It was the best meal I had in Denmark.
I remembered that it was the first time I travelled alone outside the UK in 2017. I was hanging around the city and also visited some castles outside Copenhagen. Because of the long, dark night in the winter in Northern Europe, I usually left to travel and returned to the hostel really early. So I didn’t even know anyone in the shared room with me. On the last day of the trip, I felt like I almost didn’t know how to talk to people.
Anyway, I decided to find a danish pork sandwich restaurant for the ending of the trip. Honestly, I didn’t enjoy any meal in Denmark. I probably felt weird eating alone in the restaurant. I tried once to have a buffet there, and it was really awkward. However, I didn’t want to miss the meal called a flæskesteg sandwich. I found one small food shop that wasn’t too far from the city centre so that I could catch my late flight back to London on time.
When I was in the shop and waiting for my order, I started to look around, and I found some Calendars hanging on the wall written in Mandarin. I tried to chat with those Asian-like owners and found out we all came from Taiwan! I could never feel better than finding someone to talk to after a long time! They told me that they had moved there for a long, long time. I noticed that most customers of their shop were speaking Dansk and I didn’t understand any word. Of course, the owners spoke Dansk well. I started to wonder how difficult they might have been when they began to live in a country where was far from our place and even in a period that there wasn’t much information about it. I admired their courage indeed to leave for an unknown country. And it also reminded me of how brave I was to live in a country with my poor English at the beginning.
I looked at the back of that shy owner who kept busy to make food, and his wife kept chatting with me like I was an old friend. I felt warm in a space where I didn’t know anyone. When I told them that I had to leave to catch the midnight flight, the lady asked her husband to make another pork sandwich to get something for late-night supper.
After some hours later I was waiting for the departure from the airport. I felt a bit hungry and looked around the closed shops. I started to eat that sandwich, and it was the most delicious flæskesteg sandwich ever.