Luke, around the world.

“Why are you up already?” I am looking at my sister’s message. It is quarter past nine, and Vanløse, Copenhagen is welcoming with an unusually balmy day. Apart from work-related travelling and home visits, it is my first trip abroad since pre-pandemic times. 

“Already? I’ve slept almost nine hours, and it was an excellent night.” The smartwatch’s spying eye confirms my answer: a decent amount of deep sleep, very little snoring, and my HRV is back to normal. I feel glorious, although I shouldn’t say it out loud too soon. It’s only been a few days since I halved my antidepressant dose (yet again), to just one eighth of what I used to ingest just six months ago. “Your insomnia might come back,” said my shrink when I saw him last time, “you are not ready.” Perhaps I’m not, perhaps it’s true that those who cross the sea change sky not soul, but I’ve recently started arguing with Horace. What if being in constant motion fixes my soul?

I pamper myself with a lazy morning before venturing out to explore Copenhagen, a city I wouldn’t be visiting if not for my little sister conquering Danish universities. A shower, a bit of Netflix, soon she’s back from her uni meeting and we’re ready to set out.

Before we even get to the center, I am awed by the subway system. Clean like the Warsaw one, but fully autonomous and much safer. Due to plexiglass barriers lining up the edge of the platform, there is no risk of falling down the tracks, accidentally or in a suicide attempt. It will be only on my last day that I get the seat right at the front of the car, to enjoy what would be the driver’s point of view, if these trains had them. And how to buy a ticket? Just swipe inside the app; it will locate you, and any zone that you cross will be added to the total deducted from your favorite banking app or credit card. Seamless, painless, quick.

We eventually reach the first stop of my visit. A boat takes us through the canals and into the bay; the guide is a vivacious, dark-skinned woman who keeps reminding the tourists to sit the fuck down whenever we approach a low-lying bridge. I keep wondering how many of them get traumatic brain and cervical injuries each year, and what would the insurance people say? But that’s just me and my twisted train of thought, preparing for any eventuality, dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s. In the meantime, nothing short of an architectural wonderland is unfolding in front of me. The old meets the new, and I soon understand why Danes are so proud of their urban landscape. Suffering none of the pathologies of Malta or Warsaw, Copenhagen combines the quaint with the futuristic, the cozy with the monumental. It’s a real treat.

But it can’t be too perfect, can it? They excel in architecture, but food is a different story altogether. Of course, there are unmissable plates to check out. Small fish sandwiches on rye bread are fabulous, but you cannot eat them all the time, so you need alternatives. A hot-dog, maybe? The stalls are everywhere in the city, some colon cancer franchise, processed red meat, it’s heavenly, but untenable in the long run. Apart from these, one has to rely on imports – burgers, pizzas, fusion, and don’t get me wrong, it’s all tasteful, but in the domain of national cuisine, there isn’t much to look forward to.

A trip to Copenhagen wouldn’t be complete without paying a visit to Christiania. Once upon a time, this thriving autonomous community was the go-to place for parties (and soft drugs), but recent police clampdowns metamorphosed the district into a family-with-three-kids affair. ‘Where are the masked men peddling weed?’ I ask, and there is no reply. A solitary cop standing at the corner is helping tourists find the way, the no-photo signs all got their addendums that in fact everyone’s very welcome to take pictures. Something in the air though, perhaps an aura of the place, it still remains, for now unbothered by an impending process of gentrification. We climb up a graffitied staircase and into an art gallery housing works by a dying breed of Christianians, antifascists, hippies, addicts, people with stories as colourful and scintillating as the works they present. I could sit there for a long time, but we’re on a tight schedule.

There is a long queue to get burgers from Gasoline Grill, so we enter the nearby bookstore and I can’t help myself but buy a Jack Kerouac collection of sketches and essays, Lonesome Traveler, the shape of things to come. As far as bookstores and libraries are concerned, Copenhagen is a lovely host. Northern Europeans are avid readers, and if only the prices were not so extortionate, I would buy more than some one hundred pages of a solitary beatnik’s ramblings. 

I have a return flight late in the evening, so I still have one more day to explore. We didn’t manage to see the elephants in an open enclosure in Frederiksberg Have, but we do see these grand animals adorning the inside of the Church of Our Savior. They symbolize the chivalrous Order of the Elephant established back in the seventeenth century, and there’s supposed to be forty of them strewn across the whole edifice, but instead of a compulsive count, I focus on other elements of the interior.  What strikes me most about the church is its close connection to more opulent temples of the Catholic and Orthodox worlds, contrary to the popular view linking Protestantism with austerity. The archangel statues glare at us, petrified mid-motion; the vertiginous, ornamental vaults spread high above our heads, and they remind me of my hometown’s cathedral; the Fazioli grand piano… let’s just say I am going to hear about it come Easter time; the sturdy pews coax a weary traveler into sitting down and relishing the silence.

We also climb the spire, four hundred steps, me and my sister with our debilitating fear of heights, and I see the city in its entirety on yet another sunny morning. ‘I am surprised you wanted to look at churches,’ says my sister. 

‘Come on, I might have my differences of opinions, but I am not some heathen incapable of appreciating art, right?’ and she smiles in return.

The last long walk before I fly back home is along the shoreline; the Baltic Sea at its exit, separated from the North Sea by a collection of straits. It’s Monday afternoon, yet the beach and its surroundings are full of people cycling, walking, taking in the views. If there is one thing I envy the Danish people, it is their apparent work-life balance. Life should be enjoyed, life should be cherished, and don’t you ever overdo work. Pragmatism wins with ritual: a few days earlier we had the most unusual visit at the cemetery where Bohr and Kierkegaard and Andersen are buried. Get a beer, get a snack, sit on a bench, contemplate, in your thoughts go a bit astray. Stop what you’re doing and breathe deep. That is the Danish style.

‘It’s a good place you ended up in,’ I tell my sister as we plod in the direction of the airport, exhausted after doing tens of thousands of steps in the last four days. ‘Hell, even I could live here. A lot of hygge, right?’ Another smile lights up her face.

But this is just a test trip. Soon, I’ll embark on something I’ve always wanted to do and never known if I have the guts for it. I am happy with my backpack, I’m elated to have visited my sister and to have seen that she’s doing pretty well.

‘You’ll stay for Easter at least?’ she asks.

How could I not, I need to, I have to, ‘I will.’ It is the last chance to see everyone in one place, to enjoy the last moments of calm before the biggest storm of my life. And fuck me if I am not a storm chaser.