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Denmark Journal 8/20 Tuesday, Amsterdam: Raining. Woke at 3 pm. Very groggy. Computer will go on line but AOL won't recognize me. Very annoying. Drove around looking at Amsterdam and being entertained by street and store signs. Eat at Eetcafe, where they can't take the credit card but take US $ instead. Back to the Hilton; going to the Rijksmuseumm and the Van Gogh tomorrow and to Schleswig the next day. Must remember what day it is so we don't get stranded in Europe and miss the first Raiders game. Bonnie is terrific, good company, no need to chatter all the time, up for stuff. 8/21 Wednesday, Amsterdam: Slept badly but got up at 9:30 feeling better. Bonnie still sleeping. Breakfast in hotel. Very expensive but nice. Many non-European people staying and working here. Went to Van Gogh, getting there after hours of cruising central Amsterdam, lost constantly. Lots of canals, narrow streets, people. The museum very cool, excellent to see such well known work in the oil, as t'were. Bonnie very happy there I think. Had dinner at a place called Small Talk Eating House (sic) which served enormous portions and cost a fat bundle. Learned to park the car. Found euros. Did OK. Leaving tomorrow early for Schleswig. 8/22 Thursday, somewhere near Bremen: Leave Amsterdam and drive north. We go by a nice dike where flowers grow and stones face inside of dike. Nice boat. Not cattails but reeds with feathery tops. Eat lunch at another Eetcafe where I have a weird sausage dipped in what they call remoulade which is really garlicky mayonnaise. Drive like mad into Germany and get promptly lost. Find wonderful strange hotel in some place not Bremen: the A-1 hotel for business and fun. Excellent dinner in the restaurant: local chanterelles. No luck connecting to internet and phones now down too no time so can't call home. Room very warm; all night the racket from the nearby hochstrasse comes roaring in the window, shriek of tires on pavement; terrific thunderstorms. Finally sleep some. Good breakfast. 8/23 Friday, Schleswig: Drive north through Hamburg to Schleswig. Hedeby and the Danewirke! Small museum, but the site magnificent. Walk all over. Find Danewirke, maybe, overgrown with trees. Take lots of pix of lake, etc. Hedeby noor (1) small. Walk on city wall. More of those pink
8/24 Saturday, Thisted: Drove along the Schlei for a while and found the perfect place for Gunnhild's hall. Took many pix. More adventures in quasi Deutsch net us some bread that will grow hair on our chests and other goodies. Drove east toward Husum; found Hollandstadt, very pleasant countryside: very short distance between Hedeby and Hollandstadt. Go north into Denmark. Mostly flat. More of those roses. People drive entirely differently than the Germans. Stop to visit wc and walk in woods with many feathers, maybe beech trees? Straight silver-gray trunks. Woman with nice little poodle. Lunch in roadside café: large sausage and coke I cannot finish. Denmark looks prosperous and quiet. Light strong and slanting. Not cold, very windy. Come to Limfjord and find nice hotel right on water and now going for walk. Limfjord beautiful. Thisted small industrial town: Macdonald's, battery factory. Some charming old houses. Bonnie and I sit on very rocky beach conjecturing on provenance of ceramic-like rock and many bricks. Sea snails on rocks and also hairy seaweed dried to a thick brown hide above the tide line. Water restless. Gulls and cormorants. Very few boats. Little white butterflies. People fishing, watching from shore. Odd slanting light, sunset. Steep-roofed houses. Roses with huge hips. Plantain; viny bush with tiny pink flowers, camomile. Lots of pix. My daughter is a genius. She said I should write that. I think she is homesick but trying not to show it. When we first crossed over the Limfjord there was a headland on the north side. Going on tomorrow to Skagen.
