I was the last to go over the pond.
My wife, Maj-Britt Syse, organized a family reunion in Denmark and Sweden in July. She had been traveling for several weeks in the far north of Sweden and Norway when I left MSP on July 7, on a flight to Copenhagen, via Keflavik, Iceland.
Editorial
My sons’ families living in Minneapolis, along with the two barnbarn (Swedish for grandkids), convened in Copenhagen for three nights at the beginning of the sojourn and spent six nights in Ystad, Sweden, a city on the Baltic Sea.
My wife’s brothers and their families gathered with us on July 16, in Ystad, to celebrate the 40th birthday of my eldest son, Jonas — we were 20 in all at the party.
Maj-Britt is a dual citizen of the United States and Sweden, as are our three sons. I’ve mentioned in the past that our son Max has been living in Copenhagen for the past eight years. He graduated from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and also earned a master’s degree in data science from the same school. He has been working in research and development for a hearing aid company.
On my first morning in Copenhagen, I left our Airbnb rental apartment and walked over to Sankt Peders Bageri, the oldest bakery and confectionery in Copenhagen, from 1652. I picked up a variety of pastries for breakfast, including croissants for the barnbarn, who ate many croissants during our vacation.
The short walk to the bakery took me through the lovely Ørstedparken, an oasis of greenery around a pond. Various sculptures in the classical style adorn the premises.
On my second day in Copenhagen, our traveling party was joined by visitors from England: my younger brother, Jonathan, sister-in-law Alessia and their daughter Ariel and her boyfriend. Some Jewish World readers likely knew Jonathan from his youth in Mendota Heights.
Our somewhat unwieldy group ventured out in Copenhagen and made its way via metro and bus to Reffen, a popular collection of street food vendors on the harbor. On the way back, we piled on the harbor bus, my favorite conveyance in the Danish capital. The harbor buses zigzag along the harbor and give a visitor a wonderful view of the city.
And it should be mentioned that the harbor has been cleaned up and locals flock to numerous swimming sites along the waterway. The weather was warm in July, and swimmers and sunbathers were out in force.
This was my seventh visit to Copenhagen, going back to 1985, when I first met my in-laws. My wife’s mother was from a small town in Denmark, and her father was from Norway; she was raised in Sweden, where my late father-in-law worked as an electrical engineer, traveling the globe and balancing electric turbines for an industrial firm.
Anyway, I’ve become familiar with Copenhagen but haven’t seen every attraction in the picturesque and charming city. During our visit in July, we visited Designmuseum Danmark, which boasts a large collection of items under the category of Danish Modern and celebrates the Danish designers that made everyday items attractive. On our return to Copenhagen, after the Swedish idyll, we visited the National Museum of Denmark, an encyclopedic collection of art and artifacts, including rooms of Greenlandic artwork, clothing and tools.
On the topic of Greenland (Kalaallit Nunaat), the world’s largest island and an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark, readers might recall that Donald Trump has been making noises about invading the place.
PBS News reported on July 8 that Trump “insisted that the United States should be in control of Greenland rather than NATO ally Denmark, renewing tensions in Europe even as the trans-Atlantic military alliance was announcing billions in arms deals at a summit in an attempt to appease the mercurial U.S. leader.”
The PBS story continued: “Trump called the semiautonomous island ‘an important part’ for the United States, as he repeated the false claim that it’s surrounded by Chinese and Russian ships and said he won’t let Greenland be threatened.”
Of course, the Greenlandic people, who are mainly Inuit, don’t want to be part of the U.S. And the Danish people just think that Trump is an ignorant buffoon.
Europeans generally cannot comprehend how the U.S. got into this fix. I would point out at certain junctures in conversations that the people in Minneapolis are still traumatized about the U.S. sending in 3,000 masked paramilitary immigration enforcement agents to assault and shoot down people in the streets.
So, part of the fun of our vacation was getting out of the country and enjoying the atmosphere offered by a more peaceful and rationally ordered society.
Denmark has been a steadfast ally of the U.S., despite the president’s mindless and abusive rhetoric. Moreover, it is a society built on trust among people and, generally, between the government and the citizenry.
Perhaps you’ve heard that the Danes are accustomed to leaving their sleeping babies outside in carriages while they patronize a store or café. And I experienced an instance of trust in a Copenhagen shop during my recent visit.
Around the corner from our first Airbnb rental in Copenhagen was an apparel shop called Bagabù. I found the shop on Google Maps and perused the website. A colorful shoulder bag, a “rambler bag,” caught my fancy. After a full day of touristing, I stopped in the shop accompanied by my grandson. There was a bag on display, a slightly different color than the one I had picked out online, but still fine.
