Sweden
The far more prominent cousin of Denmark, renown for Ikea and also the Nobel Prizes, Sweden seemed a far sterner and sober place, where, behind the modern exterior of Stockholm one had the feeling that important and purposeful things were being accomplished. Like any heavily commercialised city Stockholm appeared more professional and distant, a no-nonsense sort of place with no room for frivolity. Even the weather seemed to be conspiring to achieve such a goal, with sunny skies all day in order for us to carry out some serious sightseeing.
Hence, everything we did seemed a lot less exciting, a lot greyer even though the incandescent Swedish sun that dazzled my eyes made everything a lot more vivid and colourful, something like what happens when you spray an apple with nail varnish to make it shiner. Particularly intriguing was the morass of Swedish flags that fluttered it seemed from every rooftop, door, window or rubbish chute, as though we were in the wake of some Swedish September 11th. But because flags make everything so much nobler, including back alley comic porn shops or abortion clinics, I could not resist taking pointless photos of flags in a variety of settings, as though they were some curious blue creature with yellow stripes. Many a photo was ruined by this obstinate beast refusing to distend its full glory and instead hang limply in a heap which was all very disappointing.
This could only be a momentary distraction from the serious sightseeing that we were doing, visiting museums of obviously great credence and substance like of 300 year old sunken vessels, historical Swedish culture, Nobel Prizes, scientific achievement and the cosmos, weighing as heavily on me as the leaden muesli at breakfast. Having absorbed what must have been a significant portion of the bedrock of Swedish society at large I felt this immense burden composed of the innumerable museum display labels that I had read all day, having my head shrouded by a miasma of hefty political and philosophical notions spiralling into hundreds more profound questions, which is hardly part of a wholesome, gentle holiday.
Such a tangle, like all others, could only be straightened out by having a delicious dinner somewhere. There was no shortage of what we had in mind that we wanted to try out, not in the least the internationally renowned Swedish meatballs, but being a consummate meat eater, also other exotic meats that did not inevitably end up tasting like chicken. Because food writing is often just a whole bunch of tasty adjectives strung together and is easily interrupted by a sudden urge to go inhale a whole bag of potato chips, you could say that the singular dish that summed it all up was a heaping serving of crisply fried, glistening, vermillion curls of bacon reclining upon a butter sauce replete with soft onion, like a disc of fading sun framed by the skies of dusk.
Similarly, we were at the sundown of our trip, and as the colour evaporated languidly from the streets outside the window, I attempted to sum up what Sweden had been, with its much maligned welfare state and socialist policy, perhaps something like a scientist seriously absorbed in his work, being something that he believes in, trying everything, waiting for some day when everything will come to fruition and a Nobel Prize be awarded to him. But even if it wasn't, he would still deserve immense respect for his courage and industry.
(lack of resolve and fading memory delayed this for nearly two weeks)
Doing a fair share of travelling without producing some semblance of reflective writing is a plaything reserved exclusively for the jet-set, pink Tättinger slurping crowd, but most travel journals tend to be agonizingly tedious, blow-by-blow accounts of every soft-boiled egg eaten at breakfast or each tacky fridge magnet purchased from some fly-by-night roadside stall, like a grandfather's endless stories about some war being told to his grandchildren, initially stimulating but rapidly descending into a situation similar to being held down and beaten in the head with a cucumber. There is, however, also the tendency to attempt a Theroux-esque oeuvre, where one imagines one has peered right through the hearts of the people as though they were a crystal decanter and sucked up all the rich air that permeates the land. Seldom have we ever had such a journey, bordering even on the edge of fiction – everyone wants to meet a wizened old man and hear his mystic story, encircled by the aromatic smoke of some exotic tobacco.
In my opinion, this should be treated more like a good BLT sandwich, each component flavour being allowed to mingle with the others to produce a composite, delicious lunch item. Hence, like creamy garlic mayo, my experiences have been allowed to dribble and settle in amongst the crispy bacon and crunchy lettuce of the mind.
Whilst in Europe, a trip to Scandinavian lands is almost obligatory, if not to witness the land of the Vikings then to scrutinise the home of the archetypal welfare state. The Scandinavian countries are more famously known for their staggeringly liberal social attitudes and perhaps more relevantly as the home of revered and well-loved brand names like Ikea and Lego, being reflective of a more free-spirited lifestyle.
