Honeymoon Finale in Copenhagen

If Stockholm is the ice queen, Copenhagen is the cool, cosmopolitan little sister. You want to have a drink with Copenhagen. You want to get gloriously drunk and hear her stories.

After more than a week honeymooning in Sweden in late August — exploring Stockholm, the island of Gotland, Lake Mälaren, and Malmö — John and I packed up our Volvo, replenished our gummy supply at one of Sweden’s abundant 7-Elevens, and drove across the 5 mile Øresund bridge. The cable bridge was erected in 2000 to connect post-industrial Malmö to cool-as-a-cucumber Copenhagen.

Before leaving Sweden, we stopped in the university town of Lund and gorged on Räksmörgås — open-faced rye sandwiches covered in lemon and dill-marinated bitty Baltic shrimp. When we crossed the border after lunch, we beelined straight to what would be our home for the next three days.

Waterways are the rhythm section of Scandinavia. There’s no beat without them. Ergo, “Das boot” — our floating houseboat — felt like an appropriate venue to end our trip.

A short cry from office buildings and the freeway, our boat was situated among a community of houseboats. Similar to the scene in San Francisco, some boats were beautifully modernized, with floor-to-ceiling windows exposing chic Danish furniture, while other boats looked like they had just returned from an open-sea fishing voyage. Our boat was somewhere in between. It was clearly well-cared for by our airbnb host, who had installed an impressive tiled mural on the bathroom walls and decorated his below-deck bedroom in sumptuous cow hide rugs. But the warped ceiling and cracks by the windows thwarted any illusion that we were entirely protected from natural elements.

After we lobed our bags down, John and I indulged in gifts from our host: fresh peaches and a sweeping CD and vinyl collection. We enjoyed Neil Young’s waling as we figured out the best place to rent bicycles.

Our friends who had previously visited CPH highly recommended bikes to navigate the city. They assured us that it was the way most Danes got around. Still, we were in for a surprise once we fetched our bikes that afternoon and joined the army of cyclists seamlessly traversing the city.

I thought I’d lived in bike-friendly cities in the U.S., but everything I‘ve previously witnessed pales in comparison to Copenhagen’s bike culture. At every stoplight, dozens of students, mothers with children in bike trailers, and sharply-dressed commuters wait patiently for the light to turn green, and then, with speed and agility, continue to make their way — single-file — along the well-marked bike lanes. From time to time, you’ll hear the “ding!” of a bell, and a faster biker will gracefully pass on the left. The choreography is as controlled as a ballet. It almost appears as if the cyclists are peddling in sync.

John and I were, shall we say, less than graceful on our rented fix-gear bikes. We didn’t cause any accidents, but we certainly interrupted the effortless flow. We did the best we could and made our way to Christiania, the infamous bohemian autonomous neighborhood in the borough of Christianshavn.

As you pass through the painted gateway of Christiania, you immediately feel transported to a different world. If we had been less familiar with this free spirited culture, it might have been shocking. However, John spent his middle and high school years in Birkenstock-wearing, vegan-friendly, pontificating Ithaca, New York, and we lived a stone’s throw from Haight Street in San Fracisco, so we have a certain level of comfort with this ‘enlightened’ or ‘deviant’ lifestyle — depending on your point of view. I generally take the position, live and let live. Further, to live with intention and a commitment to community and civic duty will always be admirable in my book.

Walking around Christiania, I couldn’t help but feel like a tourist who was guilty of co-opting the original soul of a place. We witnessed a handful of residents selling homemade goods from artful, yet dirty stalls, and smelled marijuana at every turn. But we also saw countless young people like us having beers and talking loudly at communal picnic tables. It wasn’t exactly a bohemian Disney World, but clearly tourists flocked there to get a piece of the magic. The trick was you had to soak it all in in the present. No pictures allowed.

John and I spent about an hour at a green picnic table, drinking lagers and playing Gin Rummy, eavesdropping and bearing witness to the happy chatter around us. As the afternoon rolled on, we decided we’d venture to another spot in Christianshavn for appetizers.

We strapped on our helmets and made our way to a beautiful restaurant perched on the corner of a cobblestone street. We opted for a canal-side outdoor table. As the light dipped low, casting shadows on nearby sailboats, we held hands and grinned.