Go for walk along a busy city street; after a few yards find a stair down into a lane and suddenly we're in the country. Cows grazing, a golf course, a creek, thick stands of oak and (maybe beech?) trees. Walk about a mile. Very beautiful, B id's several plants-a pink flower I recognize, that little viny thing with the small lumpy green-yellow flowers that grows in our driveway she calls pineapple plant. Apple tree. Apples floating in the creek. I practice saying hello to passers-by. When I say "Good evening," I get startled shy looks; when I say "Hi" (Danish hej) I get smiles and nods. A wave to a man sitting by the golf bane (7) who has overheard us speaking English elicits a vague return wave. A woman pruning roses smiles at hi. Coming back to hotel room we see a special on the teardown of the World Trade Center and the first 2 and a half acts of Hamlet, Kenneth Branaugh, with subtitles in Danish. Quite a good version although the inferior TV sound system sometimes makes mush of Shakespeare. Funny to hear "there's something rotten in the state of Denmark" in Denmark. Dream: I am at the Safeway in Eureka when suddenly it closes down. Like permanently. All people mill around outside. I can't find the car, the yellow VW, which is not where I parked it. While I am looking someone comes up to me with my pocket watch, claiming I had left it somewhere (at someone's house). It looks gold and beautiful. Also I run into a woman sad because her husband has left her. He is only giving her $300 child support and I counsel her she should get $1500. Then looking for the car again I see a crowd of people coming, some looking like Iraqis or Arabs of some kind and others like Jacobean Goths. They form a tight mass and start demonstrating. I find a cop, who is very snotty and oppressive, and I go up into his face and tell him he has an attitude and that I am his boss because I pay taxes and he had better damn well get straight with me, and he does, and tells me there's been a terrorist act against the Safeway which is why it's closing (for good). He tells me also the car has likely been towed. I have no money (and now, I notice, no shoes on) and go around looking for the tow-yard. I find another cop, a woman, who is so small I have to hunker down to talk to her. She is kind and consoling. Then the Safeway is gone, the cop gone, the mob, and I am stringing a thick rope between the poles of a line of standing poles on a bright green lawn, and after me come children, who are swinging on the line. I realize I am out of rope, with poles to go, but it doesn't matter. End of dream. 8/27 Tuesday, Kiel: Tremendous thunderstorms all night. When we wake up it's pouring. Leave Bramdrupdam early and drive to Odense, on Fyn (Funen), nearest of the islands. Rain lets up on the way. See Hans Christian Andersen's house, tiny, museum, he looks like George Eliot a little. Walk around Odense looking for the King's Garden and a place to eat. King's Garden is past its best but a terrific tree, all bent and strange. Japanese anemones. Lots of middle-eastern people in Odense and the first 5 or 6 places we see to eat are really bars full of men drinking at noon. Drive by accident (B screaming "No!") into small plaza from which the only egress is over the sidewalk and a curb. Finally pull into very fancy hotel; full up. Americans there ahead of us look discouraged thereby. We decide to leave Odense but have lunch first in the hotel: B a club, an enormous pile of meat, pickles, lettuce etc. which she eats open face, me a platter containing liverwurst (which I also had for breakfast) and salmon loaf, brie, chicken, some pickled fruit, other garnishes, which I eat much of on bread with good Danish butter. Drive south through terrific heavy rain to Kiel, where we go to the Kunsthalle and see lots of strange art, find Hotel Rabe and get a nice enough room for 92 euros. Rain stops before we reach Kiel, which is a completely modern city, brick houses and tile roofs but all new since 1945. I realize what a huge break 1945 is for these people, even more than for us. We go out for dinner at a place called der Weinerwald which is, as B says, the German Denny's. A piece of fish and some nice lovely little white potatoes for me. We talk German to the waiter and give him a nice tip and he smiles. We are getting better at prattling German now that we're almost ready to go home. 8/28 Wednesday, Wismar: We leave Kiel early and drive on toward Lubeck. East Germany clearly trying to catch up. Road building everywhere. Many bottlenecks. Lubeck full of tourists. Cobblestone streets. A lot of building. Nice markplatz and doms. (8) I get a t-shirt, speaking German; the woman asks me if I'm American; when I say yes, she says, but you learned your German here, didn't you. I tell her I was at the Goethe institute. We walk around some and then drive on toward Wismar. Beautiful countryside. Get off course but come to a charming place on 207 S called der Seeblick where we sit on a terrace overlooking a lake (Ratzenberger see) with sail boats, sweeps of meadow and stands of trees, a nice breeze, utterly charming. I order a holsteiner specialty, sauerfleisch, and get cold pickled pork, with roasted potatoes which are fine.
