After Singapore it was back to Copenhagen to catch our flight to the US.
I don’t know if it is because I was briefly an Army Brat or just a quirk of my family. Or just me. But I have the habit of calling wherever I am laying my head that night “home”. Like, “Let’s get home to the hotel.” I hesitate to use that term when referencing Louisiana, or at least the town in which I was raised. For all practical purposes it is my hometown. One to which I have never felt a deep connection.
Maybe because there is little distinctive about it. Other than one or two iconic landmarks it could literally be any small, yet sprawling, suburban city in the American South. That includes the demographics and socioeconomic vagaries. If not for family I doubt I would ever step foot in it again.
Anyway.
When we left Korea, we did the same thing we did when we left Denmark: Took a long vacay then passed back through Seoul before flying to the US. That time we stayed with friends who threw us a party. A party that turned out to have a very tiny guest list as the people we expected to show up dropped out one by two. In the end it was just the four of us and mounds upon mounds of food and I learned, yet again, that folks can be flakey as fuck. So, this time we didn’t even tell people we were coming back through until we were almost there. We ended up meeting up with a few of the friends we had made in what were moments unsurprisingly both bitter and sweet.
First, let me tell you about the hotel. It was different. Still a bit under renovation it seemed very, um, institutional in a Scandinavian type of way. When we went to Taiwan there was a typhoon, which is the start of just about everyone’s description of their trip to Taiwan during storm season. We were up on a mountain when the warning came, and the locals all advised us to head downhill into the city. Our taxi driver directed us to a government hotel used primarily to house military. The place felt sturdy enough to withstand an alien invasion much less a typhoon. We barely heard the storm. Heck, SM slept through it.
The hotel in Copenhagen, the name was the CPH Hotel at DGI Byen, reminded me of the one in Taipei with a Nordic twist. Sturdy. Clean. Basic. As in Taipei the rooms were unusually large for hotels in the area. Breakfast was typically Danish with fresh fruit, meats and cheeses, the usual assortment of coffee, teas, and juices, a choice of preserves, copious amounts of butter, and absolutely gorgeous breads and pastries. That said the biggest selling point to this hotel was that staying here allows guests access to a community recreation center that includes a pool. Getting a pool at a budget hotel in Denmark is amazeballs.
The hotel also had a nice location. From the website, “We are fortunate to located next to the Vesterbro district on one side, Copenhagen Centre on the other and only 50 metres from Copenhagen Central Station. The Meatpacking District (Kødbyen) is also just behind the hotel, Tivoli and Strøget are a few minutes away, and it only takes 20 minutes getting to the airport.”
Kødbyen is a former industrial area that has since been revitalized into an area known for its dining scene and nightlife. During warmer months the area would be filled with live music and people eating at café tables scattered along the sidewalks. That said, everything in Copenhagen is pretty much walking distance wherever you are in the city because the city is so small. Our neighborhood, Østerbro, was considered a suburb and it was still a ten-minute bicycle ride to city center. A bike was faster than the bus.
Packing for a multi season trip is always hard. One of the issues was we didn’t have the right luggage for the trip we were taking. When we moved to Copenhagen we hadn’t planned on doing anymore backpacking trips or trips that lasted weeks or months for some time. So, the luggage we brought with us included the type of roller bags that are easy to get from the airport or train station to the hotel via taxi or car sharing app. Not for walking about for any distance or schlepping up and down stairs. For the trip we put together the other bags we had: a couple of smaller backpacks and some carry-ons plus the carrier for LB and made do. Until Chiang Mai.
There we each bought a couple of 70 liter Thule duffle bags that replaced the menagerie of backpacks and carry-ons we’d cobbled together. They are made to be duffle bags but come with backpack straps. Even though the straps aren’t padded it was still so much more comfortable than the three bags I had been schlepping around. (Nope, not getting paid by Thule.) Before it looked like we had a mass of stuff. Now everything not only fit easily in two bags it looked neat and organized. Including the winter gear which we wore every day in Copenhagen.
It’s also harder to pack for multi-season trips when you don’t have a “sporty” body type. A lot of the things a thinner woman could comfortably wear I simply cannot. And I am not talking about optics. I’m talking about chafing. I had dragged light winter gear for myself and LB along the whole trip. On more than a few occasions the jackets and gloves came in handy: Malmo, the UK, as it got colder in Lisbon, a few windy nights in Cape Town, even early morning in the mountains of Chiang Mai. On top of the jackets and gloves I had hats for both of us and cool pants for LB.
My advice when packing for a multi season trip is not to assume you’ll be spending most of your time in the colder regions in cozy hotel rooms and comfy cabs. Hats and gloves don’t take up much room and the jackets that scrunch down into something that can fit in your pocket are a great investment. Otherwise, layer, layer, layer. Even a four-year-old gets tired of an indoor pool every day, all day. We were able to take LB to the playground, in Denmark, in January, because we had the clothes to keep her, and ourselves, warm.
As mentioned, we also met up with friends. Our dear friend K and her family had us and another friend, J, over to her enviable apartment for a scrumptious dinner. Then it was to the airport and back to the US.