A Square Full of Giant Dogs in Malmo, and Copenhagen by Canal

Copenhagen in the morning meant walking the canals before I had fully decided what the day was for, colorful facades doing their postcard thing under a sky that stayed the same flat gray the whole time, water sitting still enough to double every rooftop that leaned over it. Bikes were stacked three deep against every railing the way they apparently are here regardless of weather, locks looped through spokes and frames with a casualness that suggested nobody in this city had ever seriously worried about theft. I had no destination beyond the canal itself, which turned out to be enough of one.

Malmo is close enough that the forty minute train barely registers as leaving the country, a bridge and then a different language on the station signs and that is more or less the entire crossing. I stepped off at the Central Station, a glass and steel building doing a modern impression of a greenhouse, bikes locked in ranks along the fence outside almost exactly like Copenhagen's had been, and walked into a square where five or six enormous shaggy dogs, something Leonberger sized and lion maned, were being untangled from each other's leashes by a small crowd of very patient owners while everyone else in the square pretended not to stare, myself included. Nobody explained why there were this many enormous dogs in one place on a Sunday afternoon, and I decided not to ask, on the theory that some questions are better left as good memories than answered ones.

I wandered from there without much of a plan, into a courtyard strung with Christmas wreaths on its upper balconies, a shop called Arsenik glowing through its windows, a couple of small stone trolls guarding a doorway that nobody else seemed to notice, a couple of trees leaning against a stand waiting to be bought and taken home by someone. Kungsparken gave the afternoon its best photograph: a windmill at Slottsparken, black sails frozen mid turn against a flat white sky, its whole wooden body doubled perfectly in a puddle at my feet so that for a second there were two windmills and one of them was upside down, patient and useless and exactly the kind of thing a park keeps around for no reason other than that it has always been there.

A country I had not planned to visit, for the length of one windmill and one square full of dogs.

The train back took another forty minutes, Sweden turning back into Denmark somewhere over water I did not see the second time either, and by the time Copenhagen had me again it was fully dark. A Christmas market somewhere near the old town had set up a small herd of life sized reindeer in red harnesses, standing behind a fence on wet cobblestones like they were waiting their turn to pull something, lights strung through the trees behind them doing most of the work the moon would have done on a clearer night. I walked the last stretch home past orange and red facades glowing under streetlights, a car easing down a narrow street lined with shuttered shopfronts, and worked out that the whole day had cost exactly two train tickets, nothing booked in advance, nothing planned past breakfast.