My wife’s cousin and his family moved to Denmark (from Oregon) in August 2019. We have been to Europe twice since then but haven’t made it all the way to Denmark to visit them. Earlier this year, my wife was talking with her cousin’s wife and she mentioned that their time in Denmark might be coming to an end sometime soon. And, since my wife seems to really enjoy looking for great deals on travel, this got her looking for a way for us to travel to Denmark sometime in the not-too-distant future.
So, we flew to Copenhagen on Sunday and we will fly home on Tuesday of next week.
Jet Lag This Time
In all of our traveling, I have never had a terrible problem with jet lag.1 But, this trip has been pretty tricky so far (it has only been a day, of course, and I am sure it’ll be fine, soon.) I had a hard time staying awake on the train ride from Copenhagen out to the town where we are now (near Billund) and I simply couldn’t stay asleep past about 4:00 this morning.
First Impressions
I don’t really want to make many pronouncements on Denmark, Danes, or any of the things we’ve seen thus far. I have fallen into a trap of making hasty statements about what I thought about certain places that I later almost completely regretted.2Still, my first impressions of Denmark are not entirely what I thought they would be. I’ll have to get “out and about” a bit more before I can really say I have any sort of “feel” for the country, the culture, etc.
Darkness
One thing that is a little bewildering, however, is just how dark it is in general, and how accustomed everyone is to this fact. Today, the sun will rise around 8:30 and set just before 4:00; this amounts to under eight hours of sunshine during the day. This is very different from what I am used to, of course. It was a little strange to me to see so many people just carrying on with life despite how dark it was so early in the evening. Of course, these folks don’t really have much of a choice, but it was still kind of bewildering to see the streets crammed with people just going about their business even though it was getting dark at 4:15.
It’s 6:30 in the morning, now. Like I said, I have already been up for a few hours, and it’ll still be a few more before it’s light outside.
Actually, as I am saying this, I am remembering the first morning back from our stay in Spain being pretty awful. ↩︎
See my quick “thumbs down” on Amsterdam back in 2019. ↩︎