Dane to be happy
COPENHAGEN | A visit to this lively city helps explain why the Danish rank as the world's cheeriest
COPENHAGEN, Denmark -- When a trip goes well, it sticks with you awhile. I've just returned from Copenhagen and all I want to do is wear a scarf outdoors, drink a beer at lunch and light a candle at dinner.
I can only guess how long this will last, but after visiting Memphis once I listened to old Sun Studio recordings for a month. And after visiting Ireland, you couldn't get me out of tweeds for a year.
(Cees Van Roeden/For the Sun-Times)
WHEN TO GO: For an early kickstart to your Christmas holiday, November is surprisingly inviting. It's cold but often sunny. If you're looking for that happiness quotient, anytime but December through March is ideal.
WHERE TO EAT: The best ethnic restaurants are in Norrebro, Copenhagen's north side, home to many immigrant groups, including Turks, Italians and Indians. A particularly excellent find for a new take on traditional Danish fare is the Royal Cafe, next to the Royal Copenhagen porcelain shop on Stroget. The classic open-faced smorrebrod sandwich is reinvented as a delicious tapas lunch; www.theroyalcafe.dk.
WHERE TO STAY: The Copenhagen Admiral Hotel (www.admiral hotel.dk/Forside-1.aspx) is right on the water, minutes by foot from many major attractions, including the clubby bars of Nyhavn. The hotel's Web site is advertising room rates starting around $115 a night during the Christmas season. The hotel is also close to Amalienborg Castle, where the Danish flag flies whenever the beloved queen is in residence. The Danes began the tradition of the spectacle of the changing of the guard -- and Buckingham Palace stole it.
GET A DISCOUNT CARD: For about $42 for 24 hours or $90 for 72 hours, an adult can buy a CPHCARD that's good for free admission to about 60 museums and attractions, as well as free travel on public transportation. Two children under 10 can get in free with each adult. Lower-priced cards are available for children ages 10 to 15. If you plan your days right, it's an excellent deal; www.visitcopenhagen.com.
MORE INFO: www.visitdenmark.com.
What I'm pretty sure will linger straight through to the new year is a cozy feeling of the holidays, which is what a trip to the land of Father Christmas and the Snow Queen at this time of year almost guarantees.
Hours after Scandinavian Airlines softly deposited me in Copenhagen, I was walking in a falling darkness through the city streets. It was all a swirl, possibly due to jet lag, more likely due to the Drambuie on the plane. It was all cobblestone streets and Christmas lights and whishing bicycles and candles in windows and prosperous, youthful people -- all wearing scarves -- and gunmetal grey canals and a dusting of snow.
There is no advice in a travel book that can measure up to walking freely and a little lost through a city's streets on your first night in a new town.
As it happens, I had visited Copenhagen before, about 12 years ago. Back then, as now, I was a guest of the Visit Denmark tourism board. The theme of that first trip was Denmark's cultural heritage, especially the Vikings and Hans Christian Andersen. The theme of this trip was more conceptual: happiness. Danes are a happy people -- a big new study purports to confirm it -- and Danes suspect the rest of us might be a little happier ourselves if we just visited them more, which I am here to tell you is true. Happiness has a way of rubbing off.
I stopped in a guitar shop called Wood Sounds on Copenhagen's north side, Norrebro, and checked out the acoustic guitars. I have learned that an easy way to chat up strangers in a strange city, given that I play a bit of guitar, is to drop by a guitar shop and start strumming. Inevitably, a clerk will come over and beg me to stop.
When Emiel Meinild, the young man in charge at Wood Sounds, walked over, I asked, "Are you happy?"
"Am I happy?" he replied.
In survey after survey for some 30 years, I explained, Danes have come out on top as the happiest people on earth. Most recently, an updated study this year of some 80,000 people around the world by the University of Leicester in England ranked Denmark as No. 1 in happiness again, followed by Switzerland, Austria, Iceland and the Bahamas.
Yes, I know: That last one, the Bahamas, makes sense.
"On a scale of one to 10, one being the best, how happy are you?" I asked Meinild.
"Six or seven," he replied. "It's very easy to live in Denmark."
It is, indeed. All the essentials of at least a secure life -- the stuff that keeps Americans awake with worry -- are a right of birth for Danes. Universal health care. Free schooling straight through college. Five weeks paid vacation. A soft retirement after age 65.
All of this means crazy high taxes, of course. Some 60 percent of working Danes pay the highest income tax rate of 68 percent. But Danes seem at peace with the trade-off, appreciating the rewards of social, as well as urban, planning. Copenhagen is an incredibly livable city, and not by chance. Excellent mass transportation, wide bike paths and architectural preservation have contained American-style urban sprawl.
While studying a map over a cappuccino in a basement restaurant, it occurred to me that I could walk the whole city in a long weekend -- and maybe I should. Then my mind got to wondering if I should venture to speak even a word of Danish -- such as "tak" for "thanks" -- when it's obvious the average Dane speaks perfect English. Before long I forgot all about walking the whole city. But I did say "tak" every chance I got, overcompensating for my lack of a scarf.
