Wandering in Copenhagen

While Wally was off with the stamp collectors seeing the international numismatic exhibition, I spent several days in Copenhagen wandering about on my own. That’s the way I prefer to go sightseeing, as long as I can meet someone at dinnertime to share my adventures. We were in the company of other stamp collectors, older men about as exciting as a convention of accountants. When we were with them, Wally willingly paid for a good meal. When it was just the two of us, he took me to cheap places to eat, but the talk was good. Wally was a good conversationalist.

Copenhagen has a delightful “walking street” in the oldest part of the city, a narrow, cobble-stoned street, closed to cars, and lined with old houses converted into pretty little shops. I am not one of those women who buys lots of stuff. Instead, I walked through the old city looking for places associated with famous men.

As soon as I knew we were going to Denmark, I went to the Woodridge library and asked for biographies of Hans Christian Andersen, Soren Kierkegaard, and Niels Bohr. They were the only famous Danes I’d heard about. Hans Christian Andersen, author of fairy tales. Soren Kierkegaard, the philosopher. Niels Bohr, the most important physicist of the 20th Century.

Woodridge, Illinois, is a small town with a small library, but the friendly librarian managed to get biographies of all three men through interlibrary loans. (To check the accuracy of my memory, this week I looked up the three on Wikipedia. More about them later.)

Another thing I did in preparing for the trip was buy a set of records to learn to speak Danish. The Swedes say Danish is not a language but a throat disease. I never did get the pronunciation right. Wally was too busy to listen to the records. Although his parents were from Denmark, he grew up speaking only English. When we got to Copenhagen, he was embarrassed to realize he could not even say his own surname correctly.

Some Danish words are like English shorthand: Mor for mother, Far for father, tak for thanks.

My mother was a McDonald and proud of her Scot ancestry. The people of Scotland always maintain that they are distinct from the English. I guess they are right. Some Danish words are similar to words used by the Scots which have disappeared from standard English: kirk for church, bairn for baby. Maybe those Jutes who came from Jutland, along with the Angles and the Saxons, left their mark on Scotland. Or was it the Vikings?

For all of us, ancestry is an accident of birth. I keep repeating: No one can choose their ancestors. Also, if we could untangle our family trees, most of us would be surprised by the variety of branches we would find grafted onto the old trunk. Because I was blonde, Wally’s mother believed my ancestors were Scandinavians. As far as I know, they were all British.

While most Scandinavians are blonde, Wally had dark brown hair. We wondered, was there Jewish ancestry somewhere? His grandfather was a pawn broker and changed his name to Gaarsoe because there were too many other Sorensens in business in Denmark. Maybe there were other changes in the past.

How many of us really know where we came from?