We chatted with the friendly woman in the shop as she attempted to get the credit card reader to work. After a number of failed attempts, she suggested that I just take the bag and the proprietor would send me an email with a link for payment. So, I walked out of the shop without paying for the artisanal bag. Of course, when I got back to the apartment, the email arrived and I paid for the item with a credit card.
I can’t imagine a shopkeeper in the Twin Cities letting a stranger walk out of her boutique before paying for some item. Danish society is different, in an admirable way.
In Skåne
After three nights in Copenhagen, our party headed for Malmö, Sweden, where Jonas had reserved a rental car that could convey all of us to the next Airbnb rental. Max recently bought a car, so my son Isaac and his girlfriend, Diana, traveled with Max and his girlfriend, Silvia. We also packed most of our luggage into Max’s little van.
We took the train from Copenhagen to Malmö, which traverses the bridge across the Øresund Strait. It’s a marvel of engineering and an entertaining train ride of about 35 minutes. We shopped for lunch on the go in the Malmö train station then hit the road in our new Peugeot.
Our destination was Ystad, a magnet for Swedes and others on vacation. My brother-in-law Pelle, his wife Marie and their son Ludwig towed their caravan south and rented a spot in a nearby campground with varied amenities.
Maj-Britt’s older brother, Bent, a retired archeologist, and his wife, Cinna, also joined us, along with my Swedish nephew Björn and his son Franke. My niece Anna, her husband Johann and their two small children, who live in Lund, which is just north of Malmö, also joined us for the birthday party in Ystad.
It was nice to have six nights in our Airbnb rental in Sweden — although it seemed weird that the homeowners, a couple with two young children, went camping for most of a week while strangers lived in their home.
In Ystad, visited the picturesque old town and Greyfriars Abbey, a 13th-century red-brick monastery, which had a playroom on the second floor for the barnbarn. We had a beach day at Sandhammar on the Baltic, with waters as cold as Lake Superior — still, I jumped in for a minute. Just west of Sandhammar we visited Ales stenar, an arrangement of massive stones in the shape of a ship atop a cliff overlooking the Baltic. The mysterious monument is said to be 1,400 years old, and its purpose is unknown.
And there was an excursion to Glimmingehus castle, a well-preserved fortress from the 16th century built by a powerful knight who was under the protection of the Danish king. Skåne, the southern part of Sweden, was occupied by the Kingdom of Denmark, and the two nations fought bloody wars over control of the land.
In Scandinavia, I ate more than the usual ration of korv (sausage). Hot dogs are popular in Sweden and Denmark. Max and Isaac invited us out for korv one afternoon in Ystad, and we visited KorvOlle, a shop in an industrial area that had tasty sausages and whimsical décor.
Back in Denmark
After the celebration of Jonas’ milestone birthday, we returned to Malmö and gave Avis its car back. We took the train back across the Øresund Bridge to the Copenhagen central station. My son Isaac left Ystad for Uppsala, Sweden, then on to Finland and Estonia. Diana flew to northern Spain for work and vacation.
Back in Copenhagen, my old friend Gesa Mackenthun, from Rostock, Germany, paid a visit. In my February editorial concerning the ICE invasion of Minnesota, I wrote about speaking via Zoom to her master’s class at Rostock University. We hadn’t seen each other in person in 30 years.
We met up one afternoon by the Danish Architecture Center, then walked over to the Royal Library Garden, a lovely park on the Royal Island, the site of Christiansborg Palace, which houses the Danish parliament. Gesa has retired as a professor of American studies. We sat in the garden, near the Danish Jewish Museum, and talked about the old days traveling around out west with the American Indian Movement.
Again, my European friends and relatives are at pains to understand how the U.S. has fallen under the misrule of a corrupt and incompetent administration. Among other topics, Gesa mentioned that Pete Hegseth, the self-styled “Secretary of War” from Forest Lake, Minn., had been in the news regarding his plan to determine the testosterone levels in U.S. soldiers. Not to put too fine a point on it, but he seems like a psychopath.
The problem seems to be that the increasingly deranged president is surrounded by craven sycophants. There is no one in the room to contradict his crackpot ideas. Lately, the gaggle of Trump lackeys are going along with his unfounded stories about unknown individuals vandalizing the Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC. Perhaps, this vast and resourceful nation can muddle through, take some remedial actions on long-running social problems.
Or we can all move to Denmark.
Mordecai Specktor / editor [at] ajwnews [dot] com
(American Jewish World, August 2026)
