Previously: Euro Pilgrimage 1985-2025 Pt. 11: Sligo respite, Live Aid, then back to France for the D-Day beaches.
(I’m not a Bryan Adams fan, but his song from ’85 about ’69 is the one I come back to.)
With an informative and respectful pilgrimage to the D-Day beaches completed, it was Thursday morning in Bayeux, and things were about to get hectic.
My provisional itinerary for the remainder of July called for a sweeping rail movement north and east, traveling from Bayeux via Paris toward Copenhagen in Denmark, with an undetermined stop in between. A week-long sampling of Scandinavia would follow, with the ultimate destination being Helsinki, Finland, just before month’s end.
Helsinki represented the summer’s only truly fixed and immutable date, because it was to be the meeting point for my prepaid group motor coach trip to Leningrad, USSR (now St. Petersburg, Russia).
In the end, after diverting from Copenhagen through Norway (Oslo-Bergen-Oslo), crossing Sweden to Stockholm, and hopping an overnight Silja Line ferry to Finland, this final peripatetic first-time tourist’s rail pass extravaganza covered roughly 2,700 miles over 12 days, half of them spent sleeping on a train or boat.
My 25th birthday fell during the Leningrad residency. Consequently a stop in Amsterdam in route to Copenhagen seemed the logical choice to begin an end-stage party, although not for a commonly assumed reason.
That’s because I’d never been any more than an occasional consumer of marijuana, and in fact swore off weed entirely two years before the Europe trip owing to an adverse reaction (read: embarrassing paranoia) caused by an unexpectedly potent tray of brownies. This self-ban lasted until a temporary relapse in 1996, followed by consistent abstinence until the present day.
Still, when in Rome (or in this instance the Netherlands) perhaps a brief loophole might surface: “resolutions are not applicable outside North America,” or some such ginned-up gimcrackery.
Given that my primary complaint about pot was never knowing the exact potency of what I was being offered, only to find myself in a state of catatonia after five minutes, Amsterdam might have been the very best place to consume the equivalent of light beer in leafy form.
There, they’d know the facts.
But the prime lure of Amsterdam was beer. I stocked several famous Dutch golden-colored lagers at Scoreboard Liquors, my part-time place of employment and the import capital of Floyd County, including Heineken (“greenies” as well as the export-strength dark version), Grolsch in swing-cap bottles, and a personal favorite, Royal Brand in the classy white-painted bottles.
Among the many “old budget traveler’s tales” often heard at home and abroad were wide-eyed accounts of voluminous generosity at the conclusion of the Heineken brewery tour, coming mostly from doped-up ex-hippies from the 1960s who’d been headed to Katmandu.
I needed to find out for myself. Besides, there were rumors of extraneous culture in Amsterdam, happenings capable of altering minds without the ingestion of substances: art, music, street life and Indonesian food.
Exiting Bayeux, my mind was made up: Netherlands it would be, and so my next two nights were spent in … um, Brussels, Belgium.
—
The abrupt itinerary change came over breakfast at the Family Home hostel. Our contingent was down to five; someone whose name I cannot recall peeled off to go somewhere I can’t remember.
I was drinking his share of the coffee as Bruce the Canadian made an auspicious announcement: earlier in the summer while in Greece, prior to running across Fred the Floridian for shared ogling at the nude beach, he’d struck up an acquaintance with a Belgian photographer living in Brussels. The latter had extended an offer of future lodging, and Bruce was calling him to claim it.
Who wanted to go to Brussels?
My mathematically challenged brain got hazily numerical over the last croissant. While the six-mattress attic room rate had been quite affordable, options like “cheaper” or “totally free” were even more attractive, and saving lodging costs for two nights would buffer the budget in expensive Scandinavia. Bleary eyes were rubbed, and the finger abacus consulted.
Did they even have beer in Brussels? Yes, I’d read about the famous Belgian ales in Michael “The Beer Hunter” Jackson’s books, but because almost none of these delicacies made it anywhere close to metro Louisville during the early 1980s, my mental playback screen was blank. I simply didn’t get it, at least yet.
Within minutes, all five of us had decided to go to Brussels. Since the others were not rapid morning movers, there was enough time for me to view Bayeux’s famous medieval tapestry and have a glance at the wonderful cathedral before boarding the train to Paris just after lunch.
