On Copenhagen, the Danish People, and their Language

Part I of the Copenhagen series

I.

Of course it’s quieter, cleaner, and whiter in Copenhagen than in Paris. I didn’t smell piss once, except when I was the one pissing. Copenhagen is one of those cities like Amsterdam and Bern that makes me feel short, ugly, and poor. Standing up straight when I walk to appear taller kind of city. A city that motivates me, I mean. By the time my weekend in Denmark is over, I’ll have created a notes app aimed towards self improvement, with three different subheadings: books to read (broken down into fiction and non-fiction), work goals to achieve by the new year, and several links to YouTube home workout videos, including a playlist of bio-hacking influencers with sleeper builds doing calisthenics, their bodies poetry in motion, and one deceptively challenging pilates video from a new age Reiki healer who seamlessly oscillates between various poses — only one of which (the rocking baby) I can replicate — in front of Sedona’s red rocks.

But Gwyneth — who I call Gwyn or Gwyn Paltrow or Miss Paltrow — says Copenhagen looks like it had been plucked out of the UK (derogatory). She means the short, squatting, dark-bricked apartments. She means the wide, quiet streets with the narrow sidewalks. The small square gated front yards littered with bicycles and children’s toys. She means the lack of monuments to orient yourself around. The skinny pale hooligans. The Arabs in track suits. The Indians delivering food on scooters. The late-night kebab shops.

Most of the time she is squinting, and yes, there’s the sun; it’s a clear blue August weekend after all, but she isn’t impressed either. As our trip goes on, her posture worsens.

This is the third country she’s visited in her life, if you don’t count England, which why would you, as going from Wales, where she lives and will one day die, to England is a bit like walking from the shower to the bathroom sink with a towel wrapped around your still-wet body. The first country she visited was South Korea, where we had met years ago during a heat wave. Can you imagine? From Menai Bridge, Wales, to Seoul, that’s travel, straight no chaser. We spotted each other across a bar full of Koreans, two buoys bobbing in the ocean. We could have been cousins or fraternal twins, same same but different, two variations of white under the hot Seoul sun, her skin the porcelain underbelly of a seashell, mine the splotched pink of a lobster boiled. If she takes anything away from this trip to Copenhagen, it’s that she didn’t miss much flying from Heathrow to Incheon Airport, and that whatever connection we once shared has eroded with time.

We’re staying in the Nørrebro neighborhood and neither of us knows what that means. Finding an Airbnb in Copenhagen was a game of raising the price threshold on the filter screen, little by little, painfully, until we found somewhere to stay. I had wanted to book a hostel, but Gwyn said absolutely not, which I thought might mean there was a chance at sex, to which Gwyn said absolutely not.

II.

There’s a Germanic quality to the Danes. A rigidity. A stiff upper lip behind their smiles. A constant winter chill bites at their core. Something is stuck inside of them, inserted and twisted. If you were to extract it, they’d unfurl, like pulling a toothpick out of a wrap.

For example, your tickets for the Rosenborg Castle are for 11:30, and you, you crazy tourist, tried getting in at 11:26, but you’re told to wait. There you are standing outside the entrance, wishing you smoked cigarettes, something to pass the time, instead you open and close the main apps on your phone and talk to Gwyn, who is squinting at the crowds, looking for a memory to take home with her.

More than once on this trip, a lady will point her finger at me, scolding sternly. The first time for something I said, the second time for something I did. I’ll make a joke about wanting to kill myself, and a Dane will ask me why I’d say such a thing, which in turn just furthers the motivation to jump in front of a bus, not in a depressed sort of way; there are just some conversations that one can’t get far enough away from.

I’ll learn that amongst the Scandinavians, the Danes are seen as the most fun, and isn’t that all you need to know about this part of the world? Traveling around Europe is like visiting extended family, great uncles, second cousins, once removed cousins, grandparents and great grandparents, those bound by blood, those bound by marriage, some of wildly different temperaments, people who you can’t believe you’re related to, people of questionable politics, that one relative who has a piece of nazi memorabilia buried alongside a chest of photo albums and a box pre-LED lightbulbs in the crawl space, the other one who displays their fascist propaganda proudly on the mantel, but sure enough, go back far enough, and there’s a connection, and sure enough, stick around them long enough, and you’ll see similarities. The patterns you spot depend on your starting point. I came to Copenhagen from Paris, which is a bit like going from the sassy aunt’s home — the one who kills a bottle of wine on a Tuesday and shares a cigarette with you on the terrace — to your more disciplined uncle’s house: up at 7 am, fiber supplements with breakfast, read the newspaper. But if I had gone, for example, from Germany to Denmark, it’d be like visiting two cousins who, while never really around each other except during summer vacation, somehow seem almost identical, mirrored versions of one another, the only difference being on which side they part their hair.

Gwyn Paltrow doesn’t notice much about the Danes or the other Scandinavians (we run into several Swedes, who are just over for the weekend, having taken the ferry from Malmö). She’s stuck in a self-destructive loop regarding an ex, a girl from Korea, feeling at times not enough for her and then too good for her. In Seoul, there is no extended family, not for people like us; it’s all new and unfamiliar. It’s hard, for example, to understand what her lover is doing to her, whether her cruelty is masking a deeper love and sincerity, or whether it’s the other way around.

III.

French is a liquid. The language can flow, pour, gush, or spew. Even when heavy and languorous, it rolls like lava down the side of a mountain. Its viscosity and fluidity are not dependent on fluency. At a bakery near our AirBnB, Gwyn — who had taken French in college — lectures me about turning the e sound into a diphthong when it isn’t a diphthong, but even if I was doing that (I wasn’t), that erroneous diphthong and all my other errors would still be fluid, not a seamless flow, but a sputtering of unfinished sentences dribbling down my chin, staining my shirt like the sporadic spots of a hesitant rain.

And if French is a liquid, then Danish is a solid. I’m sitting at Andersen & Maillard, drinking a thick flat white that made me understand how something could be velvety, and eating a cubed croissant that I had cracked in two with a spoon, pistachio cream oozing on my plate. We had waited in the queue for fifteen minutes, which wasn’t very long, the people in front of us had said. Gwyn is across from me, plucking lightly salted shredded chicken breast out of a plastic bag. Her breakfast, lunch, and dinner. She’s on a controlled diet, designed to reduce inflammation, not for any health reason, but to make her skin as beautiful as it can be. South Korea can really do a number on you if you’re not careful.

Danes are all around us. They’re easy to spot, even if they’re not speaking, especially the women, who are shorter than their Swedish and Norwegian counterparts, a little stockier, with rounded square faces with rosy-red cheeks. The style of the city is bulky, oversized blazers, basic white or black tank tops, and high-waisted, wide-legged jeans. For footwear, it’s either the cream-colored Adidas Sambas or thin thongs, mostly black but sometimes a striking color like lampshade red or Barbie pink. I can’t tell you how the men dress. I forgot to look.

But even if I couldn’t spot them with my eyes, I could still hear them slowly moving chunks of words out of their diaphragms, up their esophagi, into their mouths, where their words then proceed to plop down in front of them, like when I was finishing my coffee and coughed what I thought was a dry cough, but it turned out I was wrong, and I had this greenish-white sputum cupped in my hand and I didn’t know what to do with the phlegmy discharge, this solid, this half-formed word, so I took advantage of Gwyn Paltrow squinting off into the distance, and used the tablecloth to wipe it away.

Read more about Gwyneth Paltrow in part II of the Copenhagen series