This is Christian, Mom's cousin, one of the reasons we are in Europe at this time. We stayed several days in Denmark, so Mom could find her two cousins and visit with them. Christian lived up on the 4th floor of an apartment building and there were no elevators , it was just one step at a time to get up there. By the time we reached the 4th floor ,we were exausted. When we got to the door and he answered it Mom just said "Alice from the U.S.A." and he immediately went into the bedroom and took a picture off the wall, a picture that had never been seen by anyone in the United States, in fact it was the ONLY picture that had ever been taken of the whole family. He pointed to a child as if saying "is this you" and she answered "yes". He spoke no English and of course we spoke no Danish so he went into another room and brought out a little dictionary that had the translations in and that was how we communicated for the next couple of hours.
He lived in the same apartment as he had been born in and it had the same furniture, wallpaper, pictures on the walls, doilies on the couches, vases on the shelves, everything was the same as the picture we had of him as a boy with his mother and father. Talk about going back in time. He had been married but had no children and his wife had died several years before. The only relative he had was his wife's niece who came to see him and bring groceries every few days. He told us she could understand English.
When we got home Mom wrote to him and asked if he would have his niece get a copy made of the picture he had shown us and have her send it to us and we would be happy to send any costs that were incurred. A few weeks later the picture came and it was the original picture in the original frame. She had writtten a note and said he was so old he would not have any use for it, so he wanted us to have the picture, we both shed tears over that one. Of course we had many copies made and gave to all of the families.
While in Copenhagen we saw many castles and went to Trafalgar Square. This is a combination between a theme park and state fair park. It is very large and every night during the summer they would have fireworks. Our hotel was right on the main highway of the city and every car that went by was honking just like crazy. We found out later that was the thing Danes do--just honk their way into the sunset.
The next morning we were off to Aarhus, Denmark which is quite a long way from Copenhagen. This is where Mom's other cousin was living. We did take a little side trip to see the Hans Christian Anderson Museum which we enjoyed. I do not remember the cousin's name so I will just refer to him as the cousin. When we got to the train station in Aarhus we called him and we could not understand him and he could not understand us so we stopped a fellow that was going by and asked if he understood both English and Danish, when he said yes we asked him if he would translate a message to her cousin and he said he would. We were told what bus to get on and where to get off and he would be at the bus stop to meet us and that his grandson would be there to translate for us.
When we arrived at their home, his wife insisted we stay for dinner. She prepared what we found out later was a real treat for them. It was a hambuger patty with a sunny side up fried egg on top ( I have never liked sunny side up fried eggs). Oh well, when in Rome do as the Romans do. I made the best of it and ate like I was enjoying it. We enjoyed our visit with them and after a couple of hours they took us back to our hotel.
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