Memories are foggy. We’d have arrived in Paris at Gare St. Lazare and taken the Metro to Gare du Nord. By afternoon we were in Brussels, where Bruce made another phone call to his contact, who profusely apologized because he could not accommodate us until the following day. Somehow we found a room for five at a cheap hotel, probably because Bruce knew enough basic French to inquire fearlessly.
So much for half the two-night freebie. Then on Friday night, I slept in the bathtub, though without the soapy water (we all took turns bathing on Saturday morning).
It was the last reasonably flat space after the others chose their spots. Bedding selections occurred after we’d pooled our resources to buy a massive amount of carry-out Chinese food and inexpensive French wine, which seemed like a good idea.
In retrospect, Kung Pao Chicken and borderline Bordeaux symbolized a missed opportunity. I neither drank lambic nor ate mussels. Did I at least have the presence of mind to purchase pommes frites lathered with mayo from a greasy street friterie? Let’s hope so, as the historical record is mute on this point.
A day and a half in Brussels taught me little about Belgian ale apart from café signage on the Grand Place, but at least on Saturday our host was able to show us around, and finally Brussels came together. We equipped ourselves with public transit passes and started roaming.
There’d been time on Friday to fulfill Bruce’s goal of seeing the iguanodon (dinosaur) skeletons at the Museum of Natural Sciences, so on Saturday we began at the house of Baron Victor Horta, an acclaimed Art Nouveau architects, of whom our friendly amateur hotelier was a huge fan. His commentary was priceless.
Next came the Parc du Cinquantenaire (park of the 50th anniversary), built in 1880 and home to the Royal Museum of the Armed Forces and of Military History. At the museum came another encounter with the Habsburg dynasty, via the ill-fated Maximillian, Franz Joseph’s brother, who for a short time pretended to be the emperor of Mexico.
He was married to a Belgian, Carlota, the daughter of Belgium’s King Leopold I and sister of Leopold II, future exploiter of the Congo. As noted previously, Maximillian became involved in Mexico through the scheming of France’s Napoleon III (and his own brother, Franz Joseph), and when French troops evaporated, the unlucky Austrian was executed in 1867 by Benito Juarez’s followers.
The point is that Maximillian possessed a contingent of Belgian troops, and a display case in the national military museum was devoted to their New World service, including a macabre photograph of the deceased emperor in his temporary coffin.
To this very day, that disturbing photograph is what I remember most vividly about Brussels in 1985.
Thanks to a complete stranger’s hospitality, my brief stay in Brussels was interesting; during journeys to come, there’d be many wonderful Belgian times for me. But on Saturday evening there was a train to catch with a couchette reserved for Copenhagen.
I said goodbye to my new friends. Somewhere out there in Canada, Florida and Belgium (or wherever), I hope they’re well, and recall those days when we laughed together.
And we never even made it to the Manneken-Pis(boy).
In seeking to relive the past, I’m increasingly aware of how much of it is lost. This narrative has obvious gaps, and it’s nobody’s fault but mine. I began the 1985 trip with the best of intentions and kept track of daily events for a while; these notes began dwindling after the first few weeks, and then disappeared entirely apart from hastily scribbled dates (and a “beers consumed” list I can’t locate).
Was I lazy, or overly confident about my powers of recollection? Either way, waiting decades to tap into memories wasn’t the best idea. In retrospect, a better writer was needed, not to mention a more rounded and experienced human being, to do justice to what were daily sensations of wonderment and awe.
In the end, what is truly worth repeating about Europe ‘85: Maiden Voyage is that in the most scrupulously literal of interpretations, it was a 24/7 sensory overload. I didn’t need to be drunk, smoke pot or take drugs for each day to provide a daze of sights, tastes and smells, amid a constant accompaniment of languages, cultures and currencies, and an ever-changing kaleidoscope of emotions.
I’d barely experienced urban America; European cities completely blew my mind, and there was no way to absorb all of it. Each stop on my travel itinerary was different from the last, perhaps never more so than when pole-vaulting by overnight train from the haphazard French-Flemish jigsaw puzzle of Belgium to Denmark’s orderly northern waterside serenity.
