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a problem in Neumünster
Thursday, September 5 2024
location: room 328, Hotel Bella Grande, Copenhagen, Denmark
This morning we left our hotel room and walked past the entrance to world-famous Tivoli Gardens (where one one amusement ride was visible above the trees) to a the Copenhagen Central Station so we could catch a train south to Hamburg, Germany. The inside of the station is strikingly beautiful with its exposed trusses of what I initial thought were cast iron. But as I looked at them more closely, I could see that they were actually made of wooden timbers bolted together with lots of hardware. My initial concern was coffee, which I bought at a 7-Eleven inside the station (7-Elevens in Denmark don't much resemble those in the United States; the other day I think we'd bought our SIM card at a 7-Eleven-branded vending machine.) Another vendor in the station is Max, a Swedish-based fast-food chain. Gretchen had read that they have vegan burgers and "chicken" sandwiches, so she got us each examples of the latter as well as sides of fries. We ended up eating that a not long into our ride to Hamburg, and they were pretty good.
As one would imagine, trains in Denmark are comfortable and well-managed. There was a European-style 240 volt outlet for me to plug in to, and there was free Wifi, meaning I could live the way to which I have grown accustomed with my travel Thinkpad open on the tray in front of me. For awhile there was even room in other seats to spread out into, though a bunch of customers climbed aboard further to the west. (To avoid the water, the train initially went almost due west for 150 miles, crossing a long bridge to a stepping-stone island to the Jutland mainland just east of Nyborg.)
Down in Germany, though, the train came to a stop in the city of Neumünster, and there was a lot of blather in German on the PA system that caused a bunch of people to start leaving the train. (This rather reminded me of being on a subway bound for lower Manhattan on the morning of 9Eleven, 2001). Then came the English version, where we were told a "fire brigade" was dealing with some incident on the tracks further south and that our train could go no further. We were told we would have to make other arrangements if we were going beyond Neumünster, which (of course) we were.
So then we joined the other bewildered passengers milling around on the platform in the Neumünster train station. Gretchen eventually started talking to a fit middle aged gentleman in a uniform that suggested he might be an airline pilot. He spoke excellent English and soon told us what the story was and what we could expect to happen. Evidently there is a big east-west shipping canal called the Kiel Canal cutting across the base of Jutland south of Neumünster, and a bus had crashed and caught fire in a tunnel under it, causing such severe damage that trains could no longer use a nearby bridge. (A later version of the story that we heard was that the bus had been a battery-powered one whose battery made it unexpectedly tall.) He said that there was no obvious replacement for the train and certainly none was being provided by authorities. Possible solutions were to take a train back north and take a route to Hamburg that crossed the Kiel Canal in some other location.
Then the uniformed gentleman said something about a message he'd just received saying emergency buses were being sent and that we should now go to the bus station next door. As he left the station, a gaggle of a dozen or more people followed him, thinking he was the person most likely to know what to do. But that thing about the emergency buses didn't seem to be true. So then Gretchen decided to assemble eight or so people to rent a large minivan-style taxi. She quickly assembled six other people and was about to load stuff into the cab when some guys with enormous bikes started cramming their bikes in the back. Evidently they'd agreed to a price while Gretchen was trying to round up people. Or the cab driver had said he'd take them and then told Gretchen that he'd also take us.
A few minutes later we climbed into a cab with three young German men (one of whom was of African descent). But after some tense banter with the driver, the young men jumped out of the cab, telling us that the driver was a bad man. Evidently he was now quoting a higher price, and they weren't willing to pay. Out of solidarity, we abandoned the cab too. We tried to find another cab for us and these young men, but there were few if any cabs left in Neumünster. By the time we'd found another cab that seemed willing to take us, the young men had drifted away, and we ended up instead riding with a couple of youngish Danish men who looked to be in their thirties. They were part of a 12-man group that had been planning a party trip to Hamburg for years, plans that had been further delayed by the covid pandemic. The capitalism of inelastic demand had rendered our ride very expensive: the four of us were now paying 60 euros each for the 42 mile ride to Hamburg.
Initially, the Autobahn freeway was uncrowded, and our driver was able to drive the Volkswagen we were in fast as 200 km/hr (124 miles per hour). That was a little terrifying, though the car seemed to perform well and driver wasn't doing anything reckless otherwise. It was just that the other cars on the road seemed to be standing still by comparison. Later, though, as we approached Hamburg, we got bogged down in traffic and sometimes crawled along at walking speeds. I knew we were getting close to Hamburg, though, when I saw a Space-Needle-style tower of the sort that is only ever found in big cities.
