Visiting Copenhagen (and Denmark in general)

Last night was the start of another eight part Scandi Noir on BBC4. It’s based in Copenhagen and it got me thinking. I’ve generally got a positive opinion of the city way removed from the darker side which we see in such programs. Why?

The easy answer is that I’ve always visited Denmark on expenses, I’ve never been there on vacation, because it’s been business and I don’t recall any serious conflicts. The food has been good, the people positive and the lasting impression which you pick up at the airport has been low stress.

I first visited the country in the early 80s. I attended a conference run by Haverly Systems, it’s still going strong, for users of its Linear Programming software. We stayed at the Marienlyst Standhotel in Helsingbor and I remember my first experience of Danish buffets with gravlax piled high for every meal! The hotel was close to the castle which we’d know as Hamlet’s castle, and I ran round it every morning before breakfast.

Later in the decade when I was a product marketing manager I visited several times because we had a key distributor in Copenhagen, Chr Krogh A/S. That’s another company which is still in business and its owner and managing director these days is Klaus Fredsted. Klaus joined Krogh when Erling Sorensen (on the right in the photo above) was in charge and I remember meetings with both of them.

Krogh had a unique position in being one of only two companies which held out against the implementation of a pan-European contract brought in my my predecessor. It was very successful at least in part because it had managed to get the tradenames of our products included in the Danish Pharmacopeia. This success, and my support of Krogh and its unique position, probably justified the generous hospitality show towards me whenever I visited. On one occasion I recall a very elegant dinner down in the wine cellar at the Hotel d’Angleterre. Lunches were also a treat and often that would be a buffet with multiple eel dishes at the right time of the year.

That was the end of my visits to Copenhagen until the early 2000s although I several times transited through the airport several times. In the early 90s I visited a Danisco (DDS) reverse osmosis company in Nakskov which was being acquired by my company, but that was a 170km drive away, and later on I visited Dandy the chewing gum manufacturer and that was on the mainland and served out of the airport at Billund.

Finally and some twenty years ago my company had a relationship with EasyPrint about 30km outside Copenhagen but visits to it were quick in and out affairs. No more elegant dinners! And I haven’t been back since.