This poses another subtle challenge in the retelling. What were my impressions of Copenhagen the first time I went there, before all the other times afterward? Can they be separated from each other? I never even thought there’d be subsequent travels, but they happened, and during these trips Copenhagen became a place I frequented.
My best and most enduring European friendships are with the Three Danes of the Apocalypse, and by the mid-1990s, I’d have found it easier to navigate Copenhagen than Louisville. This said, here are my first impressions of Denmark’s capital city during two fast-paced days in July of 1985.
- Bricks
- Sea
- Carlsberg beer
- Girls
- Bicycles
- Girls on bicycles
- Efficiency
- Tuborg beer
- Friendliness
- Hot dogs
- More bricks, more beer, more bikes
Although detailed observations were yet to come, Copenhagen was love at first sight. Upon returning there in 2023 after 14 years away, I was all aflutter … again.
When the train from Brussels halted at daybreak and the conductors began rousing passengers, I groggily started to grab my bag and debark.
“Not necessary,” I was informed in English. In fact, the entire train was about to roll onto a ferry with tracks built into the ship’s hold. Passengers were required to exit the rail cars (sans luggage) and walk upstairs, where they could have coffee, beer or schnapps while viewing the 12-mile crossing of the Fehmarn Belt, the strait separating Germany and Denmark.
Following border pleasantries, we reached Copenhagen in short order. As usual, my first order of budget travel business was housekeeping, which began at the train station’s change counter, where a few traveler’s checks from the rapidly depleting stack were swapped for Danish Kroner.
Moments later, some of the Kroner were dropped at a kiosk for coffee and a pastry, not a “Danish” as such, although this familiar baked goodie genuinely originated in Denmark before being brought to America. Next, it was off to a newsstand to buy a strip ticket good on public transportation, followed by a bus ride to a hockey rink.
Wait — hockey in July? Anyone who has witnessed me trying to skate in any fashion should be doing a ferocious double take right about now. However, the ice rink beckoned not for recreational purposes, but because a man’s got to sleep somewhere, preferably cheaply.
I’ve never been a camping enthusiast, which was the bargain-basement choice for overnighting in or near Copenhagen. To review, bricks ‘n’ mortar budget lodging came in a variety of forms, ranging from permanent year-round hostels affiliated with the International Youth Hostel Federation, to others operated independently.
In summer there were seasonal beds, generally in university dorms, and logically coinciding with academic breaks. Other creative ways were found to house peak season tourists existing on the cheap, hence the ice skating venue in Copenhagen that bore the name Sleep-In.
(Danish-language Wikipedia says: “Østerbro Skøjtehal was an ice rink in Østerbro, Copenhagen, built in 1975, and located in the Copenhagen Sports Park at PH Lings Allé 6 until it was demolished in 2008. It originallly had been built in 1960 as an outdoor artificial rink, but was later covered.”)
Obviously the ice was gone for summer, and the expanse divided into multi-person pods with bunk beds. In fact, Sleep-In was ideal for my purposes. There was a luggage check prior to the official late afternoon opening time. I registered, dropped off my bag and started wandering. It was a sunny summer Sunday, insinuating a refreshing aimlessness.
The bus took me back into the center of town, and my orientation stroll began at the Rådhuspladsen (City Hall Square), all crimson-bricked and bedecked with advertising signs. From here, the Strøget pedestrian shopping street extended for almost a mile to Kongens Nytorv (King’s New Square), the gateway to Nyhavn (New Harbor).
In this instance, “new” indicated a construction date in the late 1600s. A narrow man-made inlet designed for small wooden ships, Nyhavn had long since ceased being a commercial harbor. Rather, as quaintly lined on both sides by brightly colored old commercial buildings and residences, it was well on its way to complete gentrification. Most of the historic structures were scrubbed, restored and painted, including one where the writer Hans Christian Andersen once lived.
There were former dive bars, now nudging upscale, and many people lined the old docks. Many were drinking Carlsberg and Tuborg from bottles, which would have prompted widespread societal paranoia back home. I soon learned there were no open container laws in Copenhagen, and drinking in the street was permissible.
Canned beer was banned at the time on environmental grounds (in 2002, this was overturned to please the European Union), and all glass bottles were returnable, with deposits sufficiently hefty at about 20% of the purchase price to encourage care in handling. The return rate was better than 90%; it will suffice to say that plastic containers weren’t floating in the water as I’d observed in Greece.
