Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
show where the hotels stood in relation to the station. I considered for a moment jotting down some of the
names and addresses, but I didn't altogether trust the board and in any case the addresses were
meaningless unless I could find a map of the city.
Perplexed, I turned to find a Danish bag lady clasping my forearm and addressing me in a cheerful
babble. These people have an uncanny way of knowing when I hit town. They must have a newsletter or
something. We wandered together through the station, I looking distractedly for a map of the city on a wall,
she holding onto my arm and sharing demented confidences with me. I suppose we must have looked an
odd sight. A businessman stared at us over the top of a newspaper as we wandered past. 'Blind date,' I
explained confidentially, but he just kept staring.
I could find no map of the city, so I allowed the lady to accompany me to the front entrance, where I
disengaged her grip and gave her some small coins of various nations. She took them and wandered off
without a backward glance. I watched her go and wondered why crazy people like train and bus stations so
much. It is as if it's their office ('Honey, I'm off to the station to pick through the litter bins and mumble at
strangers. See you at five!'). I can never understand why they don't go to the beach or the Alps or
someplace more agreeable.
I went to half a dozen hotels in the immediate neighbourhood of the station and they were all full. 'Is
there some reason for this?' I asked at one. 'Some convention or national holiday or something?'
'No, it's always like this,' I was assured.
Am I wrong to find this exasperating? Surely it shouldn't be too much, on a continent that thrives on
trade and tourism, to arrange things so that a traveller can arrive in a city in late afternoon and find a room
without having to traipse around for hours like a boat person. I mean here I was, ready to spend freely in
their hotels and restaurants, subsidize their museums and trams, shower them with foreign exchange and
pay their extortionate VAT of twenty- two per cent, all without a quibble, and all I asked in return was a place
to lay my head.
Like most things when you are looking for them, hotels were suddenly thin on the ground in
Copenhagen. I walked the length of the old part of the city without luck and was about to trudge back to the
station to begin again when I came across a hotel by the waterfront called the Sophie Amalienborg. It was
large, clean, modern and frightfully expensive, but they could give me a single room for two nights and I took
it without hesitation. I had a steamy shower and a change of clothes and hit the streets a new man.
Is there anything, apart from a really good chocolate cream pie and receiving a large, unexpected
cheque in the post, to beat finding yourself at large in a foreign city on a fair spring evening, loafing along
unfamiliar streets in the long shadows of a lazy sunset, pausing to gaze in shop windows or at some church
or lovely square or tranquil stretch of quayside, hesitating at street corners to decide whether that cheerful
and homy restaurant you will remember fondly for years is likely to lie down this street or that one? I just love
it. I could spend my life arriving each evening in a new city.
You could certainly do worse than Copenhagen. It is not an especially beautiful city, but it's an endlessly
appealing one. It is home to one and a half million people - a quarter of the Danish population - but it has
the pace and ambience of a university town. Unlike most great cities, it is refreshingly free of any delusions
of self-importance. It has no monuments to an imperial past and little to suggest that it is the capital of a
country that once ruled Scandinavia. Other cities put up statues of generals and potentates. In Copenhagen
they give you a little mermaid. I think that's swell.
I walked along Nyhavn, a three-block-long street with a canal in the middle filled with tall-masted ships
and lined with narrow, step-gabled seventeenth- and eighteenth-century houses, looking for all the world like
a piece of Amsterdam gone astray. The neighbourhood was in fact originally settled by Dutch sailors and
remained the haunt of jolly tars until recent times. Even now it has a vaguely raffish air in parts - a tattoo
parlour and one or two of the sort of dive bars through whose windows you expect to see Popeye and Bluto
trading blows - but these are fading relics. For years, restaurateurs have been dragging Nyhavn almost
forcibly upmarket and most of the places now are yuppie bars and designer restaurants, but very agreeable
places for all that, since the Danes don't seem to be the least bit embarrassed about living well, which is
after all how it should be.
The whole length of Nyhavn was lined with outdoor tables, with young, blond, gorgeous people drinking,