Walk around Wismar. Very large impressive altstadt with lots of fine 17th century and earlier buildings. Lovely details on buildings, window scrolls and those high ornate fronts as in Amsterdam etc. Massive brick cathedral. Huge marktplatz. Lots of people. Everywhere building and ripping down. Walk and walk and walk, looking for food store so we can buy fruit and bread and don't have to eat another heavy Deutscher meal. Many eis (10) shops. People less formal, nicer, fatter than West Germans. Just as we give up, having walked miles and found no markets, and are (I believe) impossibly lost, I look in a door and see racks of fruit. Buy wasa bread, other bread, beet juice, cheese. Fruit not organic so B won't buy it. Then we walk back, not as we came but trying to cut across town, and suddenly are back at the hotel, only a few blocks away from market. 8/29 Thursday, Moddergat: Leave Wismar early after paying. Clerk tries to give me too much change back but in broken German and English we get it straightened out. I am beginning to have trouble speaking even English. Drive south to Schwerin to miss bottleneck by Lubeck and then west through Germany to Netherlands. Lunch the rest of yesterday's dinner. At Groeningen turn north and drive through Friesland. Very flat, fields, small villages; after some considerable way we go over a bridge and into more flat fields. Dikes. Sea very close. On inland sea by bridge boats with gaff rigs. Cattle, sheep. Rushes of the usual sort. In tiny village perhaps called Modderdam we find a pension and get a dear little room under the eaves with a skylight and 2 beds, toilet and shower in hall, for 42 euros. Walk around, all the people we see greet us, including small children. Walk out on flat polder (11) land, past fields of cabbage and cauliflower and aardappels, (12) dike full of floating green scum. The rushes make a seething sound in the wind. Blue flowers. Wool bits blown against side of the road. Very quiet. People on bikes. Smell of ocean and creosoted fence boards. B very homesick and trying not to show it, but tomorrow is Amsterdam and Saturday we go home. Dinner in gasthaus excellent. Long talk with B about her childhood, aspirations, fears, etc. Gasthausmeister comes out in tank top and lectures us on the history of new Amsterdam. We walk around once more, B now in a better mood, we see cabbages and brussel sprouts, sandy soil. Sheep. Climb to top of dike very disappointing as nothing but more polders. Fine village (twin villages, Paesens and Mottergat, once separated by a canal) with prosperous looking homes. Back to gasthaus for the night. 8/30 Friday, Amsterdam: Dear little room is full of mosquitoes. Nonetheless we sleep well. Wake for early breakfast: breads, multiple processed meats, the usual. When the guy brings the coffee he also brings a hard-cooked egg for each of us. I am so bemused at this that I pour the coffee into the cream pitcher, evoking much mirth from B. We spend the rest of breakfast consuming the evidence. Much fascinating conversation with B: changing my mind (or perhaps growing it) about lots of things. Almost a relief to change mind which must have been yearning for new values. Drive back to Amsterdam with no trouble, trying to spend euros. The euros are mating and multiplying in my pocket. By the time we reach Amsterdam they are spilling out of my jeans. We navigate expertly through Amsterdam to the Rijksmuseum and there see fabulous paintings, as usual buried in dreck, but still, Vermeers, Rembrandts, fat kitchens. Baroque dollhouses, furniture, Meissen, snuffboxes, bad medieval and renaissance art. We buy lunch, I spend euros in the shop, throw handfuls of coins at lovely Turkomani musicians playing in egress (man a 2-stringed instrument of great sensitivity, man wearing Mongol type hat, girl with zither, very nice), nonetheless, enough euros remain to pay for criminally expensive hotel room at airport, which we reach smoothly as if we have lived here all our lives. Successfully upgrade to first class on Atlanta/Oakland flight. Call home. All seems well. Can't wait to get there. Dinner in hotel: buffet with shrimp with heads on (disappointing flavor, but they look terrific) and lamb stew. Room shakes like a ship when we walk in. Get up at 8 am to get ready to go home. (1) noor = lake (2) a howe is a barrow, a large mound of earth over a sacred site or a burial (3) Harald Bluetooth was King of Denmark from c. 930 to c 980, brought the whole kingdom under his control, and christianized it by force. His (putative; Harald never recognized him) son Sweyn Forkbeard became King of Denmark, Norway and England. (4) Thyra was Harald's mother,
a Saxon princess (daughter of Aethelred, not the bad one, the
other (5) Gorm the Old was Bluetooth's farther. Nothing much is known about him, not even why he's called Gorm the Old, as he must have been young for a while anyway. (6) The Danewirke was an enormous earthworks that ran from the end of the Schlei, in the east, to Hollandstadt (Hollingstedt) on the Treen, in the west, where in olden times the swamps and fens were impassable. The Danewirke was first built in Charlemagne's time and later rebuilt by Harald Bluetooth (legend has it his mother Thyra built the first, but there is clearly a campaign on here to make Thyra the big hero of everything, probably goes back a good way into the past; she's also alleged to have save Christians from Gorm (her king husband's) evil pagan designs.) It ended at the city wall of Hedeby in the east. There were several battles at the Danewirke between Danes and Germans, Danes and slaves, etc. (7) golf bane = golf course (8) dom = cathedral The classic north German cathedral is of red brick (9) fruhstuck = breakfast (10) eis = ice cream, sherbet, etc. (11) polder = flat land recovered from the sea behind the dikes (12) aardappels = potatoes |