Denmark is real!

No shit. I'm in it right now. There are strange letters on the keyboard, like æ and ø and å.
Glasgow and London and the Lakes District are also real. If you too have been to these places then you don't need my confirmation, but if you haven't then you can take my word as evidence.
We arrived in London after approximately 24 hours of torture under the guise of international air travel. In an eerie reprisal of that perennial Salientin-joke about Wee Hamish who did not stop crying fra' Aberdeen to Auckland, some children several rows behind us screamed the whole way from Singapore to Heathrow. I was welcomed in to London by the worst airport organisation I've yet seen and a terrible cup of tea from Starbucks. We made our way to Euston Station, where we sat on the grass and were stared at, as I tried to properly cognise the fact that I was actually in actual England and everything was twelve hours different and I was suddenly an outsider.
England is very old and very crowded and very manicured. All the gaps are filled in: hedges are clipped, trees have been planted, fences are painted. Nothing is wild except the weeds that grow to the sides of the train lines. We went for a walk when we got to the Lake District; the forest was a plantation and you could watch the 'Squirrel Camera' from the comfort of the cafe at the bottom of the hill (which, by the way, served some of the best hot chocolate I've ever had, an anomaly in this land of surly service and dishwater-strength coffee). And CCTV is absolutely everywhere.
Scotland is a bit rougher. In Glasgow people on the street sound like they are garlging ball bearings when they talk. Too many things have happened for me to bother retelling. Mum says to say that she is in love with Charles Rennie Mackintosh, whom you can Google search if you don't know who he is. I was briefly inspired to relocate to Glasgow University, and am still mulling this option over... Glasgow is dirty in the most innocent literal sense: buildings are covered with a century's worth of coal soot and car pollution. Everything is older, bigger, more beautiful, more awe-inspiring than I could have ever imagined, and by contrast I felt young, small, scruffy and naive.
And now, Denmark, which is even older and several degrees more foreign. The houses have thatched rooves and cars drive on the wrong side of the road and the language is completely different (as opposed to Glaswegian, which admittedly does have a lot in common with English). We are staying with Frede, an old friend of my Dad, in the house that has belonged to his family for a hundred years. Down the road - less than 50 metres - is the church and graveyard where his parents are buried. The town was founded some time in the 12th century.
And this is normal here.

Broken window theory

(In response to the blacking-out out of the Ian Curtis RIP tag on Wallace Street)

the walls are not enough for these vandals.
your wives will be next - you'll find them on the doorstep, sunny Sunday morning, face down and covered
in spray paint. clean up graffiti before it spreads
to your sleepy suburb, your front gate and your beloved spouse.

Someone broke a window. But before that,
someone's grandfather got the cane
for speaking his native tongue in a classroom, and it's too late to employ measures such as
litres
and litres
of thick black paint.

Experience Overseas

Us humans really aren't as good at perceiving time as we think we are. A year, ten years and five minutes all go by and they feel the same to us. We know that things have happened and time has passed but our minds can never quite seem to grasp the weight of it. Our memories stretch and compress the bits of our life that have already happened, until they are way out of proportion.
As for the future, we make plans and expect things but it's always like a slap in the face when they actually arrive. The future is like one of those colouring-in books we used to have as children, the ones where you just washed water over the lines with a brush and the colours would come out on the page, grey-tinged pastels on a newsprint background and cartoonishly thick black outlines. A pale, insubstantial and two dimensional image of what's to come.
So when you're leaving the country, you speak of 'it hitting you'. It hasn't hit me yet, and won't until I'm on the plane thousands of feet in the air, that I'm actually going to a real foreign country. And then another, and another. Am I excited? Sort of, but only in the distant future of next week will it hit me. And those foreign countries are just like the colouring-in books and my grasp on the future: exaggerated and slightly mythical, but as yet still very translucent.

I am going to blog my adventures and misadventures as much as possible, or as much as I can be bothered because I will probably have more interesting things to do on my journey. Please do watch this space and leave me comments so I feel vindicated in my ramblings. It's nice to know that people are listening.
And here is a list of fun synonyms for travel:
sojourn
pilgrimage
voyage
mission
expedition
tour
progress
migration

And here is some brief trip information:
With mother. Fly out of AK 19/9/09 to London, train to somewhere in the North nearish Carlisle. Friends and relatives. Glasgow. Art and buildings. Denmark. Dad's friend Fred. More art and buildings. Eurail pass! Germany. Berlin. Munich. Oktoberfest! Austria. Italy. France. Spain. France. Belgium? England. Mother leaves. Germany? England? Ireland? The world?
Home.