From The Straits Times    |

I was in Denmark in February for an Ecco press junket, to learn more about the brand and its shoes, as well as to watch its Walk In Style awards show, an event mounted every February during Copenhagen Fashion Week.  

 

The trip took us from Tonder to Bredebro, before we finally ended up in Copenhagen. The weather was as cold as you might imagine, a Scandinavian winter that has been unusually brutal in Europe this year. It’s snowing in most parts of Denmark, has been  for eight weeks – it made the landscape so pretty; bare trees silhouetted like a fretwork of black lace against the pure, dazzling white of sky and ground blanketed in snow. But it’s not snowing in the capital city, which oddly enough made it seem colder. Wind gusts in from the harbour, penetrating my many layers of clothing. A giant thermometer in the city square shows the temperature hovering at minus six. It never gets any warmer!  

 

I can’t say that I was too impressed by Copenhagen. I had heard that the city was pretty and no doubt it’s in summer. But in winter, most of its charms were hidden from me. “Doesn’t it look remarkably like a communist bloc nation somewhere in Eastern Europe?” a fellow journalist whispered to me. I couldn’t help but agree — the blocky architecture, the drab grey skies, the dirty snow piled along the road. 

 

We checked into The Square, a hip hotel right smack in the centre of town. Its rooms are nice and comfortable but there are things that aren’t there that i find strange — there is no bottled water or hot water kettles in the rooms. The lifts are also rather unusual, you have to manually open the lift doors — tough when your hands are busy with your luggage since they have no bellboys or porters either.  

 

No trip could be complete with a taste of the city’s café culture. We head to Café Norden, in the centre of the city. It’s large, popular and serves up excellent coffee, along with an unexpected touch of arrogance when I ask for a skinny mocha. “We don’t do skinny here,” the barista behind the counter says with disdain, as if I had asked for a shot of Botox along with my coffee. He then tempers his response by offering me a glass of water to go along with my drink, along with a smile. He’s lucky he’s good-looking. But then again, so many of them are — and I’m not just talking about the models at the shows. Waiters, sales assistants in the shops, PR reps, the average person in the street — they all truly flesh out the ideal of Scandinavian beauty, being tall, thin, blond, blue-eyed and beautiful.  

 

Food is not too great. There’s a lot of cold salads, cold cuts, cold salmon – not the best thing to eat when it’s so cold outside. All i want is a big bowl of steaming hot noodle soup! But that seems to be impossible to find. Even when we have hot food, it doesn’t taste that great – the steaks are dry and tough, their meatballs salty, their soup cold by the time it reaches you. I have to say, this is the toughest thing about the trip for a Singaporean who loves her food…