It was time for a snack, and perched on a sidewalk by a corner of Kongens Nytorv was a pølsevogn, or hot dog stand. This was no mere weenie wagon, but a mobile kitchen, almost identifiable as a food truck.
As a devotee of the novel A Confederacy of Dunces, I imagined the Danish words translating as Paradise Vending, or at the very least, “mogul of meat.” Then again, Nyhavn wasn’t New Orleans, and no weight-challenged, costumed pirates were in the vicinity.
Subsequently I became fond of the long and thin red-skinned wieners called rødpølser, and in Copenhagen a pølsevogn always seemed to be somewhere near. You might even carry a beer around while walking to one of them.
These were remarkable, civilized institutions in a beer-drinking town. Would a sane American ever willingly return to wine coolers and KFC?
Temporarily fortified like Confederacy’s fictional Ignatius, I walked back down the Strøget in the opposite direction and kept going toward the train station, ultimately landing at Tivoli Gardens.
Opened in 1843, and one of the oldest “theme” amusements parks in the world, Tivoli was among the inspirations for Disneyland. A vaguely Oriental motif formed the setting for rides (including a huge wooden rollercoaster), games, concerts and various party tricks. Admission was inexpensive, but food and drinks quite pricey. Consequently, people-watching sufficed for me.
By now it was early evening, and time for the day’s solid meal. Heeding the advice of Arthur “$25 A Day” Frommer, I found the Vista Self Service Restaurant at Vesterbrogade 40 opposite the train station, mounted the stairs to the second floor, and experienced throwback budget travel dining at its finest.
(Photo credit for three of the preceding photos.)
The author’s description is classic.
The Vista serves the largest food portions I have ever seen in preparing this book. On a recent summer evening there … a trio of British rock-and-roll types ordered one plate of fried potatoes with fried eggs on top (22 kroner), picked up the unlimited servings of fresh Danish bread that the Vista offers free, split the mound (it looked a foot high) among them, and still weren’t able to finish their meal … be prepared, of course, to encounter large, lively crowds ― including every itinerant hippie and aspiring Rolling Stone from across the continent, who seem drawn to the Vista by some ultrasonic homing device, and whose presence adds to the fun.
Aspiring Rolling Stone? In 1985? Even punk was diminished by then. Frommer’s reference may have been dated, but his assessment of the Vista was perfectly accurate. It pleases me to report that because trenchermen are born, not made, I finished my $3 plate of potatoes and eggs easily, and returned the following evening to do it all over again. What a sweet deal.
It turned out that Vesterbrogade was a key street. It linked the Rådhuspladsen to Tivoli and the central station’s transit hub, but was more important for continuing through the Vesterbro neighborhood to a must-see shrine: Carlsberg. Brewery tours resumed on Monday, and I intended to be there for one of them.
In 1985, the performer Michael Jackson’s savvy pop music was ubiquitous all around the world. Jackson’s album Thriller remained epochal a mere two years after its release, and today, 16 years after the performer’s premature death, it has sold more than 70 million copies worldwide, with an astonishing 4 billion streams in Spotify.
I’ll concede that these quantities far outpace the total number of books sold by Michael Jackson, the beer writer (1942 – 2007), although three million-plus units is no small achievement in itself. The entertainer Jackson’s music never did much for me, apart from his theme from “Ben” (the sequel to “Willard),” and to this day I refuse to accept “King of Pop” as his sobriquet. Maybe it applies to Hoboken’s Frank Sinatra or Hound Dog Elvis, but not to the Moonwalker.
But a compelling case can be made that Michael Jackson the Yorkshireman fully deserves to be remembered as “King of Beer,” far more so than A-B InBev’s classically insipid American pet shampoo. Jackson’s book The World Guide to Beer (1977) almost singlehandedly elevated beer to the status of a topic important enough to discuss in mixed company, although ironically, it probably didn’t achieve critical mass in America until long after the initial publication, when it could be found remaindered on the discount tables of chain bookstores in malls across the country.
