US Soft Power Lane, Copenhagen

One of my meandering walks in Copenhagen brought me to this row of American businesses, purveyors of…what exactly?…foods & beverages?…culture?…soft power?…in this case, to people who are understandably rather fed up with the United States. For the record, beside me and the man who is obviously spending time at the gym, there was a KFC.

Airports in Vietnam are infested with Burger King outlets, and if I am not in the mood for a $15 bowl of pho, I can part with my $15 for what is still laughingly called a Whopper with some tasteless fries and a Coke. Or is it a Pepsi at Burger King? Does anyone care?

I don’t know what 7 Elevens are like in the US these days; in Vietnam they are standard convenience stores with small selections of all kinds of packaged foods and beverages, household goods, and personal care products along side of prepared sandwiches, pastries and cakes, and a few prepared items zapped and served hot. The European 7 Elevens I saw on this trip have a more up market appearance and are devoted almost entirely to selling prepared foods – sandwiches, salads, and other small meals prepared and delivered daily for same-day sale. Some foods can be heated. There are rows of soft drinks and juices of all kinds, and beer, wine and booze (at least in some of the shops I saw). There are fresh baked goods, as well as packaged cakes and pastries along with the usual selection of ultra-processed ingredients and too much sugar or salt or both wrapped up as cookies, chips, nachos, biscuits, and “energy” foods, ad nauseam. Much of the fare is labeled “natural.” You can also find toothpaste and toothbrush, batteries, and a very limited selection of other personal care and daily use items.

A little difficult to see in the low resolution online post is a Hard Rock Cafe sign behind the 7 Eleven. Every time I see one, I shake my head wondering how this ridiculous outfit serving up mediocre, absurdly overpriced food and drinks survives.

Even more difficult to see beyond the Hard Rock, there is a green Starbucks sign. While I am ambivalent to cynical about the other three US brands pictured here, I loathe Starbucks. In addition to overpriced bad coffee and various overpriced toxic sugar concoctions passed off as drinks, the company is run by anti-union thugs, and that alone is enough to keep me out of any Starbucks shop anywhere.

In fact, my dislike of this outfit goes back many years. I lived in Nanjing and was a frequent visitor to Shanghai when Starbucks made its first appearance in that city around the year 2000. Shanghai was exploding with growth at the time and newly affluent Chinese were developing a taste for coffee. The city had numerous recently opened coffee shops, good and not so good, some homegrown, some run by overseas entrepreneurs or coffee aficionados. Starbucks arrived on the scene with massive brand awareness, its cachet as premium, imported American coffee, and cash to burn. The company’s shops opened up with bargain basement prices that undercut small shops importing and serving genuine premium coffee. Within a matter of months, Starbucks had decimated most, if not quite all, of Shanghai’s independent coffee shops. Typical of the first casualties of Starbucks’ entry, the young Italian man who served up absolutely brilliant espresso and coffees from his tiny stall in the Shanghai American Center was gone in a matter of weeks after Starbucks opened an outlet in the Center. After wiping out most of the competition, of course, Starbucks’ prices skyrocketed, over the course of a year or two, roughly tripling from what they were when the company first arrived in Shanghai.

I know Starbucks is not the only wealthy, large company that has bullied its way into a new market by undercutting the competition with low, loss-generating prices that small businesses cannot afford to match. That does not mean I have to like Starbucks or consume its mediocre coffee, does it.

Kirkegaard in the Library Garden

Søren Kierkegaard. Words like philosopher and theologian came to mind when I saw this statue in Copenhagen’s beautiful Royal Library Garden. I read the first paragraph of Kierkegaard’s Wikipedia entry. This told me the man was a prolific thinker writing about a wide range of topics – I did not read the lengthy article introducing his works – and is considered to have been the first existentialist philosopher. His was a name my dad dropped from time to time during his years at Harvard in the early 1960s, and that is most likely when I first heard of Kierkegaard.

The Royal Library Garden is a quiet, restful place, and I had been sitting on a bench near Kierkegaard for quite some time when a group of Chinese tourists walked into the area around the statue. They immediately began standing in front of Kierkegaard and posing for photos with hands raised in V salutes. I amused myself wondering how many, if any, of these Chinese had ever heard of Kierkegaard or knew anything of his work. Of course, it is very possible most of them knew more than I did. Be that as it may, I wanted to get a picture of this photo taking, but doing so would have required me to get in the face of some of the group. I was not inclined to do that and remained sitting on my bench.

Christiansborg Palace, Copenhagen

Originally, Copenhagen was to be the European starting point of a trip to Iceland I was planning for late summer in 2025. When, in the spring of 2025, Minh and I decided to buy a parcel of land and build a house, that trip was put on hold. In February 2026 the house was finally – well, mostly – finished and we were able to move in.

At that point I got back to trip planning. First, although it had been the center of my earlier travel idea, I scratched Iceland from my itinerary. I decided that renting a car and driving solo around the island, stopping to see scenic wonders along the way, might be a bit too much to handle for my going-on 77 years old physical equipment. As much as it annoys me to acknowledge this, I am simply not as physically capable today as I was even 10 years ago.

I am, however, still capable of travel somewhat less strenuous than a solo drive around Iceland.

Instead of a way point on a journey to Iceland, Copenhagen became the starting point of a European trip that, in addition to Denmark, included visits to Netherlands, Belgium and the UK. The fact that Vietnam Airlines introduced a direct flight from Ho Chi Minh City to Copenhagen sometime in 2025 encouraged me to keep Copenhagen on my itinerary. Although Denmark had never been on my Europe must-see list, I decided it would be an interesting place to begin my travels.