Denmark
Being a gibbering fan of pretty, self-connective plastic bricks, Denmark was of course the first thing that came to mind in the course of planning the trip. Visiting the home of Lego could only be like some sort of pilgrimage to the consecrated land, (if you can pardon the slightly ridiculous comparison) and could not be missed. After all, who could resist looking at intricate plastic reconstructions of some sort of utopia where the trains run on time? But going to a country simply because of a children's toy can only make one look like a drooling fool, so we did intend to go to the capital and cultural centre, Copenhagen (where, not coincidentally, Carlsberg also originates from).
Half-expecting some sort of welfare paradise where the streets were paved with gold bought with the kronor of heavily-taxed rich decadent people, we arrived by plane to find spanking new, chic, and lavish airport, rail system and rail station. Stepping out into a foul Danish day however, Copenhagen still looked like a 1980s Berlin, its browns and greys in a lattice of buildings only exacerbated by the overcast skies.
Suffice to say that we went to a few common or garden museums and churches and the like (punctuated only by a mildly amusing visit to the somewhat promisingly named "Guinness Book of World Records Museum" that consisted mainly of a few bits of plastic and paper that looked like they had been glued together by some autistic, spitting circular saw accident victim. Naturally, our admission fee might have been better spent by handing it to some shady Nigerian Colonel named Mbomtba to get our cut of the 15 (fifteen) million United States dollars) and the awful greyness of the city was getting me down. It seemed a complete letdown that a trip to this land of social justice and light begin with going to a city more similar to one where collectors roamed the streets and beat homeless people for their coins while the rich dined on caviar bought with their tax rebate money.
Because the hotel was charging us the famously high Scandinavian prices, we soon left the city (but not without the requisite visit to the statue of the Little Mermaid, which we saw under a pall of rain and tour buses - that made the stay complete; something like getting a fridge magnet after a visit to a famous museum) and went to a more rural tourist town to look at more rural things. Travelling pleasantly on a train that would make English ones look like stinking latrines, some members of our party struck up conversation with some of the locals, who, like all good Europeans, became increasingly congenial after a multitude of beers. I soon learnt, to the delight of my Western European, left-wing, whale-hugging liberal ideology, that the Danish government was playing the role of some extreme Robin Hood man, providing free education, unemployment benefits and vehemently paying for everything in sight. Grey as Copenhagen was, the warmth of righteousness glowed beneath its subsidised roads.
We were soon to be surprised again by all the tax kronor of the wealthy, as we were about to get off the obscenely late train and miss our connecting journey. But we had a taxi provided all the way to our destination as "this was why we pay taxes in Denmark", to quote our increasingly tipsy friends, lurching over a gaggle of empty bottles to bid us farewell.
An uneventful two days elapsed in this country town amongst the marshes, whose only claim to fame was that it was the oldest town in Denmark, being the least flooded and lousy place for settlement in the ninth century. I never really had the chance to observe much about the rural lifestyle, the famous and rather hackneyed comparison between the hectic and corruptive urban life pitted against its more chaste and tranquil rural counterpart. They seemed mostly the same, though, as, emerging from a restaurant, we were hit by some racist abuse that battered us like an errant ping-pong ball, some inebriated man telling us to "go back to Italia (sic)". Needless to say, we were absolutely quaking in our shoes.
Something like how, to a young child, the sleeping, eating, and praying prior to present-opening on Christmas day is superfluous and idiotic, we had completed the preliminary stages in the lead up to our stay in Legoland, and, with puerile fervour I set upon the spoils like a child ripping open his presents, at times feeling like a Gulliver treading through the Lilliputian land and at others parrying the curious gaze of a wayward European parent as I shifted uncomfortably in a seat designed for someone a quarter my age.
You might say that theme parks hardly count as any sort of serious travel at all, being self-contained bubbles of joy and contentment, and without the chance to observe any real people with real lives to live in a real environment, time seemed to zip by instantaneously, as it tends to do when one's mind is only occupied by the thoughts of tiny plastic cars and their even tinier plastic occupants.
Wondrous, slightly creepy, we all harboured various thoughts about a world that could be constructed solely of plastic bricks, and maybe in our sleep we wished it were all that simple, like when we were children, building fantastic things from nothing, and where, if things didn't work out, we could always try again or go eat some crackers.
Soon, it was time for the seemingly more serious and sober Sweden with its more ironclad reputation. From the glum streets of Copenhagen to the even more sullen weather, if we were to compare Denmark to a person (which strictly is counter-intuitive as we encounter even more difficulty when trying to unravel people) then it might be like a scatterbrained old person who is often shabby in appearance on several counts but pays careful attention to others, who is really quite intelligent, caring and gives candy to children and goes to bed with a contented heart. Inexplicably, as observing such a person would cause, I felt a sudden spurt of warmth as we left for Stockholm. Or it could just be my third glass of free wine.
(more…)
