We made our appointment with the contractor who works with the Danish embassy for first thing in the morning. The plan was to stay in Houston the night before the appointment. The morning of our trip dawned chilly and dreary making the four hour drive seem interminable. Turning into a Cracker Barrel for some sustenance we managed to hit a pothole and pop a tire. It was not an auspicious beginning to our trip.
The next morning, also grey and cold, we were downtown at the contractor’s office before they opened. We thought we were there just for fingerprints and pictures. In and out we would have enough time to enjoy a bit of our old stomping grounds and still head home before rush hour. Instead they spent hours duplicating, and charging for, work that my husband had already spent hours completing and turning into the embassy.
Finally it came time for fingerprints and photos. Not until then do they tell us that they don’t take pictures of kids under six! Believing that we were there specifically to get photos taken we didn’t bring a spare passport photo. Lil Bit and I take off to the cold and windswept streets of downtown Houston for the the FedEx office the employee pointed us to. They don’t do child photos either.
They recommend the U.S. passport office down the street. I go one block in the wind and the cold before deciding to try to find my way there through the maze of tunnels under the city when it hits me that this isn’t a passport photo. I call the contractor and confirm that the picture does not have to meet passport standards. Back to the FedEx office where a very patient young man spends a good ten to fifteen minutes helping coax my daughter to stand still and not smile at the camera.
Because the contractor took all bloody day rather than fight rush hour traffic through the rain we decided to just stay another night in Houston. The next morning was a call with the relocation specialist (RS) assigned to us by the company my husband’s company uses. As it turns out she is the third culture daughter of African (I am deliberately not naming the country) diplomats. She grew up moving from country to country and speaks four languages. She’s married to a Dane and has mixed kids. When I was doing the research on places to live in Copenhagen the neighborhood of Nørrebro as a gentrifying, multicultural area seemed like one of the best options to avoid living in a completely white world. The fact that it was still a bit rough around the edges meant it was also affordable and I was still focused on having four rooms.
The RS, who by this point had been living in Denmark for decades, was not on board. She pointed out that as important as racial mirrors were, that the right kind of mirrors were also important. The people in Nørrebro, she insisted, were not examples of the kind of folks we would want Lil Bit to look up to. Besides while Denmark was quite homogeneous Copenhagen was quite diverse. She steered us to the expat friendly neighborhoods of Frederiksberg and Østerbro. I’d looked at Østerbro and dismissed it as too expensive. Turns out it wasn’t.
The other good news from the trip is that we got to have Korean food with two of the few friends that we have that still live in the city. L and I have been friends since we worked together in the 90s. In the in-between L and her long time partner J had gotten married. Because the wedding was only a week after my hysterectomy this was our first time seeing them since the marriage. Our time with them, as always, was too short but it was wonderful to see them looking so well.
As we hugged our goodbyes it really hit home how fast this thing was going.