Within minutes, we found ourselves sipping beer out of stemmed wine glasses and dunking hunks of sourdough into gloriously buttery mussel broth. We dabbed the corners of our mouths with white linen napkins. Cultural whiplash. Weren’t we just a quarter mile from boho Christiana?

We decided our final evening scene would put us smack dab in the middle of the funky to classy spectrum: we’d eat al fresco on the porch of our houseboat.

We picked up falafel, hummus, dolmas, feta, and kebabs from a well-reviewed — and for good reason — take-out joint and made our way home. With the food bouncing in our bike baskets, we whizzed over a long arching bridge, its reflection swaying in the tide of the black steely water below. Once we crossed the bridge, the last few minutes of our 20-minute bike ride was along a dirt harbor-side path.

We pulled onto the deck of our houseboat, knocked open our kickstands, and curried our food down to the small attached floating dock below. We found plastic chairs to rest upon as we cracked open our ales and dug into our vegetarian feasts. We rocked back and forth with the current and inhaled deeply. Whether or not it in fact occurred, in my memory I’ll be humming — humming like I did when I was much younger, and was enjoying my food so thoroughly that I couldn’t contain my voice. I hummed of happiness.

We slept of restfulness. In the morning, we rose from our cow-hide cavernous bedroom and made coffee in an Italian pot. We put on a record and began researching design shops. Like most honest couples we know, our engagement exposed some unexpected differences of opinion. For one — John’s strong desire that we forego the “stuff” of weddings and shirk the registry — butting heads with my conviction that because it’s a love language and tradition persists, “stuff” is inevitable, so let’s get the stuff we’ll like and love. Well, we found some semblance of compromise. I made a registry on Zola that allowed us flexibility in what we ultimately purchased, so we could filter the “stuff.” This also meant that we could have some fun picking out home goods in design-savvy Scandinavia.

John found a few good-looking design department stores in the center of the city, so we put on our finest we’re-adults-and-we-might-actually-buy-a-chair-so-please-take-us-seriously outfits and cycled into town. We made our way around HAY and two other department stores chalk-full of Georg Jenson, Marimekko, and various other titans of Scandinavian design. I was enraptured by a few spatially-efficient hooks and racks, glassware and stemware. We expected to go ga-ga over their unique, beautifully-crafted chairs, but for the price tag, nothing felt right.

It was clear that the day was best spent perusing and making mental notes — we would return during our final day in Copenhagan to make purchases. We ultimately ended up stuffing John’s half-empty suitcase with Georg Jenson bowls and plates and a wooden wall-mounted hook from HAY. A lesson I’ve taken from my Mom is that while the happiness evoked by stuff is fleeting, the associated memories are not. I love where my mind goes when we’re eating dinner off of our honeymoon plates.

After a couple of hours of roaming the floors of department stores, we were peckish. Our most anticipated dinner of the trip awaited that evening, so we opted for light fare from one of CPH’s many Paleo food spots. It’s incredible — even 7-Elevens have whole sections devoted to Paleo-only options. Health-conscious Scandinavia may be a few years behind the U.S. in terms of the Paleo trend, but they seem to have embraced it with greater fervor.

But enough about raw food. John and I were mentally preparing for the full-immersion sensory utopia of noma.

noma is René Redzepi’s brainchild and winner of best restaurant in the world from 2010–2012, and again in 2014. A friend from childhood worked his heinie off to become one of the 16 cooks in noma’s esteemed kitchen. He graciously agreed to reserve us a much sought-after table months earlier. With no small amount of culinary imposter syndrome, John and I arrived at 7:30 pm, ready to be dazzled.

And dazzled we were. As soon as we walked through the unassuming doors of noma, we were greeted by a wall of people clapping for us and congratulating us on our marriage. It was Nate and his fifteen co-cooks — all in matching modest light blue cotton aprons, none a lick above thirty years-old. I’m sure I was shades of red as our chic waitress escorted us from the wall of well-wishers to our seats.

