One Last Look at Nyhavn, Then South Through Flensburg to Hamburg

The last thing I did in Copenhagen was walk to Nyhavn before checkout, early enough that the canal still had the whole morning mostly to itself, gabled houses in yellow and red and blue standing over a row of old wooden sailing boats with their masts doubled perfectly in still water. I had seen this exact view online more times than I could count before this trip even started, and it did the thing Brandenburg Gate had done in Berlin a few days earlier, felt less like discovery and more like finally standing where a photograph had always promised I eventually would. I did not linger. There was a bag to finish packing and a train that was not going to wait for one more angle of the same harbor, so I let one good long look be the whole visit and turned back toward the hostel.

The way south went through Flensburg, a name I knew only as a stop on a ticket rather than anywhere I actually saw in daylight. Three hours to get there, a short changeover on a platform cold enough to make the wait feel longer than it was, then another two hours plus into Hamburg, arriving close to midnight with nothing left in me but the walk from the station to a hostel bed.

Some days on a rail pass are entirely about the rail pass.

Borders and platforms and the particular blur of a country moving past a train window after dark, that was the whole day once Nyhavn was behind me. I do not remember much of the Flensburg changeover beyond the cold and the specific tiredness of a platform at the wrong end of a long day, the kind that makes you stop bothering to read the departure board and just wait for the right train to show up. Two weeks into a trip built almost entirely out of these rail pass days, I had stopped resenting them. They were the connective tissue holding together every city that did get a proper look, and Copenhagen to Hamburg turned out to be one of the longer, quieter stretches of that tissue. Hamburg would have to wait until morning to actually introduce itself.