Walt Disney apparently was so inspired by Tivoli that he based his Disneyland theme parks on this. While M and the kids with my sister E went on all the rides, I sat in between my parents, just like I was 5, and listened to live, DJ-spun music from the fairground in Heineken sun-loungers under a twinkly tree and watched the sun set on a lovely warm summer’s evening, feeling cocooned and protected. It was heavenly, and one of the most memorable nights of my life.

We took it really easy in Denmark. We ate at home, both lunch and dinner and Mum made sure we got our fair share of home cooked food for me to recuperate!( I didn’t tell her about my mussel eating and beer drinking habits in France and Belgium!) Given the fact that eating out in Copenhagen is rather expensive, it worked well for us. At the request of my dear husband one day, I accompanied him to the Carlsberg Brewery by foot!( The kids opted to stay home with grandma and grandpa to play Scrabble and to bond with their beloved aunty.) It was a complete letdown to him( compared to the Heineken Brewery in Amsterdam he had gone to when interailing as a student), but I enjoyed the slow 5km walk that I did with him to get there. If it’s one thing I LOVE about Europe, is that I can walk everywhere. The weather is (mostly)always lovely to walk.( Except this one time when we were bracing hail and wind walking from Marie- Antoinette’s playground back to the main palace of Versailles one wet and freezing spring day, and I had worn boots that heaped blisters on my blisters!) But, mostly, it’s therapeutic and a wonderful form of exercise. It’s bracing if it’s windy, and it’s not humid and even at its sunniest, you don’t actually get HOT. After my brief love affair with Belgian beer, Danish beer was just plain awful! As Carlsberg is freely available in M’sia, I have never liked it. And my opinion didn’t change in Denmark either. The best part of the brewery- seeing my man enjoy himself so much, trying out the different kinds of drafts. I realized it doesn’t take much to please him. Just his beer and his Malaysia Airlines ‘kacang’ that he’d packed in his back pack. A Malaysian true and true. And seeing him completely relaxed and away from work and business calls is a pleasure in itself. After my Paris scare, he, for one, completely deserved to have a break from any form of stress. And I got to see the sculptures in the garden. That was my high point. And we found out that the family who founded Carlsberg are also big advocates of the arts, and they had donated the Little Mermaid statue to the city of Copenhagen, so they aren’t just plain, greedy beer barons after all.

A man and his beer is a happy man!

The next day, we managed to drag Dad( who isn't fond of castles and museums) and Mum with us to see Hamlet’s Castle called Kronborg, an hour away by train. The castle itself wasn’t great as far as European Castles go, but as an English Lit person, it wasn’t to be missed. Nope, I didn’t see or feel Hamlet’s ghost nor hear Ophelia’s cries but there was a boutique on the Elsinore high street named Ophelia, so that'd do I suppose. We could see the ferries going back and forth the harbour to Helsingborg, Sweden. There isn’t really much of a difference between the two neighbours as we discovered. Both citizens speak excellent English, they both love fish on Ryvita (a phrase I shamelessly borrowed from Bill Bryson) and the use the same currency. But Elsinore is a quaint little town and the market square was atmospheric and being another sunshiny summer’s day, the kids had ice-cream and I did a bit of shopping!

Mum & Dad in their element at Kastellet Park

Following that, we also managed to see Kastellet Park and the Little Mermaid at dusk, and it’s really a pleasant stroll through verdant greens and grassy knolls. We had a fresh and dewy sun blessed evening, one of the loveliest of the year in all of Denmark which made it all the more pleasurable. My sister says mostly she gets home and stays as close as she can by the heater. We also saw Amalienborg Palace in the night which was another lovely jaunt through one of Europe’s most agreeable capitals.

With my baby sister by the little mermaid- I used to read aloud Hans Christian Andersen stories to her as a child!

My sister then whisked us off to the island of Bornholm, by bus, then ferry, which technically is on the Baltic Sea and south of Sweden and not far from the German coast. A sun-kissed( on the day of our arrival), windblown isle, the day we arrived was the sunniest it had been all year. I think we Malaysians tend to bring the sun with us wherever we go. (Someone said the same to us in Paris the morning we arrived, for it had been chilly and cloudy in Paris right up to Bastille Day weekend). We hired a car and drove around the main key spots of Bornholm. There is nothing more joyous than squares upon rectangles of bright yellow rape fields and pine forest whizzing by you as you drive along Bornholm’s picturesque and rural country roads. The views from the ruins of Hammerhus Castle was particularly arresting.

