Thus began my Scandinavian tour
⇒ Puttgarden ⇒ Rödbyhavn ⇒ København ⇒ Helsingør ⇒ Helsingborg ⇒ Hässelholm ⇒ Nässjö ⇒ Linköping ⇒ Norrköping ⇒ Nyköping ⇒ Stockholm ⇒
Wow! That's a lot of umlauts...
Yesterday, fell asleep somewhere around Lübeck on way to Puttgarden to take the ferry across the Fehmarn Belt, some 20 miles wide, to Rödbyhavn in Denmark.
The Fehmarn Belt is a strait connecting the Bay of Kiel and the Bay of Mecklenburg in the western part of the Baltic Sea between the German island of Fehmarn and the Danish island of Lolland.
During my 100 days, I took many ferry boat rides:
Italy-Greece, Greece-Turkey (almost), Rhine River cruise, Germany-Denmark, Denmark-Sweden, Norway-Norway, France-England, England-Ireland, Ireland-Scotland, England-Belgium.
In a few years, there will be a
bridge across the Fehmarn Strait
linking Germany and Denmark, and one more ferry will go under. From fairy dust to ferry rust — I cannot resist the pun.
I remember the Copenhagen train station
more than any other — something about the delicate weaving of the iron work.
Imagined Danny Kaye singing
Wonderful Wonderful Copenhagen.
Made a special trip to visit the little mermaid
A mermaid has not an immortal soul, nor can she obtain one unless she wins the love of a human being.who wished for immortality, like many of us mistakenly do before we lie in a hospital bed for weeks without end wishing for oblivion. Her creator more modestly only wished for 150 years. Hans Andersen
was another in the long line of melancholic Danes from
Hamlet
Any perfectionist who has had a creative block also understands Hamlet's melancholy and what Shakespeare revealed about himself trying to finish it.
However, the author of this retro-journal is an explorer, and explorers cannot be perfectionists.
Perfectionists have ideals, but a true explorer has little idea where he is or where he is going,
and much of the time, he is just sleeping on a train heading into the unknown...
to
Kierkegaard.
According to Kierkegaard, I was still lingering at the Aesthetic stage of life, trying to skip the Ethical, so as to land prematurely in the Religious.
Danes are made in the dark and the dank. Loved it.
Elsinore,
I'm home.
Øresund Bridge —
half bridge, half tunnel — was not finished until 1999.
So the train stopped under
Hamlet's Castle
and we took the
ferry
about 3 miles across the Øresund Strait from Helsingør, Denmark to Helsingborg, Sweden.
No passport required then amongst Scandinavians. After all, they were all
Vikings.
And so are all the pink people in the world — like me — who descended from them.
Why ever did they give up their aggressive violence to emulate a peace-loving Jew?
Around six hours later, we chugged out of
Stockholm
which I only viewed from a distance in the ever glowing summer twilight.
Regret not searching out
St. George slaying the dragon.
Perhaps a few phrases of
Stan Getz
Ah, how I once wished I could play like the immortal Stan Getz.
Many teen years I spent listening to his quartets
while my peers were rockin round the clock.
Perhaps a little more morphine and a miserable life would have done the trick.
Must one suffer to air great beauty?
playing
Old Stockholm
still lingered in the summer air, but I was dozing off as the sun tried vainly to set. Fell asleep on train barreling northward passed the viking tombs
into
Lapland
and the
Arctic auroras,
while ABBA songs swirled in my head, or was that someone's transistor radio.
