Day 26-27: Copenhagen, Denmark and Helsingborg, Sweden
from Photographs of Europe, May-June 2002 by Tim Darling
(Click on the photos..)
Wednesday, June 12 - Copenhagen, Denmark
At 7AM I got on a train from Munich to Hamburg. It was the slickest train I'd ever seen.
Glass doors swooshed as you approached them, opening into rows of gray executive
leather seats. Some people had TV screens (but not me).
On the train, I started reading Ernest Hemingway's Green Hills of Africa which I had
bought in a bookstore in Prague. The book was his travel stories of a month long trip to Africa.
There was a wooden castle in the style of a children's tree fort in the middle of the
Hamburg seaport as we approached the station. I had a few minutes at the Hamburg
station before my 4 hour train to Copenhagen so I stood outside for a while (in the rain
again). The station was full of loudspeaker announcements and I noticed that there were
benefits to not speaking the language because my brain didn't pay any attention to them
at all, even subconsciously, which would have been impossible had they been in English.
It struck me how much talent there is lying around the world and what strange places you
find it in. On the wall of my train to Copenhagen, there was a picture of a shaggy cartoon
cat which looked very unhappy with the fact that its tail was being used as a pipe
cleaner. The pipe was shaped like Magritte's famous pipe- I expected to see 'ce n'est pas
une pipe ou un chat' written underneath it. I loved the picture and I wanted to
photograph it but I realized that would be a joyless and trivial theft. So I drew it in my
journal. Photography is such a cheap excuse for art. Photographs are stolen.
Photographs are the simple click of a shutter. Not all photographs, but most of them. It's
hard to give the world something back for all its beauty with photography- what you give
back was already there and already appreciated.
I like how Susan Sontag said that photography give us an "unearned" sense of understanding things.
Halfway to Copenhagen, in the middle of miles of bright green fields, a lone Ferris wheel
stood hazily back on the horizon. Tall white metal three-bladed windmills turned every
time I looked up, stealing the breeze from neighboring trees.
Three hours south of Copenhagen, the train went onto a ferry for an hour long crossing.
It's strange to be on a train and look outside the window to find you're sitting in a ship's
hull next to a row of trucks. But the good thing is that you can get off the train and stand
on the deck during the crossing.
I met Phil, a good friend of mine since I started college, at the train station in
Copenhagen (Køpenhavn / 'Koob-en-how-en' to the Danes). We shared a house together
before he moved to Copenhagen for grad school about a year ago. We took the bus and
above ground trains to Rui ('Ray'), his girlfriend's, dorm. She was cooking for her friend's
birthday in the shared kitchen which was soon filled with a crowd.
One of her friends, Ludwig, who was from the Faroe Islands (which are a part of
Denmark), had borrowed a guitar from a friend for a few minutes to play Happy
Birthday. He let me play it for a little while after I explained how long I'd been away and
missed playing mine.
Later, from Rui's room, I called Lina and said I was in Copenhagen. We decided to meet
the next morning- she lives a 30 minute train ride from Helsingborg, Sweden which I said
I would meet her at (it was a 45 minute train and 15 minute ferry ride for me).
Thursday, June 13 - Helsingborg, Sweden
The Copenhagen metro/train/bus system is so good that I used my bus pass to get to the
ferry which I took to Sweden. The train was crowded with young kids on a school trip.
The ferry was ridiculously short- the distance was swimmable. And then I was in
Sweden for the first time, the country I've always assumed that, at least somewhere along
the line, my ancestors came from.
I met Lina at the train station as she got off her train. We walked into Helsingborg.
There was a bookstore with records on the top floor. I found an old copy of the Alan
Parson's Project I Robot (the one whose cover I had discovered had been shot at Charles
de Gaulle airport shortly before meeting her for the first time in Paris). I went to buy it
for her- it's a good album- but the owner of the store said it was 20 Kronor and he didn't
have change for my 100 Kr ($10) bill.
So we had lunch at a café up the street, partly to get change. We sat outside and it rained,
but the Swedish don't let the rain change their plans. We held up umbrellas until
someone from the store came out with a table umbrella for us. We went back to the store
and I gave the man 20 Kr. He said, no, he'd sell it to me for 10 Kr but he didn't have
change for 20 Kr! OK, so I dug around for 10 Kr in change.
Day 28-29: Perstorp, Copenhagen, and Back
Your Comments
I think that was a great couple paragraphs about europe. the
pictures were cool to!
-- , Oct 11, 2002
I don't know you but your vacation seems like it was absolutely
beautiful and the pictures are just goergous! It makes me wanna
go to Europe again.
-- , Nov 10, 2002
Thanks for taking me there again... back to work now...
-- Shannon, Nov 11, 2002
Add a comment
All text and pictures copyright © 2002 Tim Darling.
