A brief note on Copenhagen
What it feels like when a city welcomes you
Last month, I spent a few days in Copenhagen after a week of solo hiking and surfing Lofoten in Northern Norway. As I flipped between food guides and Google Maps on my flight over, I quickly learned two things:
There are too many places to try and I’d need to visit again
The credentialing of “ex-Noma” in Copenhagen food is like “ex-Google” in Bay Area tech or “ex-Goldman” in New York finance.
I landed late and set out to search for some food in Vesterbro, where my Google Maps showed a cluster of saved blue bookmark icons. The first two places I walked into told me that their kitchens had just closed. I kept making my way down Istedgade and walked into Sanchez, which had a particularly convivial buzz coming out of the door on the street corner.
“Hey, how’s it going. Is your kitchen still open?”
The host/server told me it was closed, but offered to book me a reservation for the next day. I said absolutely, and he asked for my phone number.
“It’s American, so, uh, plus 1.. 408…”
“Bay Area?”
I was surprised he recognized my area code and asked how he knew. He told me that he’d grown up in Pacifica and lived in Mountain View. I lit up a bit, said something dumb like “no way that’s crazy”, and then told him thanks and that I was excited to come back the next day.
Something about the interaction of making a reservation in person made me giddy. Walking around a new city an hour after I landed, I’d met someone who recognized my phone area code. I still hadn’t eaten, but a part of me was satiated. Thanks, Jonathan.
A few blocks down, I found a late-night spot called Isted Grill run by a Taiwanese couple that I’d saved because it was labeled “Taiwanese-Danish” on some map (I thought maybe it’d be like the new Taiwanese-fusion diaspora like Win Son or something). As it turned out, Mr. and Mrs. Lee had been running this shop since the 80s, serving up beloved flæskesteg (roast pork) sandwiches.
I overheard another solo traveller chatting with the owners in Chinese, explaining that he’s visiting from San Francisco. I joined the conversation with my American-accented Chinese, and for a moment, felt deeply grateful for this warm and serendipitous welcome from Copenhagen.
Random unrelated thread on parenting philosophies:
I’d taken a particular fascination to the Scandinavian way of parenting and raising kids, with its emphasis on outdoor playtime and independence. It sounded like the perfect foil to this theme I’d written about when I was in high school, about how the American (my own) upbringing had gone from a “Free Range Childhood to the Pre-Professional Adolescence”. Then, as I was flying home, I read this interesting excerpt in a Monocle magazine about some downsides of the Danish upbringing:
“Danish children are extraordinarily free, except to succeed or fail”.
- Michael Booth, Copenhagen’s latest park demonstrates the virtues of having no kids on the block
The grass may be greener on the other side of the pond, and perhaps parts of the elite American hyper-competitive, high-pressure school system has its merits.