Then and Now

This week I had the opportunity to go to Copenhagen, Denmark. It’s a great city that I visited once before when I was fifteen (nine years ago now...) but as that was on a travelling holiday through Denmark and into Sweden, I didn’t remember too much of Copenhagen itself, until I started walking around the town centre and it all came back to me. Coming home, I looked through the family’s photo album from the trip and saw that I‘d taken a lot of very similar photos this time round... A fifteen-year-old and a twenty-four-year-old John walking up the Round Tower.
At the top of the Round Tower: Outside the Resistance Museum (which I’ve never actually been in): The Amalienborg Palace: The Little Mermaid: Being a bit of a thinker (at times), I got thinking about all that has happened in the time since I was last in Copenhagen. A lot. On that trip I spoke my first ever Danish sentence (which probably went along the lines of ‘En Big Mac, to McChicken Sandwiches, en Happy Meal, tre milkshakes og en kaffe, tack’, but still). Now, after having studied Swedish for five years, Danish is now my main language, and I’m currently writing a PhD on it – I never would have seen that coming. It would be kinda cool to have a conversation with the fifteen-year-old John and give him a little advice about what was coming up in the next nine years, but he’ll just have to work it out for himself. In those days, I was a bit of a poser in front of the camera, but not any more.