WINTER TRAVEL. NORTHERN EUROPE.
Who Says a Flight Connection Has to Be Boring?
From sand to snow in 24 hours.
Eclectic coin collections. A list of vaccinations longer than your school results. Picking up your trusty backpack with old luggage tags hidden inside; ones you have been too sentimental to throw away.
These are just some of the signs that you have caught the ‘travel bug’.
But more than that, the lust to travel and explore etches its way into our DNA. And when that happens, it becomes nigh on impossible to resist.
On a personal level, one of the biggest changes I have noticed is how I have learned to make the most of the opportunities available to me while travelling. Sometimes, going the extra mile even requires a little bit of risk.
The time that I took a whistle-stop tour around the ‘floating mountains’ of Zhangjiajie for my 20th birthday springs to mind. I’d spent a few days visiting Shanghai, but it felt like a crime to travel the 1,000 miles straight back to Zhongshan. So I crammed it in, and afterwards almost found myself stranded and penniless in the dark of night in the town of Zhuzhou; only, to my relief, to just about catch a train to take me back South.
Similarly, I started to make a habit of booking long flight connections pre-pandemic. One of the more memorable experiences I had doing this was in December 2018.
I was living and working in Italy, and completely burned out. I had managed to wrangle a couple of weeks off work for the Christmas holidays and was desperate to make the most of it. So, naturally, I booked a cheap flight to Jordan. There I spent the best part of a week stuffing my face with mansaf in Amman, admiring the skilled workmanship of the Nabataeans in Petra, and sipping tea with Bedouins in Wadi Rum.
When it was all over, and after a tea-related scrape at the airport, it was time to come home. Well, almost…
An Excursion to Copenhagen: 03:00–05:00
It was three in the morning when I arrived at Copenhagen Airport. This was where most of the cheaper flights from Amman to London passed through, with the next plane leaving to the UK in just a few hours. Once again though, I knew I would have regretted taking the quickest and easiest option. Not only had I never been to Denmark, nor Scandinavia in general, but I had, for a long time, wanted to soak up the Nordic Christmas atmosphere. Granted, my time would be limited. But isn’t there joy in the ephemeral, the short-lived?
Anyway, I had planned to spend the first couple of hours within the confines of the airport, and only then venture into Copenhagen, before catching my mid-afternoon flight. But the problem was that the airport bored me to death. Almost nothing was open and, without considering what this meant, I decided I had to head elsewhere.
So I hopped on the overground subway, which was warm and comfortable. I was pretty happy there. Annoyingly though, the connection to the city centre was so efficient that by the time I had got to Nørreport I still had no clue about what I was going to do to whittle away the next few hours.
There is no getting away from it: I was bloody freezing. For the past week, my body was used to high teens and humid air. That was then juxtaposed with something comfortably below zero, combined with a bitter wind coming from the North Sea.
I had to get warm, so I went to the only place I could go.
More or less every McDonalds looks the same at four o’clock in the morning. The struggle to find a clean table, with some more bearable than others, turned out to be something that even a Scandinavian McDonalds was not immune to.
It was Sunday night, but it was also holiday season, so there was a lot of foot traffic. Students, mainly, that had quite the appetite after a long night out. Some were energetic, but most were on the way down. We have all been there, right?
But time was passing slowly. There were no charging points for my phone (my own fault) and the staff wasn’t serving much hot food, meaning there was very little to distract me. So, reluctantly, I headed back out.
An Excursion to Copenhagen: 05:00–08:00
As the clock crawled past five, I couldn’t help but question my decision to come here. Even though I’d layered up, my clothes weren’t exactly ideal for the conditions. I didn’t have thermals, for example, and tried to cover the bottom half of my face with a scarf, only to find my eyelids would start sticking together. I was roaming the streets at night, with all of my belongings on my back.
I still had a few hours to wait until the first cafe opened, and the only thing I could do to warm up was to keep walking. I plugged in my headphones, with the frigid cold needing just a few seconds to alienate my fingers from the rest of my body.
I started by doing a few laps of Kongens Nytorv, just to get my bearings, before joining the Holmens Kanal. Soon after I found myself standing outside of Børsen, a majestic 17th-century stock exchange built under the reign of Christian IV.
It was at that point that I started to really enjoy myself. I had the city of Copenhagen — a place that I had never set foot in before — exclusively to myself. I was alone with my thoughts, my feelings, my silence. I felt present. I felt alive.
Snow was coming down, I was listening to great music, and every turn led to a new discovery. My adrenaline was high. I felt like a mixture of James Bond and the guy in After Hours, and I began to love it.
The cold was still there, of course, and the snow occasionally turned into heavy sleet. But I knew I was experiencing the world in a new way, an unexpected way, and a way that brought all sorts of emotions to the surface. So lost was I in this brave new world of mine that, after having clocked up around ten kilometres, the time had sped along to seven-thirty. I had survived my first night in Copenhagen!
That is when I took this photo. And no — I do not know what possessed this lady to go running in those conditions.
An Excursion to Copenhagen: 08:00–15:00
I don’t think I have ever been as happy to be inside as I was when I walked into Espresso House, a cosy sanctuary just off Kongens Nytorv.
The immediate warmth coupled with the smell of freshly brewed coffee was a joy to my senses. The barista gave me a slightly puzzled look as I stood there, motionless, for I don’t know how long. I thought about explaining my day so far but quickly realised my lips were still playing catch up from the cold and could hardly function. “It’s cold out!”, was as much as I could muster.
Eventually, I ordered a large hot chocolate with two pastries, before sinking into a leather sofa overlooking the square. Out of the window, I saw market traders arrive to put up their stalls for the day. I watched in awe as the sun began to reveal itself, reflecting off the brilliant snow. I lost myself in a book, comforted by the chatter and laughter that started to build up around me. Hours of pure bliss passed.
Sometime later, I made the short walk to Nyhavn, the famous canal sandwiched by those magical buildings that we are all used to seeing in Copenhagen travel journals. That was where the stretch of Christmas markets was running; where people gathered; where restaurants decorated their entrances with lights and ivy; where the scent of warm mulled wine filled the winter air. I only had a few hours there, but in a way, I felt as though I had all the time in the world.
Over the past 24 hours, I had gone from the Mars-like expanses of the Jordanian desert to the frosty canals of Copenhagen.
And later, when I stepped onto my next plane, I felt ready for more. Sand, snow, you name it. I was ready for anything.
But in reality, the next stage of my journey was, on paper at least, a bit less audacious.
When I got off, I was greeted by a subtle breeze, drizzle, and familiar voices.
I was home.
Take a look at my other stories on the World Traveler’s Blog: the consequences of globalisation in Siberia and celebrating the New Year in China.
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