From Paris to Copenhagen, Fueled by a Little Mystery Meat.

I hate graffiti, and I can tell you that they don’t seem to be coping with it very well in Germany. It’s everywhere. All along the route from Hamburg to the German border on the way to Copenhagen, I saw new noise-abatement walls along the tracks. On some stretches, we went roaring past crews at work installing brand new ones. 

 And, of course, here’s what happens, probably within days or even hours. I suppose that people living along the rail lines are demanding them. But they must also be able to see what’s being done to these new walls and, indeed, to every other broad, flat surface that’s a bit out-of-the-way. I even spotted a six-car commuter train that was spray-painted front to back. Why can’t we restrict the sale of that stuff to kids? We do it for beer and booze, for heaven’s sake. Why not for spray paint? 

 I’m now in Copenhagen and happily settled in the Plaza hotel which, as you can see from the photo taken from my room, is less than 100 yards from the city’s main railway station. (By the way, note all the bicycles!) The two trains bringing me here from Paris met 80% of my expectations and were 100% interesting, to wit …  

 
It was just after 8:00 p.m. when my City Night Line train left Gare de l’Est in Paris for the overnight trip to Hamburg. When I boarded, my compartment was dark because of the hour, and I couldn’t see to locate buttons and switches for lights and the A/C. Not to worry, I thought, that would all be cleared up when the car attendant appeared. Except he never did. I finally figured most of it out, but didn’t see him until this morning when he handed me a small paper bag containing my breakfast. 

The repast included coffee in a paper cup, orange juice in a little box the size of a deck of cards, a pastry literally as big as a roll of quarters, tiny plastic cubes of margarine and jam, and a pinkish substance, also encased in plastic, that an olfactory memory of long ago identified as probably liverwurst. Welcome to first class on a City Night Line train, brought to you by the folks at Deutsche Bahn.  

Never mind. Everything else was fine and the segment from Hamburg to Copenhagen on an ICE (Inter-City Express) was interesting because it included being aboard the train as it rolled right up and into the hold of a large ferry that took us for a 45-minute ride from Germany to Denmark across what I gather is a narrow channel of the Bering Sea. 

 
Tomorrow is a free day here in Copenhagen and I intend to make a nice relaxing day of it, although I was distressed to learn that the museum honoring Danish Resistance in World War II is closed because of fire damage to its building. 
 
Here comes an obvious segué: A young Danish man I met some months back told me it was best, when in Denmark, to pronounce the name of this capital city as “co-pen-HAY-gun”. If it comes out “co-pen-HAH-gun”, he said the locals will think I’m German.