Copenhagen Guest Blog: Rick Combs (AKA Hillary’s Dad)
The redeye from Washington Dulles took us through Paris, where Claire and I sat in a nearly deserted section of De Gaulle Airport eating French pastries and drinking coffee and watching the sun rise as we awaited our flight to meet Hillary in Copenhagen. Never having been north or east of Switzerland, I was excited to see Denmark and the other locations on our itinerary. The last leg of our flight was very comfortable. The pilot circled to approach from the sea, and we looked down on the huge wind turbines that sit out in the bay near the city. After navigating the sprawling Copenhagen airport, we made our way to the train station. Copenhagen has great public transportation, and is probably the most bicycle-friendly place I’ve seen. Trains and busses offer designated areas for bicycles, so locals carry their bikes aboard. The railway system is large and complex enough to be a little intimidating to non-natives, but with a little help we soon made our way to downtown Copenhagen.
Our first night in Copenhagen was the perfect start to our European visit. Hillary’s host family, Verner and Anne Christmann, and their ten-year-old son Anders, had us over for dinner. They are wonderful hosts, and made us feel very comfortable right away. I am not a wine snob, but I aspire to be one. Verner uncorked two excellent wines—one in particular really impressed me. Dinner was outstanding as well. Later we had dessert and coffee. It was great fun to meet the Christmanns, and to see where Hillary was living. They’re very close to the shore, and as we had approached their home I had a strange feeling of déjà vu. Out of curiosity I had Google-Earthed their residence and had been able to look around the main roads and intersections nearby, and was able to get within a couple of blocks of their home, so the neighborhood seemed familiar. They live a few blocks from a train station in suburban Copenhagen; after dinner we walked the short distance to the station and caught a train that took us within a short walk of our downtown hotel.
Copenhagen is a great city—large enough to offer all the advantages of a big city, but small enough that it can be navigated with relative ease. It’s a modern city with Old World charm, full of tiny restaurants and cozy cafes contrasting with the huge public squares, block-long government buildings, and palaces. Copenhagen is on the shore, but instead of the bustle of an industrial port city, the marinas are filled with sailboats and the canal tours carry visitors past condos and museums and galleries.
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| Copenhagen Canal |
Verner and Anne took us up the coast by car one day to visit Elsinore Castle, the inspiration for the setting of Hamlet. It was the kind of outing we enjoy, since it gave us the opportunity to see the local countryside. The shore-side homes and shops and the rocky coastline reminded me a little of parts of New England. The castle was impressive---bigger than anything I’d have imagined, and complete with the requisite dungeon below ground. By chance, Hillary ran into several of her classmates as we left the castle.
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| At Elsinore Castle |
Eventually Hillary had to return to classes and studies, and Claire and I flew off to Vienna for a few days. We stayed in the type of place Frommer’s recommends--a small but very comfortable hotel near the museum district, frequented by Europeans. The weather was rainy, but that just made Vienna’s restaurants and cafes more welcoming. We found navigating a bit of a challenge. The street and place names in Romance languages are a little easier for speakers of English to distinguish and recall than is the case in German. We were lost half the time. We didn’t care. Vienna is another beautiful city, and we enjoyed the museums as well as the cafes. One night we went to dinner followed by a symphony of Mozart music. The food wasn’t great, but the wine was drinkable and the company was interesting. We sat with a retired Australian couple on a three-month tour of Europe, an Asian mother-and-daughter (their limited English made it impossible to determine their exact origin), and an American forensic psychiatrist and his wife. After a long career in forensics, the psychiatrist thought Hillary was making an excellent choice to concentrate on positive psychology.
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| Lost in Vienna |
Back to Copenhagen for a few days, then off with Hillary to Berlin. Europeans say Berlin is emerging as the new unofficial capital of Europe, displacing Paris. That is hard for me to imagine. I enjoyed Berlin mostly because of the history. We visited the Checkpoint Charlie Museum and drove by the remains of the Berlin Wall. So much of Berlin was destroyed by Allied bombing in WWII that most of the city is very modern. As an American visitor, I found that a little disappointing. At times I felt that if it weren’t for the signs in German everywhere, I could have been looking at a city in the U.S. No need for an American to travel to Europe to see a city that looks very American. We did have a great time, though. Our hotel was first class, with a beautiful view overlooking suburban Berlin and the Danube Canal. The café in the hotel boasted that it had recently been presented with the “Ernest Hemingway Best Bar in the World” award. They did know how to mix a martini, a skill perfected (as far as I have yet been able to determine), only by my late Father-in-Law Raoul and myself. Hillary asked for a wine, and since we were after all in Germany I suggested a Riesling. I am not a huge fan of Rieslings, but this one was pretty good. She had several others over the course of a few days, and all were good, prompting me to wonder if they ship only the bad ones to the U.S. and keep the good ones in Germany. Food is not, generally speaking, a reason to go to Germany. Still, Berlin is a very cosmopolitan city and good food can be found, if you look for it. Or if you ask the concierge at a good hotel where it can be found, which is what I did. We hopped in a cab and raced off to our last dinner in Germany, and it was fantastic. The Maître d recommended a wonderful, juicy cabernet.
Back in Copenhagen, we shopped. Copenhagen claims the world’s longest pedestrian-only street, and it appears to be lined with clothing and jewelry boutiques of the kind frequented by people like my wife and two daughters. That was OK; while they ducked into every other shop on the street, I stayed outside and people watched. Scandinavia, as I had long suspected, turned out to be a pretty good place for people watching.
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| Coffee and (what else) Danish |
For our last night in Copenhagen, Verner and Anne took us out to dinner. It was actually our intention to take them out to dinner, but they were very insistent on picking up the check. We can only hope they will someday give us an opportunity to return their hospitality. It was another great dinner. I had red deer, shaved thin like roast beef, served rare in what tasted to me like a plum sauce, with a wine that complemented it perfectly. I have no idea what everyone else had, but they assured me it was excellent. (Did this turn into a food blog? That wasn’t my plan.)
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| Dinner in Copenhagen |
We have been home for several weeks now. Recently while skyping with Hillary, I asked her if she was looking forward to getting back to her familiar haunts in Bloomington. Turns out not. Somehow Indiana appears to have lost its luster. She is already thinking about how she is going to get back to Europe. That is something we had been thinking about for a long time, and we’re very glad Hillary gave us the excuse to make it happen.
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