Sunday

 

Friday morning Victor and I caught the train over to Copenhagen.  Our mission was to meet Lina at one of the suburb train stations outside the city center.  Siwert showed us the way to Malmo south station, where we parked the car and bought our tickets.  Five minutes later we were traveling over the bridge connecting the two countries.  The train tracks are actually under the four-lane highway.   We of course were late meeting up with Lina and Sigrid, the mother, who was in town for a funeral.  Our train was delayed when they discovered some non-paying passenger on board and had to call the police to have him removed.  They told us the ordeal put them off schedule, so they would only run the train to the main station.  Victor and I looked for the next train to continue on and went to the indicated platform.  Three minutes before the train was to arrive, they switched track numbers on us.  We were wondering why the platform seemed rather empty; naturally we missed the connection and had to find another train twenty minutes later.

We finally met up with Lina and thanked them for waiting, nothing like being late for a funeral!

The temperature was climbing up to close to 30 degrees, with the humidity not far behind.  So we decided to try for a boat tour of the city; at least there we would be close to the water where it’s cooler.  We grabbed a bus and rode it a few stops down to Nyhamn, their word for New Harbor.  It was anything but new; in fact one of their oldest houses was located there, along with Hans Christen Andersons house.  The small harbor was filled with old wooden boats, something I just love to paint.  So I have a feeling some painting will coming out from this trip. 

We bought our tickets and were the first to board.  Vctor and Lina headed to the back of the boat to get away from the crowds.  At least there we could take pictures off the back of the boat without other bodies in the way.  I’m glad we did this, being so close to the water was quite comfortable and we enjoyed an hour-long tour as they winded through some of the canals of Copenhagen.  Some of the areas looked quite similar to Amsterdam, where I am writing this now.

We finished the boat trip and did lunch in the square by the harbor.  There was a long walk back to the main train station we had to do, so we decided to start heading in that direction up the main shopping street.  It was a pedestrian only street filled with street merchants and artists the whole way up.  Before we knew it we were back at the main station, across from Tivoli, one of Europe’s first theme parks.

Yesterday was the long nine-hour drive back up to Osthammar and today I caught the flight down to Amsterdam.  Its game night tonight and the town is one giant party, all expecting Holland to win in the World Cup.  I do hope they win, as they have never done this before, but after seeing Spain play……I don’t know!

 

Richard Boyer