Belly Boo atop the ruins of Hammerhus Castle in Bornholm

We enjoyed a family picnic by the grass. Mum was taking it easy as she was still recovering from her recent asthma flare up. It’s quite rare for us to be able to explore castle ruins so openly and for the children to be able to climb trees in the shade. As my sister had booked our accommodation rather late in Bornholm, we ended up staying in a family hostel in an 8 bedded room, so we had a bit of a George & Lennie kind of adventure on bunk beds with sheets and pillow cases that we had brought with us from Copenhagen. Of course this was Scandinavia, so the rooms and shared bathrooms were really pristine and hygienic and we all fell into a restful, communal sleep that weekend on Bornholm. On our last day on Bornholm, it rained and rained and all the shops worthy of going into were shut and we had a few hours to kill before the next ferry to Sweden, so we went to the cinema instead. The one theatre cinema was so quaint and empty during the mid-afternoon showing of the Miley Cyrus-Demi Moore movie set in Chicago, screened entirely in English that we felt that we owned the cinema!

Bornholm's wild coast on the Baltic Sea

A visit to Denmark is not complete without mentioning their much-loved royal family. The Danish royal family has got to be one of the more popular blue-bloods left these days. Their Queen Margrethe II is very much loved and revered though lately, it’s good ole Princess Aussie Mary who hog their headlines on Hello. It’s Mary in her new trench coat, or it’s Mary- pregnant again with Princess number ???. It’s Mary- shopping at Illums Bolighus for a new cot!

In all seriousness though, the Queen, in her 41st year as Head of the Monarchy is very much loved and her recent ruby jubilee was well celebrated and the people of Denmark love their royals, who seem so well behaved in comparison to the other royals in the region. As a European country still holding on to their kronors, Denmark is one of the countries in the world who give the citizens an incentive for recycling! Every tin can returned with the code still intact fetched 1 kronor to 2 kronors each. To our horror, the only people bothered about recycling were the Asian immigrants, carrying large empty recycling bags around and ensuring that they fill them up to the brim so that they collect 50-100 kronors for their ‘recycling’ effort. The Islands Brygge harbour-front and Nyhavn after a big night are pretty lucrative recycling hauls. It’s a huge shame that the Danes, who are well-noted for living well, are not partaking in this recycling endeavour initiated by their government.

No visit to Copenhagen is ever complete without a stroll through Stroget, their popular long pedestrian mall now chock full of fast food joints and fast food takeaways which brings the tone down a little, which made it look like any international high street in any majot European city. It was in Illums Bolighus, the Danish homeware department store that is appointed by Her Majesty the Queen of Denmark that I was in retail heaven, looking at designer lamps and furnishings and all gorgeous house things! It's hard not to fall in love with Danish design. They are clean cut, very swish and really beautiful. Every piece is a work of art.

It was full moon at the tail end of our week in Denmark and we were on the beach near the serene & tranquil deer park where the former king used to hunt and play, and as you know, kids say the darnest things. My little girl pointed to the full moon, and said to me: “Mummy, you didn’t turn into a were-wolf this month!” Haha! Perhaps it was the easy going atmosphere of being in Denmark, the world’s happiest nation. Perhaps, I was still high on eye drops of all kinds, but mostly, it was such a special week, of family closeness and love and just catching up with my baby sister and my parents. So, I didn’t turn into a werewolf as I sometimes do when I am particularly stressed out.

Full moon in Denmark near the deer park.

We left Copenhagen for Amsterdam, our final European leg with stuffed up bags- the kids had discovered 'Tiger', A more upmarket Danish equivalent of Daiso, a really cute 5 dollar shop if you like, with anything under the sun done in kitshcy, cutesy Scandinavian designs and I discovered their designer homeware, especially the lamps!( that I wasn’t allowed to carry at all), heavy hearts and teary eyes. It’s hard saying good bye to family. And in Copenhagen, it truly felt like home, one away from home. R- August 2012