Saturday was the big day. We all (i.e. Heather, Son and myself) trooped down to Copenhagen to fetch Daughter from the airport after her year in Brazil.
As the major point of entry to the country that gave the world such buildings as the Sydney Opera House, the main terminal building at Kastrup Airport, Copenhagen is a design nightmare. It is impossible to walk in a straight line: As soon as you walk in the main doors you have dodge to avoid the queues for train tickets. Further along, past the bottleneck created by the carefully-placed lifts down to the train platforms, you have to weave to left and right to get between queues for the check-in desks on both sides as, coming at you in the opposite direction and equally weaving are the streams of newly arrived passengers. A burger King Franchise and a Starbucks are tacked on as an afterthought and the whole thing is housed in a building no larger than a provincial sports centre. It can be chaos at 6 in the morning. At 6pm on a Saturday afternoon it was pretty much impossible.
Arriving passengers emerge from a twin set of swing doors underneath a large balcony, giving the whole area a gloomy, subterranean atmosphere and despite there being barriers to (ineffectively) keep waiting friends and relatives clear of the doors, there is often such a scrum of people that the arriving passengers have to go around or plough through the middle of them.
The terminal building is held up as an example of the best in Danish architecture but, for a building with so much glass on the outside, there is disappointingly little natural light inside. Like so many public buildings today, it sacrifices function to form and modishness and its main purpose seems to be to glorify the architect rather than to be of any practical utility. Or, as another kindred spirit I found on The Web put it…
’All in all, this is more an overpriced shopping mall with some planes than an airport to help with convenient and efficient travel. Avoid it if you can’
The main concourse at Kastrup airport on a quiet day. Picture taken from the balcony over the arrivals cavern. The way out is straight ahead, just where the building tapers into the lift shafts. Oh yes, and the baggage handling system is crap. On the last three times I have been through Kastrup I have been delayed because of some problem or other with the baggage handling. Saturday was no exception
Daughter’s journey from Brazil took somewhat over 24 hours, including a 4-hour layover in São Paulo and a SIX hour layover in Frankfurt. To add insult to injury, the Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt to Copenhagen was delayed and it took the baggage a full forty minutes to be unloaded and delivered. According to Daughter, everyone was waiting at the baggage reclaim when suddenly all the carousels stopped at once. For a flight that should have landed at 17.55, we were finally away just after seven.
Kastrup airport arrivals cavernWe were curious (and not a little apprehensive) to see how her year away might have changed her, but right from the moment she finally emerged through the swing doors it was obvious it was the same Daughter we know and love. She was even wearing an 25-year-old t-shirt of mine which I got from the
Great Western Arms pub in Aynho, that she had commandeered a couple of years ago, it being too small for me.
She was slimmer than when she had left: she’d been eating an awful lot of fresh fruit, but she wasn’t as tanned as I had imagined She explained that she had been living in the south of the country and it is winter there at the moment. Her language was a little different. Odd words of Portugese slipped into the conversation without her being aware of it. Her English had suffered from having spent a year where her two best friends were from Texas and New York City, and a definite transatlantic twang was detectable, but we’ll soon get that out of her.
We didn’t know how she was going to be after her long journey, suddenly being transplanted from one world to quite another: Hyper, depressed, sleepy maybe. But she was just…her. She was a little bit like a tourist at first, taking pictures of everything, and lots of us all together, and as we drove towards the ferry, through little towns and villages she comented: ” Danish houses – they’re just so…Danish! No fences around them, no barbed wire, no gates or security guards. And where are all the dogs? In Brazil there are dogs roaming the streets wherever you look”.
We finally got home around midnight, having made a small detour to pick up her best friend who we took back for a sleepover. On the Sunday we were going to Heather’s parents’ summerhouse because pretty much the whole family would be there to celebrate Heather’s mother’s birthday. Late in the afternoon she got a text from an old schoolfriend that they were holding a beach party in a town about 20 miles away, so we drove her and her friend up there, and picked them up again at 2 am. Yesterday she went into the city to hang out with another old schoolfriend and stay the night there. I’m assuming we’ll see her today but early tomorrow morning we are driving her to the city railway station and she is off for over a week at a huge international scout camp in the south of the country.
So things are pretty much back to the way they were before she left. Our daughter is home, but never at home!