That’s where I found it, and I wasn’t the only one. A whole generation of aspiring beer geeks took its cues from Jackson’s classic survey of world beer history, a big, heavy, coffee-table book that I didn’t haul to Europe in my gym bag, although it was as important to me as the budget travel guidebooks.
Why? Because it’s all about the power of words. While the pop music canon was enriched by Michael Jackson’s output of songs, its everyday vocabulary is not directly referential to his body of work. However, the language of beer indisputably passes directly through Michael Jackson, the writer.
He was among the first to systematically consider and explain beer styles, and to show how aspects of the brewing process, historical practice, geography, chemistry and myriad other human experiences pertained to them, demonstrating that our enjoyment of the genre is enhanced by greater overall knowledge. All of these facets taken together form a shared language of “beer speak,” and Jackson shaped it in an enduringly readable way, neither dumbing down his material nor assuming the role of lofty pedant.
Jackson was an erudite prose stylist in addition to his journalistic skills as a nuts-and-bolts reporter, telling wonderful stories, while never forgetting a newspaperman’s facts-first orientation. I persist in believing that he is best compared to figures like Samuel Johnson and other great essayists of the English tradition.
As such, I feel quite fortunate to have made Jackson’s acquaintance, chatting with him on more than one occasion. In fact, in 1994 he visited my pub and drank a pint, but first he showed me the way to Carlsberg in Copenhagen, where I experienced my first Old World brewery tour.
Much ground would be covered during my second (and final) day in the city, as facilitated by the wonders of the Eurailpass, which was valid on the efficient “S” trains of the city’s suburban rail network.
Early Monday morning, I left the iced bunkhouse and took the bus to the central train station, checking my bag at left luggage, and securing an overnight couchette reservation for Oslo, Norway. The train would be departing around 21.00 … or, 9:00 p.m. The 24 hour clock made sense; thermometers remained mysterious.
Twelve whole hours lay ahead. Unencumbered of increasingly dirty clothes, the “S” whisked me through urban Copenhagen, its outskirts and far-flung suburbs for a 45-minute ride to the city of Hillerød, and a pleasant, sunny morning spent traipsing the grounds of the Frederiksborg Castle.
I dimly recall finding a pølservogn in Hillerod. Assuredly, a budget traveler can live on hot dogs alone without damage to his valve.
On the way back, there was a stop at Churchillparken, site of an old star-shaped earthen military redoubt and the Museum of Danish Resistance (to Nazi occupation). The museum was destroyed by fire in 2013 (suspected arson) and has since reopened after being comprehensively reimagined.
Denmark’s experience in WWII falls outside the aim of my narrative, although its surreal nature is worth noting. The Nazis desired a measure of propagandist “ethnic” solidarity with Danes, and occupied Denmark without formal hostilities being declared. The country’s government and institutions functioned somewhat normally until 1943, when the tide of affairs elsewhere made matters more openly confrontational.
The aftermath of the fire opened old wounds (think: collaborationists); the exhibits were saved, but apparently were not re-installed exactly as before, and now embrace a nuanced examination of Denmark’s wartime status.
As with so many other aspects of my travel narrative, the resistance museum symbolizes differences in consciousness, then and now. Forty years after the war’s end, many people who lived through it were still alive. Now, most aren’t, and the uses of the past change with time, no matter how hard we try to cling to “eternal” and fleetingly objective truths.
Just as with beer.
By mid-afternoon, I’d finally gravitated back to the Vesterbro neighborhood stretching beyond the Vista restaurant’s front door, stepping off the “S” near Carlsberg’s 19th-century rail yard complex in Valby, the brewery’s locale. This observation alone provided a valuable lesson for future European beer hunting expeditions, because breweries of a certain pre-automotive age almost always are located near railroad tracks or navigable waterways, the twin interstates of their age.
At the time of my visit, formerly independent Tuborg still brewed beer at its own historic plant on the other side of town, despite having merged with Carlsberg. Tuborg, which I toured in 1989 prior to its closure, had its very own docks for shipping.
Carlsberg remains an iconic international beer brand, recognizable the world over for the green label and unique script of its flagship, Carlsberg Hof, a mild Pilsner-style golden lager. Significantly, the beer wasn’t always golden. Nor was it always a lager. Carlsberg’s first batches in 1847 were dark-colored ales.