The first thing I noticed was a brown fur pelt draped over my sturdy wooden chair. Then, how the light streaming in from the large harbor-side windows danced on our flat ceramic gray dishware and accentuated other diners’ smiles. I’d bet that the relative sparseness of the room was meant to keep people food-focused, but the happy unintended effect on me was that it also kept me people-focused. The circular tables were far apart from each other, but in the absence of paintings or elaborate floral arrangements, our fellow diners became our decorations. The father with the waxed mustache behind us, or the gaggle of incredibly well-dressed women at the table near the exposed kitchen, breathed beauty into the space.

Within minutes of being seated, we were swept into the experience with glasses of complimentary champagne and our “first apple of the season.” Our first course of the night was a hollowed-out green apple with pea-sized apple balls, nutmeg and other sweet spices, and elderflower. noma’s original concept was a return to local eating, serving only ingredients from Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. Now of course this concept is copied and maligned in restaurants and kitchens throughout the world. But when noma opened in 2004, it was still somewhat avant-garde, and even controversial in bourgeois circles in Denmark.

The apple was a quintessential way to start our 16-course parade of flavors. It was early September, and apples had begun showing up in farmer’s markets across town. We delighted in everything, but the first dish to absolutely, positively knock our socks off arrived seventh.

Sea urchin wrapped in buttery cabbage. The texture was divine. A savory empanada melting in your mouth. Our friend told us that Redzepi works with three times the vendors of the average chef in order to source everything but his wine from Scandinavia. A testament to limits breeding creativity.

From there, we agreed to intentionally slow down to savor the back half of our dining experience. It worked. We ultimately reveled in four glorious hours of gustatory pleasure. Perfectly-grilled artichoke with black caviar, Norwegian King crab served over a rich egg yolk sauce, paired with German semi-dry riesling, earthy, bright foraged greens in an umami scallop paste that we tour into with steak knives.

Our stomachs were full, but not the weighty, Italian-pasta dinner type of full. We cheerfully welcomed three final courses of dessert.

In an ode to Italy herself, our first dessert was a wildly flavorful play on panna cotta. Sweet sheep’s milk pudding coated in ant paste. It turned out to be an unexpectedly perfect balance of sweet and tart. John loved the next dessert, featuring rose and elderflower ice cream on wooden sticks. The ice cream was coated in toasted barley, recalling the chocolate-dipped soft serve shells you find all over New England’s coasts from June through August.

To top it all off, we were served noma’s eminent dessert: reindeer moss. The presentation was perfect. Atop deep white bowls, filled with bright green mountains of moss, lay dark chocolate-drenched reindeer moss and chocolatey, pickled mushroom slivers. The mushrooms looked like miniature Thor hammers and the reindeer moss could have passed for a tentacled sea creature. As we began floating to other lands, the pleasing crackle, pop of the moss snapped us back to reality just as our waiters set vials of spiked eggnog and limoncello on our table.

Before we said our goodbyes, we opted for a carafe of coffee so we could linger for twenty minutes longer. The unspoken sweet understanding that we may never have a meal like this again.

For our final day in CPH, we split up for a couple of hours so that John could finish scouring the design stores and I could take a tour of the Folketing, or Danish Parliament. After reading about Sweden’s political history, I was curious to better understand Denmark’s politics. They both have proportional representation, with eight recognized political parties in Sweden and ten in Denmark. There’s an emerging party in Denmark, already established in Sweden and Norway, almost entirely focused on a feminist agenda. It already has a room and seats at a table in the Danish Parliament.

With our palates pleased, our political hopes buoyed, and our new design savvy in hand, on our final day in Denmark, we made our way to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. The museum is about thirty minutes up the coast from Copenhagen and worth the trip. The outdoor sculpture garden was as extensive and playful as the Picasso collection on loan. The museum was intended to exclusively house modern Danish art when it opened in the 1950s. Happily, it expanded. I was particularly impressed with the multi-media contemporary art wing.

After enjoying our last smørrebrød sandwiches from the museum’s cafe, we drove our Volvo onto a ferry boat to get back to Sweden, spending a final night in a rural Inn near the Stockholm airport. Lest our spirits dip at the thought of returning to our quotidian day jobs, John bought more gummy candies. We indulged in the simple sugary pleasure the whole way home.