Paris to Copenhagen and back

AmundsenI can’t think of very much to say about Paris right now … I feel “done” with Paris, in a sense, though I think this is probably a feeling that comes and goes for a lot of people living abroad. Anyway, it’s because I just spent a long weekend in Copenhagen, and I was very tempted to not get on my flight back to Paris last night. So I guess I’ll write about Copenhagen here.

Three of my friends who are studying in Prague had planned to go to CPH for the weekend and had been trying to convince me to go too. And so, despite the expensive tickets and my plans to go on the NYU trip to Grenoble this past weekend, despite knowing that I should be exploring France, or somewhere new, or at the very least Paris, I went to Denmark instead.

My ex-boyfriend/friend/lover (it’s complicated, sorry) lives in Copenhagen, and so do his friends, many of whom I’m also friends with, and his family, who we stayed with while my friends visited because their apartment has more beds. For me, the weekend was less like travel and more like going home to my family, or my second family, only with a little orange kitten, Amundsen, instead of my crazy father. We drank tea in the warm apartment and played cards and cooked everyone dinner one night: fiskefrikadeller (the fish version of Danish fried meatballs), boiled potatoes, sautéed spinach, and salad. We took my friends walking around the city until it got dark, around 4 in the afternoon (the early sunset can be really disorienting). On Sunday my friends left at three in the morning for a 7:45 AM flight from Malmö, Sweden (a half-hour train ride from CPH and apparently much cheaper to fly to from Prague), and my Dane and I slept until 2 in the afternoon, waking up in time to see the little Christmas tree lighting in the apartment’s back garden, drinking gløgg (mulled wine) and eating æbleskiver (little pancake-donuts) with powdered sugar with his parents’ neighbors as the sun went down.

Admittedly, it’s still frustrating to be in Copenhagen and not speak more than a few Danish sentences—when I don’t get a neighbor’s joke, for instance, and I have to just smile and remember to ask my Dane to explain it to me later. It’s not a problem I’ve really experienced in Paris, since I came knowing French and living here has forced my French to keep improving. Still, this past weekend felt more comfortable, happy in a simpler way, than a lot of my time in Paris. I guess Paris is still my adventure, and it’s nice to have somewhere to go and take a break from all that.

Location