DocAndersen
One of the oldest amusement parks in the world, Tivoli it is located in Copenhagen Denmark. There are many memories I have of walking in, by and near Tivoli. The first time I was in Copenhagen with my parents it was right after Christmas. It was pretty cold, after a lot of time spent in the tropics, none of us were prepared for cold again. We hadn’t been in cold air in more than a year. But we wandered around Copenhagen and by Tivoli several times. One of my all-time favorite memories of traveling home from Thailand was being in Copenhagen. We found a toy store with the most intricate animatronic Santa’s Workshop display in the main window of the store.
We went to see that in the evening several times that week we were there. It was an amazing display. My father had a goal of seeing the Little Mermaid in the harbor. I have the picture we took, he and I, of the Little Mermaid. One of the things I had been thinking about was the famous Danish open-face sandwich. I don’t know why that stuck with me so much. I grew up reading the stories of Hand Christian Andersen (no relation, Andersen was not our family name, that was changed when my family arrived at Ellis Island in the 1890s). You would think based on that, and I would have wanted to see the Little Mermaid (I did but nowhere near as much as my father did).
Or that I would have wanted to see ice skating on the Frozen canals (I didn’t). In fact, when we were there it was cold, but the canals were not yet frozen. It was an open-faced Danish sandwich that caught my fancy. Copenhagen was one of the stops on our way home from Thailand. It was the last stop we would make together. Mom took my sisters, and my home while dad went to Paris to debrief at the UNESCO Global Headquarters. Denmark was where my father, father’s family had been from originally. Our family from the area just south of Copenhagen known as Jutland. Copenhagen felt like home the first time I visited. It felt like home every single time I have been.