Founder J. C. Jacobsen was the son of a brewer, and his career began at a propitious time, because numerous factors were about to seismically transform the beer business from a typically localized and smaller-scale brewing of ales to the eventual global reach of mass-produced golden lagers as brewed at expansive factories just like the one I visited in Copenhagen.
Jacobsen had no specialized academic background, but he was industrious and astute. His European contemporaries Gabriel Sedlmayer and Anton Dreher were pioneers of lager brewing, and because they didn’t think in proprietary terms, the Dane freely borrowed from their expertise, making frequent journeys south for continuing education.
It is said that Jacobsen transported fragile lager yeast from Munich to Copenhagen, keeping it cool in his stovepipe hat. More importantly, he funded a laboratory and commenced a rigorously scientific approach to brewing, correctly foreseeing the value of a consistent, replicable product in the context of an emerging global economy.
The relationship between Jacobsen and son Carl, his eventual successor, was complicated. However neither was an extractive robber baron capitalist. To both, brewing was more about technology than art, but the profits were a different story. Carlsberg became a model of 19th-century industrialized philanthropy, with the family’s brewing interests bequeathed to a foundation with numerous scientific, cultural and artistic non-profit imperatives.
Much about Carlsberg has changed since my first glimpse of Copenhagen. There have been mergers and acquisitions, and a structural reformatting of the company after the fall of communism. Large scale brewing moved to a different location in Jutland circa 2008, and the core of the “old” brewery in Copenhagen survives as a company headquarters, tourist destination, and historic site, producing specialty “craft” brews.
The remaining acreage of the former industrial plant, comprising 74 acres (and including the brewery’s lagering cellars), is now known as the Carlsberg City District, a mixed use development originally slated for gradual completion over a two-decade span of time. However, Carlsberg still fulfills its philanthropic mandates as a foundation.
I’ll always feel better drinking a multinational Carlsberg than a beer brewed by the likes of AB-InBev. Unlike the Jacobsens, the Busch family legacy is unsightly, indeed.
The most enduring architectural feature of the old Carlsberg brewery is the imposing stone Elephant Gate lying just outside the historic brew house. Generations of multi-lingual brewery tour guides have been drilled to immediately disavow the jarring presence of swastikas carved into the elephants’ pedestals, paraphrasing:
“These are ancient symbols of auspiciousness, luck and well-being. The word ‘swastika’ itself is Sanskrit, not German, and these have nothing to do with that other fellow during the war.”
Point taken.
As I came to understand, brewery tours at the Carlsberg level of hugeness seldom rise above the introductory. I’ve heard the gospel numerous times since, and repeated it often during the period of my own brewery ownership.
Grain is malted and mashed, sugar water created, hops added during the boil, and the yeast gobbles sugar to create alcohol and carbonation. The tour’s inevitable conclusion comes while looking over the throbbing, cacophonous bottling line.
For so long as breweries like Carlsberg occupied their original properties, they correctly placed their tours into architectural and historical contexts; if 19th-century industrial buildings did not continue to fascinate modern man, we wouldn’t rush to convert them into condos, and if advertising graphics from the same era ceased to exert feelings of loyalty and cultural identification, we’d have no breweriana collectors.
Unfortunately, the litigiousness of our modern world has gone far toward spoiling the ultimate objective of brewery tours, because who would endure the factory stroll without a prospect of tasting the bounty? At the end of my first Carlsberg tour, the participants were seated at tables in a room festooned with brewery ads and graphic art.
Sample beers in lightly chilled bottles already were lined up and ready on each table, with a few salty snacks and gratis souvenirs — stickers and decals, maybe some paper labels. There was joy and delight all around.
It seemed odd to me at the time that families with young children would be taking the brewery tour, but they were. It was free-wheeling Europe, not puritanical America. There were soft drinks for the kids, and only later did I grasp the solo traveler’s best strategy at such times: Stick close to the families and be smilingly gracious, because when they occupy a table set for six with a single spare seat and invite you to join them, only the adults will be drinking.
And this, of course, means more beer for you.
Next: Euro Pilgrimage ’85, Ch. 13: Introductions to Oslo, Bergen, Stockholm and Uppsala.
P.S. I never even made it to the Little Mermaid in 1985 (but did later).
