Denmark Journal

Notes from the background trip for forthcoming novel

Web Site: www.thefiredrake.com

Denmark Journal 2002

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 Danewirke roses with the large rose hips. A beautiful day, also, sunny and warm. Scotch highland cows and teeny little sheep. Dense oaky woods. Wonderful examples of fabric and jewelry recovered from site. Ate lunch at a café run by a man who looked exactly like Ed Munn. Everybody here very nice. Schleswig itself small and charming, easy to get around in, right on the Schlei, sailboats, riverside cafes etc. We do our laundry! And find an internet café and read through tons of email, almost all spam. Ring Hotel quite nice. Too hot; walls dotted with smashed corpses of mosquitoes. Best night's sleep since we've been in Europe.

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.

8/25 Sunday, Skagen: Still having trouble getting to sleep but once I do I sleep well and dream a lot. Drive to Skagen across rolling meadowland, some woods. Small towns dot the road. Get kroner because the clever Danes declined to join in the Euro. Everything expensive. Reach Skagen in jig time and have lunch at a place with several other brands of tourist: fish and chips for me (in faux English newspaper wrapper) and coke. Walk on beach. Deep sand studded with small rocks. Strips of seaweed like ribbons. Trash on beach and beside road. Several huge mounts for guns on the beach, plus a lookout, maybe a semaphore. Lighthouse in distance. Many jellyfish on the beach, many Danes sunbathing. Danes uniformly large, blonde, handsome, uniformly kind if a little reserved. Very casual in dress. Many dogs. Walk in a kind of mall with shops on either side, see amber which I will try to buy tomorrow for the kids. Stay in Strandly Hotel right across the road from a factory which is on the beach. Many ships sailing up into the strait. From the lookout I can see a strip of white water running straight out into the sea which must be the place where the Skaggeret and the Kattegut run together. Water cold but not impossible, rolling surf on Baltic side. We drive around trying to reach the tip of the land and come to the north sea side and the surf much smaller. Stands of sea oats. Swampy. Very windy. More of those roses. Homes small but tidy, nice gardens. Bonnie funny and wise. A good day.

a howe at Jelling

8/26 Monday, Bramdrupdam: Excellent night's sleep. Walk around Skagen a while before B wakes; small neat homes, gardens, lawns. Breakfast and then we go shopping. Buy amber, t-shirt, wasa bread and water. Drive south toward Jelling. Nice day, a little overcast. From Vejle go inland over rising ground; find Jelling easily enough but drive right past howes (2) and rune stones before we find them. In the center of town. Howes both impressive in size, with white church in between. Small museum. Much info. Originally this was a huge stone ship formation, with the axis aiming N/S. Site highest point in area. Harald (3) built the north howe over another smaller howe. The Jelling stones were colored: russet on the runes, blue and yellow elsewhere. A lot of stuff about Thyra, (4) all spurious. Thyra's stone dug up later and put where Gorm's (5) stone is (smaller, less impressive). Looks like effort to make Christianization of Denmark look less violent and forced. Allegedly built Danewirk. (6) Good aerial view of Hedeby shows lakes, shape of city wall. In Jelling complex Gorm's stone set on the axis of the stone ship. Cross side faces south. Runes like the writing in a book, in lines, read top to bottom, east to west. Harald also built a wooden causeway across the Vejle valley, very steep-sided little valley probably swampy and narrow river down the middle. Hard to cross before Bluetooth put the causeway in. Drove huge balks of wood down into the muck to anchor it but didn't last long. No sign of the sacrificial altars. No mention of them either as you would expect with all this bringing the light of Christ to the poor heathen thing. Great aerial

Gorm's Stone, at Jelling note that runes go up & down

photograph of Hedeby showing the little lake and the bigger lake beyond. Lunch at local café advertising Viking specialties and then the menu is quiche and potato salad. But good. German tourists come in after us and sit nearby. Woman in white headress like Arabic veil walks down street (but high heels). Find hotel near Kolding. Desperate to spend kroner before I leave Denmark. B definitely homesick but sleeping better and in good spirits. Excellent company. Winding down here: tomorrow Kiel. Will try to find more for B to see.

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.

Wismar

B eats putenbrust with reis, whatever puten is, we can't figure out, but it's good. Then going back we hit major traffic; freeway not yet built (no existing cross-border roads so rather like trying to rejoin Siamese twins), lots of twist and turn and trucks and cars bumper to bumper for miles. Woods and meadows and fields of corn and cut stubble. Rolling countryside. Views of lakes. Find Wismar and get a nice room for 82 euros with we hope fruhstuck, (9) the German having abandoned me at the last moment. Tomorrow starting back to Amsterdam.

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 one), a Christian, who allegedly would not go to bed with (the museum says something like "share the nuptial couch," so sweet) Gorm until he released some Christians he was about to sacrifice or something. This seems to me all nostalgic redressing of the christianizing of Denmark which was from the top and by force.

(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

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