CT to Copenhagen!

25-26 August 2019

Thanks to a gift from Aunt Katharine, I was able to schedule a shuttle from New Haven straight down to JFK for my flight out to Europe the night of Sunday the 25th. Katharine (Conroy) kindly offered to drop me off at New Haven, and the rest of the ride to JFK was a breeze. I even took a nap.

I had arrived according to plan a little over three hours before my flight, so before I entered the river of lines and hallways ultimately leading to the plane I had the time to spread weight around my luggage. My constraints were two 20kg checked bags, and 10kgs total for my carry-on and “personal-item.” Luckily I was right at the limit of 50kg according to the test scales by the check-in…if I wore my coat with its pockets filled with the smallest but heaviest non-metallic items I could find. 🙂

As you can see, I was very precise with the weight.

…but when I saw this…

I figured I could surely do better.

Actually, it wasn’t as close as I thought, because when I got up to the check-in, their scales were only to the tenth of a kilogram, and read a whole 0.4kg less than the test scales.

The flight was a bit late, but uneventful from then on. I watched the movie Avatar, which I had been interested in seeing since probably middle school (I liked it), and was able to doze off pretty well before we arrived in Copenhagen. There I connected with Bo Christensen (his father and he both were in the number of Danes who stayed and worked at Grandpa Emil’s AZ farm, so they are family friends). He had a few hours left of work at his office, so I got to make a walking tour of the medieval downtown section of Copenhagen for about 2 hours. It has no skyscrapers because as Bo told me, there is a height limit of 5-6 stories practically everywhere.

The highlights were an amber store that I stopped in at…

the Hans Christian Anderson statue…

this church (which was my most favorite of the day)…

and its organ!

I found more times to use my camera stand–right here it is straddling one of the pews.

Of course, most of the two hours was just walking through the streets, around the quarter that has the longest pedestrian street in the world. This is very representative picture: LOTS of bikes, and often the lights hung on wires above the street to save space. What I realized once I got to Hungary is that the bicycle traffic culture in Copenhagen is excellent, with the riders politely making their “excuse me”s with their bells.

This midieval heart of the city is surrounded by water, and on the waterfront they have an activity strip of sorts, with an enclosed court for soccer and basketball, as well as these fun little trampolines set at ground level into the concrete.

At this point I had gone from the upper left corner of the medieval sector south to where it is bounded by water and then followed this line to the east. To meet back with Bo, I of course decided to go up the famous canal right there with its colorful boats and houses.

And then it was back to Bo’s house for the night, where I met his wife and two children!

Sincerely,
Samuel Rausch

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The success of these days was made possible by Aunt Katharine, Katharine Conroy, and Bo Christensen. Köszönöm szépen! (Thank you very much!)