Warning: Reflective travel may dismantle your preconceived notions of a place and lead you to wonder why you left home in the first place. Proceed with caution, and take a moment to double check whether or not your tickets are refundable.

It All Started in the Calgary Airport

To be fair, given the state of the Calgary International Airport on August 17, I would have felt guilty traveling anywhere. Walking through the departures area, I pass several signs welcoming evacuees from Yellowknife, the capital of Canada’s Northwest Territories. The entire city of Yellowknife, a place I have visited several times and truly adore, is under mandatory evacuation because of wildfires. Many evacuees came south to Calgary or Edmonton.

Frankly, travel by air has become an increasingly ambivalent experience for me over the last 10 years, and all of my sparse air travel in the past 5 years has been to see family. It is impossible to ignore the contribution air travel makes to global CO2 emissions, and to climate change overall. In a University of Washington course called Sustainability, Resilience, and Society, I learned that one of the biggest factors to my personal ecological footprint is occasional air travel. A small amount of air travel quickly negates the food I grow at home, the kilometers I travel by bicycle, and the cool temperature at which I keep my home during Calgary’s chilly winters.

The travel restrictions associated with the Covid-19 pandemic taught me that I can be just as happy traveling close to home. As I say goodbye to my wife before entering the security line for the international terminal, I wonder through tears why on earth I decided to go to Copenhagen for a month.

So Why AM I in Copenhagen?

I don’t know why I’m here. I could spin you a tale about how my work for a municipality will benefit from visiting this socially progressive northern city. Or I could ramble on about my interest in comparative colonialism, and how this course will bring together so much of my previous learning. If I’m being honest, though, the truth is probably more personal than that.

I am coming off a hectic year of working full-time, taking an almost-full course load, and raising my 9-year-old foster son (with my wife). I have such a full and privileged life, yet I’m exhausted. I don’t remember who I am, and in a way it does feel like I needed to fly halfway around the world to try and figure it out. I want to disrupt the routines in my life in order to find new ways to grow. When the opportunity to study abroad came up, I trusted my gut and went for it.

I am here to get to know who I am when I am by myself. I am here to find out what I enjoy doing when nobody is depending on me for something. Being in Copenhagen and taking a course on Colonialism, Culture, and Public Art are both a lot of fun, but they aren’t the main storyline for me. I will have to zoom out a little farther to really figure that out.

Taking Off the Rose-Colored Glasses

It’s easy to romanticize other cities. Among municipalities, Copenhagen has a reputation as being socially progressive, with plenty of cycling infrastructure, local gastronomy, and practical yet elegant design to show for it. Yet, when I experience the spaces in which I find myself here in Copenhagen, it’s not much different than many other cities I’ve been to.

Take Copenhagen Pride, for example. I arrived in time to attend the parade in the morning and visit the festival in the evening. The parade was much like what I have seen in other cities – a mixture of local organizations and large companies celebrating Pride. The only noticeable exception was that nobody was giving away cheap junk, which was refreshing. It was familiar to me, and it was a relief to see so many sexual and gender diverse people celebrating their collective diversity. For me, one of the only things I get anxious about when traveling is how I will be treated as a sexual and gender diverse person. I always wonder if I will be able to be myself in a new place, and if I will be safe. Participating in Copenhagen Pride was helpful for alleviating those fears. I even made friends with an old lesbian who invited me to march in the parade with her group, called Female Oxygen.

But, much like Pride at home in Calgary, parades and even laws don’t always equate to safety. While walking back to the hotel after a class lecture a few days later, I passed a group of Greenpeace volunteers and talked with one of them. We quickly realized I wasn’t eligible to donate because I don’t live in Denmark, but he kept chatting and I had nowhere to be, so we got to talking. Normal stuff, where are you from, what’s it like there. He told me he is from the southwest part of Denmark, and lives in Copenhagen now.

Then, out of nowhere he went on a rant that started with: ”I’m all for people living their lives and being themselves, but I don’t see why all of a sudden they think they can tell me what to call them.” Wait a minute. Are we talking about gender diversity? Is this an angry rant about name changes and pronouns? In socially progressive Copenhagen?! That’s exactly what was happening, and my guess is that he decided I should be the unwilling recipient of his opinions because of my own unconventional gender expression. (If you are wearing pearls, now is the time to clutch them, this guy was very out of line.)

I let him finish, then abruptly ended the conversation and continued on my way. The moment stuck with me. In Calgary, many people hold these types of views, but they would never share them with me, an outspoken gender diverse person, in a setting like this. This small interaction was important as a challenge to the socially progressive Copenhagen that existed in my head. It reminded me that cities don’t have tidy ways of delineating what is acceptable and what is not. Cities, rather, are socially constructed sets of norms that are upheld every day by the millions of interactions people have with one another. To understand a place, then, is not just to visit its most famous monuments or participate in its most popular activities. Rather, perhaps, it is to notice the ways in which people interact with a place and with each other.

Learning to Notice

Slowing down and noticing does not come naturally to me, at least not these days. Like I mentioned, I’m here in part because my life has been too hectic for me to reflect on who I am, why I am here, and what my relationship is with the places where I exist. It is going to take some practice for me to build this skill of noticing, and what better place to start than Nyhavn, the iconic canal lined with colorful old buildings.

I sit on the canal wall and do a meditative breathing exercise that my wife and I often do together when we are traveling. In this exercise, called ten breaths, the objective is to take ten deep breaths while meditating (with your eyes closed), without letting your mind be distracted by whatever is going on around you. I do pretty well, even though someone breaks a glass during my breathing exercise.

Then, I do a noticing activity that I used to do with kids when I worked in after-school care. I take note of five things I see, four things I hear, three things I smell, two things I feel, and one thing I taste. A flat for sale; a food delivery bicycle; a skinny building built between two other buildings; car tires lining the canal; a duck; ambient noise of people talking in outdoor restaurants; a classical guitarist; bicycle bells; cutlery tapping against plates; smoked fish; hot dogs; something musty; the old wood I am sitting on; a very light, almost unnoticeable, breeze; a fennel-y flavor.

Putting it All Together

As I let myself settle into a more sensory place, I experience Nyhavn in a more honest way. Turning my phone off also helps me turn off the part of my brain that wonders what vantage point will yield the best Instagram shot. As the sun starts going down and goosebumps appear on my skin, I grab a bicycle and pedal to the hotel. I am rewarded with a cotton candy pink and blue sunset. I briefly consider stopping to snap a few photos, but instead I take a deep breath in, look at how the buildings change color at this time of day, listen to the noises of the city at dusk, and feel the texture of the road as my bicycle wheels rotate.

I’m still not sure what the meaning of this study abroad experience will be for me, and I’m learning that I might not care. If I can return to Calgary with an ability to be more present in day-to-day moments, and to move more reflectively and gently through life, I will be content.