For four days in Copenhagen in mid-November, in search of an early whiff of the Christmas spirit and the secret of happiness, I balanced the Good Life and the Wandering Life.
The Good Life meant a beer at every lunch, champagne every night, three-hour meals in superb restaurants and visits to some of Europe's oldest castles and most inviting museums.
On one perfect night -- one that, quite honestly, left me wishing my wife had been with me -- I took a champagne cruise aboard a glass-covered boat that glided along in the dark harbor. Next came dinner at Salt, an updated version of a Parisian brasserie, in the ideally located Copenhagen Admiral Hotel where I was staying. The Danish island of Laeso, as it happens, is celebrated for it softly briney salt; hence the restaurant's name. If you're up for the opera, a shuttle boat will carry you across the harbor after dinner.
Was I happy? Yes.
The next day, I visited Denmark's cool yet friendly Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, so named because the founder had been married to three women -- all named Louise. The Louisiana's collection is impressive, with enough good stuff by the Impressionists to hold its own with the Art Institute of Chicago. But what charmed me most was the setting itself: sun-filled, low-sculpted buildings tucked into the countryside, with as much sculpture exhibited outdoors as in.
Other worthwhile excursions included visits to the country home of Karen Blixen, better known to non-Danes as Isak Dinesen, the author of Out of Africa, as well as a quick stop to Kronborg Castle up the coast in Elsinore -- that would be Hamlet's gloomy haunt -- and a guided tour of the Danish Design Center, where it became clear that world-famous Scandinavian design still has something to say.
Much as I enjoyed the Good Life, though, I am at heart a Chicago guy from 79th Street. When too many people offer me champagne, I fear I've stumbled into the wrong house. So I looked forward to those free hours when I could escape to the Wandering Life, doing my best to get lost.
I began with a stroll down the famed shopping street called Stroget, a crowded pedestrian mall of the sort Chicago's first Mayor Daley no doubt had in mind when he closed State Street to auto traffic for a while. State Street didn't work but Stroget does. The street shouted Christmas with its wreaths, ornaments and carols, not to mention warm pools of light spilling from apartment windows above, smoke rising from fireplace chimneys and ruddy, lovely Danish cheeks. I bought a Christmas ornament -- a golden angel -- at the flagship store of Royal Copenhagen, the famous makers of fine porcelain.
Denmark has a reputation for being dank and dark in winter, and I suppose it is; but in November the icy Snow Queen has yet to blow in for real, the days grow dark only an hour or so earlier than in Chicago, and the cold seems no less tolerable. Cold weather is never that bad as long as you're just visiting -- renting, for once, beats owning.
Danes in November are like squirrels, making the most of those last days before they burrow in for winter. That's about all I could make of it when I saw waiters along Nyhavn (New Harbor) -- three blocks of hip restaurants, bars and coffee shops along a canal -- setting up outdoor tables in a light snowfall. Stranger yet, Danes actually sat at those tables, drinking beer as if it were summer.
Nyhavn this time of year is lined with festive Christmas stalls. A century ago, the street was lined with dive bars and drunken sailors.
I tried to get out and explore at every chance, but sometimes doing absolutely nothing could be fascinating. I stayed up late one night watching a racy French movie with Danish subtitles -- I did not understand a word -- about a group a beautiful young people who are mysteriously murdered one by one while staying at a country mansion. Agatha Christie with full frontal nudity.
Earlier that evening, I had dined on roasted breast of berberi duck at a legendary Copenhagen restaurant, Nimb, an establishment so serious about food that they make their own yogurt and ice cream in a dairy downstairs.
The Wandering Life -- a good, stupid movie discovered by chance -- had capped off the Good Life -- one of the best meals of my life.
Was I happy? Yes.
On my last morning in Copenhagen, I stopped by another guitar shop, this one just a few doors off Stroget. I asked the man behind the counter, "Are Danes the happiest people in the world?"
He looked out the window at the bundled people passing by.
"See these people walking the streets?" he said. "They don't look so happy."
"But what about you?" I asked. "Are you happy?"
"Happy enough," he said.
And so was I, more than enough. It rubs off.
• Shakespeare's Hamlet. The play is set in Denmark, of course, and you can visit Kronborg Castle, where the fictional Hamlet brooded.
• Hans Christian Andersen's classic fairy tales.
• Johannes V. Jensen's The Fall of the King. Jensen was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature 17 times before winning in 1944.
• Dan Turell, affectionately nicknamed "Onkel Danny" (Uncle Danny), was a popular Danish writer with notable influence on Danish literature. He shares subjects with the American Beat poets, especially Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs.
• Peter Hoeg's Borderliners and Smilla's Sense of Snow.
• Jan Sonnergaard has written three story collections, each dealing with a different layer of Danish society in the late 1990s: Radiator (1997), Last Sunday in October (2000) and I'm Still Afraid of Caspar Michael Petersen (2003).
• Karen Blixen's (a k a Isak Dinesen) most famous work, Out of Africa.