Denmarkable

Wrote this awhile ago, it's unedited too.

On the train to Stockholm. The Swedish train is amazing. For example: It has Internet on board! I’m not going to use it because I don’t need it right now and it costs money, but wow.

Our man in Copenhagen, Mr. Lewis Lebolt, my second-cousin, was the host with most. He took us on tours of the city, and to a movie (“I’m not There” – another Bob Dylan biopic) and a fine dining experience. We could not have been treated any better.

Lewis was also as great of company as you’d expect from someone who works nights doling drugs to inpatients at a psychiatric ward. Really good stories.

We saw the sights as well, including a quality art museum, Tivoli gardens, a tower and some harbors. And we caught up with our mutually favorite professor from Carleton, Professor Keiser, and his family, the Keiser’s.

Their daughter Alanna, who was seven when we used to babysit her, is now ten. Her precocity is astounding, almost creepy, like the discomfort you get watching a movie like Baby Geniuses, where babies wear professor glasses and talk like adults. When asked how she likes Copenhagen, her reply was accompanied by gestures, like she was a debate team champion: “Well, at Sibley [school back in Northfield], I felt we learned more, and it is quite an adjustment to go to such a different school here. But it’s the differences that make my experiences interesting.”

What can I say about Copenhagen? There are a lot of things to say, but it’s not coming to me. We’re overtired, since the only train available left at 6:23 this morning. But there are things that made this turn in our trip unique, as with most our other turns. It seems nearly every 1-5 day stint diverges from the prior one—from all the previous stopovers.

One thing we’ve noticed is that we are completely, thoroughly used to traveling. It seems I could do this the rest of my life, train around everywhere, showering less, sleeping less, and leaving freshly finished books in no name train towns like the dot we just left midway up the west coast of Sweden. It’s not that I, or we, want to do this much longer. In fact, we don’t. But we could, and I for one never imagined getting used to regular relocation.

What’s the gain of this, aside from the trite but true visceral understanding of how big and old the world is, and especially Europe? It seems the ability to be fully transplantable is, in itself, something. I imagine that living like this forever, not ever belonging to any place or having any place belong to you, leads to disassociation with possession in general. What you spend money on is transient: train tickets, museum tickets, food. What you can see or talk to, what moves around you and outside of your control, is, inevitably, what’s of interest and possible meaning.

There’s things I’m not used to, like reconnecting with family members I don’t know that well at the same time as foreign places spin around our heads. They kind of blend into a novelty factor, like the Duomo in Florence, the interesting Carleton Thanksgiving outside Rome, a dancing woman in a glass cube in Prague and a train with Internet. People live in Paris. People live in Amsterdam. People live in Brugge and Rome and Naples and Chambery and Vienna, and all these people are different and the same. People live in Copenhagen, and Lewis Lebolt, my dad’s cousin and friend, and my second-cousin and now friend, is one of them. But just like all the people and places above, it’s not like I’ll be back in Copenhagen anytime soon. And it’s not like these places and people are novelty factor to themselves, it's just our moving vantage point. Am I making any sense?

It’s comfortable knowing that things are coming to a close. For example, I could ditch our train passes here if I wanted. Though they don’t expire until 12/27, we’re not going to go by rail any time before then. It’s all family from here on out, except for four days in Paris. We will always have Paris (Lewis, Annalise and I watched Casablanca in Copenhagen.)

Anyway, things are going great and we’re in good hands. Marshall’s meeting us at the train station in Stockholm. I am apprehensive about the snow I see, since I’m still sporting my unzipped jacket.

Here are some pictures.