Along the way, Gretchen kept asking the Danes about their lives. She was enjoying the chance to actually talk to Danes after visiting their beautiful capital city. One of the Danes was a landlord and his family even owned a house in northern Italy, one he occasionally visited after twenty-some-hour drives (something he said he'd occasionally do basically non-stop). The other had worked for some aid organization in India partially funded by the Danish government. It involved helping teachers better handle kids with learning disabilities. (One of the things he found himself convincing teachers not to do was beating the children.) Fairly early in the conversation, the landlording Dane said that he hoped to one day travel to Montana, go hunting, and shoot a deer. As you can imagine, Gretchen was horrified at hearing this (more so for her than it was for me, since I grew up knowing lots of people who hunted and even hunted myself). When it came her turn to respond to this, Gretchen said that we live out in nature, but we prefer to enjoy it without killing anybody. The landlording Dane said that he figured out himself that she wasn't too keen on hunting by our "silence" in response. Considering that, though, the conversation was never derailed.
Later in the conversation, Gretchen asked the Danes what they thought about immigration. One of them responded by saying there was widespread consensus in Denmark on immigration policy, which amounted to tight restrictions on immigration coupled with a generous welfare package to help new arrivals get established. The Danes then told us that such consensus doesn't exit elsewhere in Europe and that, for example, it was best not to talk to a German about the subject, since opinions there are highly polarized.
The cab driver let us all off at the destination in Hamburg that the Danes were headed to and refused to make a separate stop for us at our hotel, saying that traffic was too bad. So we shrugged and decided to walk the rest of the way. Fortunately, we had less than a mile to go, and there was ample free WiFi along the way. This allowed Gretchen to get into touch with our friends Kelly and Brian from Scotland, who were also in Hamburg to board the river boat we would all be cruising on. At the time, they were at a cat café called Katzentempel about a block from where we would be staying, the 25 Hours Hotel.
25 Hours was in an old building sunk into the landscape [a couple days later I would learn that much of this part of Hamburg had been elevated with trucked-in fill, leaving older buildings to be partially buried or at the bottom of pits]. It had been renovated in a quirky manner, like a restrained variant of the McMenamins franchise in the Pacific Northwest. There was a brief problem with the computer that kept us from getting access to our room for a few minutes, which was in keeping with the bad luck we'd had today. But then we were finally in our room, Gretchen could take a shower, and I could crack open a black beer from the minifridge (since the contents of the minibar were all compliments of the house). But we didn't stay there long, because Gretchen wanted to meet up with Kelly and Brian while they were still at the Katzentempel.
The Katzentempel was just what one with expect: a normal-looking café but with eight or nine cats, all of them available for adoption. There were cat toys strewn about tastefully and even shelves on the wall for the cats to leap between. As for the cats themselves, they seemed mostly indifferent to humans. The rules of the place stated that only cat that were awake could be petted, which seemed fair enough. The Katzentempel had a number of fun-looking vegan sandwiches, so I ordered the one featuring fake pulled pork with a side of fries along with an oat milk cappuccino. The woman who waited on us was Asian and spoke English in a high-pitch sing-song that sounded more like a cat's meow than anything else. It had me wondering if that voice was part of the reason she'd gotten the job.
Our conversation with Kelly and Brian was mostly about our absurd travel from Copenhagen. They then told us about the weird AirBnB they're staying in that is surrounded by a daycare center. They also showed us pictures from a Hamburg attraction they'd been to called Miniatur Wunderland, featuring tiny scaled-down models of various cities complete with moving trains and flying vehicles that disappeared through flaps that opened in a fabric sky. (When Gretchen had mentioned this place to the Danes, they'd rolled their eyes and said it was "the most German thing ever.") The model train aspect of Miniatur Wunderland reminded me of a childhood friend named Mike True I'd had for a couple summers after my family moved to the farm south of Staunton. Mike was from a fairly wealthy family and had an extensive model train collection. But it was his name that caught Brian's attention, and he kept referring to Mike True from then on. (The name sounds particularly ridiculous when pronounced with Brian's Scottish accent.)
The four of us left the Katzentempel and went for a stroll among the old warehouses of Hamburg. In places the old buildings were replaced with much newer ones, some of which were rather ugly. This likely reflected reconstruction after heavy bombing during WWII.
Back in our hotel, Gretchen and I briefly discussed an article she'd read about how laws in our society are constructed in such a way as to disadvantage women in murder cases. The law, for example, provides people a good justification for killing in self defence when the attacker is a stranger. But the law frowns on such defenses when the attacker is known to the victim. Thus a woman who kills her abusive husband stands a good chance of facing a life sentence regardless of how terrible that husband was, since the prosecution merely needs to ask the rhetorical question, "why didn't she leave him if he was so bad." But if she has kids and a terrible job, she might stay with a terrible man for a considerable time, since leaving him would be difficult. And she probably came from a home where living with a terrible man was just the way things were done.
The big wooden timbers holding up the roof of Copenhagen's Central Rail Station.
Click to enlarge.
A cat, Brian, and Kelly at the Katzentempel.
Click to enlarge.
Gretchen with a cat at the Katzentempel.
Click to enlarge.
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