As the business meeting wore on, John stared at the yellow legal pad on the conference table and took a few obligatory notes. The person speaking was droning on, and so he took the opportunity to gaze slowly around the long table at the participants. His eye halted on a slender blonde lady. Not wanting to become obvious, he avoided staring did realize that she had triggered a memory from long ago.
With no end in sight for the meeting, John allowed his mind to stroll down Memory Lane. What was the old movie, "Eddie and the Cruisers," where the lyrics went "There was a time...the world seemed so wild and so free..."? There was a time, long ago, when he had gone to Sweden with a girl who resembled the young lady in the conference room. He began to think about that trip, and how it began. Two young soldiers, himself (John)and Larry, had taken the train from Frankfurt to Hamburg to see the famous Reeperbahn, a center of nightlife.
Hamburg had quite a lengthy tradition of bars, brothels, and dancehalls. The Beatles got their start at the Kaiserkeller there. While sexual freedom was often construed as the central meaning of the Grosse Freiheit, part of that area actually used to belong to Denmark, which had freedom of trade and religion considerably before Germany.
As the train departed Hamburg, the two soldiers were surprised to see it roll onto a ferry. For a century, that was how Copenhagen was reached from that location. Today, however, trains use the Great Belt Fixed Link between Funen and Zealand where Copenhagen reposes.
After John and Larry walked into the Central Station, they went to the American Express counter to confirm their hotel rooms, then found a cab outside. In the taxi, they heard their first taste of Danish music on the radio as Johnny Cash sang "I Walk the Line." Larry turned to John and said "I feel right at home here."
As diligent tourists, they saw the superb collection of art in the Statens Museum Kunst and strolled by Amalienborg, the royal palace. Naturally, they had to take the tour to Elsinore to take a look at the setting for Shakespeare's "Hamlet." Despite the cold, they walked through Tivoli and then checked "The Little Mermaid," the sculpture inspired by Hans Christian Anderson's fairy tale.
At night, they walked to Nyhavn, the old waterfront district with its many and various bars and nightclubs and cafes. In one club, John danced with a svelte blonde from Sweden. She had a friend and Larry danced with her. The girls were heading to Sweden the next morning and invited the two guys to tag along. That was before the engineering marvel of the Oresund Bridge, so the four took the hydrofoil ferry where the boat rose up out of the water at speed. It had a wonderful Smorrebrod offering for lunch; passengers at there and also folded extra in napkins and put snacks for later in coat pockets. In 2021, Green City Ferries of Stockholm unveiled an electric hydrofoil catamaran.
The group toured Malmo, which back then was a wonderful and peaceful town. In recent times, of course, it began to have problems with crime and the cultural integration of immigrants. After making a brief visit to Stockholm with the Swedish girls, the two soldiers pondered their limited time on leave, said "Hejda and Adieu" to their new travel companions, and returned to their hotel near Kongens Nytorv, a public square at the end of the pedestrian street Stroget in Copenhagen.
The following night, they visited a book and magazine shop off their hotel lobby. Sprinkled among the usual newspapers and magazines such as Gemany's Der Spiegel, they were surprised to see Private, the first all-color porn magazine published in Europe. It just seemed incongruous to them as Americans to see pornographic magazines displayed so openly and in close proximity to "respectable" publications. To seem less vulgar, John purchased a copy of the paper he read most often, the Suddeutsche Zeitung, along with a copy of Private which he planned to use later for masturbatory fodder.