After the long haul from Vietnam, I arrived at Copenhagen Airport on 30 May 2026 at 07:30 in the morning. Fitful sleep is the best I ever manage on long distance flights, and I did not even achieve that level of “rest” on this particular flight. So I was especially fuzzy around the edges as I emerged from the plane. I was relieved that the pleasant looking, graying women at the Passport Control window did not become frigid when I handed her a US passport. Not that A Dane would have any reason to be fed up with Americans. Right? Whatever, entry to the Schengen Area took no more than a couple of minutes (and as I write this I cannot help but think of the hour it took to make my way in a massive line through Passport Control in Hanoi when I returned to Vietnam a couple of days ago). Unfortunately, entering the Schengen Area no longer results in a physical stamp in one’s passport – it is all a digital transaction with data encoded in the passport entered into a computerized database. Nowadays it is virtually impossible to fill up a passport with the visas and entry-exit stamps that document travels. My old passports have become a sort of collector’s item.

When I emerged into the airport, I was struck by the fact that the arrivals area was relatively small, far removed from the cavernous terminals that are so common in airports today. And there was no information kiosk. Virtually all airport services were automated – it was difficult to find anybody to give me information about anything. I did find an ATM from which I hoped to draw around $100 worth of Danish Krone. Alas, muddled as I was, I was mistaken about the exchange rate and drew DKK 5,000 thinking that would cost me USD 80 or 90. Wrong. The transaction cost me almost USD 800. Suffice it to say, I had no shortage of cash during my 8 days in Denmark.

Purchasing a metro ticket that would get me into the city of Copenhagen required the use of a ticket machine with instructions that I found impenetrable. Maybe if I had slept more on the plane… Eventually, I spied two Metro employees standing near the ticket machines – an impromptu information kiosk? – and one of them helped me buy a ticket. He worked so quickly that I had on idea what he did and had to start over the next time I wanted to ride the Metro. On the good news front, the train I boarded at the airport ran directly to the stop for my hotel; I did not need to change trains.

I arrived at the hotel well ahead of the 14:00 check-in time, so I ended up walking around the neighborhood for a couple of hours while the hotel worked on making up rooms. First impressions: Copenhagen – at least the area in which I found myself – was quiet, uncrowded, and affluent. It was a rather blustery, cool, overcast day, not raining, but hardly very welcoming to a tired, first-time visitor. There were several small (man made?) lakes near the hotel and the paths around these were crowded with joggers and bicyclists. Young, svelte, fit looking, Nordic type joggers for the most part. Lots of blond hair. I cannot remember ever seeing so many people out jogging in a reasonably small area. I eventually walked in to a place to get some lunch, lots of whole grains, vegetables and nuts on the menu, and found the place took only cards. Not encouraging, considering my recent ATM misadventure. I ate something that was tasty and, no doubt, good for me before heading back to my hotel where I finally got into my room and a rest at around 12 noon.

To be continued…

The Christiansborg Palace pictured here is the third iteration of a building of this name on this site. The previous two palaces, the first of which was completed in 1745, were destroyed by fire. The palace pictured here was completed in 1928, and in the process of excavations for the building, buried ruins of castles from as early as the 13th century were discovered. The Palace was intended to be the home of Denmark’s monarch, though it seems the royal family has never resided in this building. Today, Christiansborg Palace houses all three branches of Denmark’s government: the Prime Minister’s office, the Danish Parliament, and the country’s Supreme Court.

Mỹ Sơn: Legacy of the Cham People

About one hour to the west of Hoi An, the UNESCO World Heritage Site, Mỹ Sơn, was an important religious center of the Cham people. The earliest Cham settlements in what is now central and southern Vietnam date back to the 3rd century CE. At some point early in their history, the Cham came into contact with Hinduism and adopted some variant of that religion. While there is debate about the extent to which the Cham in Vietnam were a unified kingdom, there is no question that Cham polities functioned throughout much of Vietnam for hundreds of years. They were traders and seafarers – Hoi An was originally a Cham port city and trading center – who developed a sophisticated civilization that presented formidable challenges to the Vietnamese living in the northern part of today’s Vietnam. For many years, there were ongoing conflicts and wars between the Cham and the Vietnamese. As the Vietnamese moved south, they eventually overran the Cham and absorbed their culture, though it was not until the 19th century that the last Cham enclaves were subdued.

Vietnamese friends have told me that the Cham people have been completely assimilated into the Vietnamese nation. While I suspect that is largely true, I have read that there is still a small, distinctly Cham ethnic minority in the country. How and to what extent Cham culture and customs have influenced the development of Vietnamese culture, I simply do not know enough about the very complex history of interaction between to two peoples to comment.

I have made two trips to My Son. The first time I went, it was a cloudy gray day. The second time I went, it was a cloudy and raining gray day. The photo above is from my second visit in November of 2024.

The Pink Church, Saigon

The Tan Dinh Church (Nhà thờ Tân Định) is a Saigon landmark located along Hai Ba Trung, as that street runs through downtown, making its way from the Kieu Bridge to the Saigon River. The Roman Catholic church was built by the French and completed in 1876 at a time when Vietnam was divided into three colonies, all part of French Indochina. Today, it belongs to the Archdiocese of Ho Chi Minh City.

The church was painted pink in 1957, or so Wikipedia tells us. Although Tan Dinh Church is surely the best known pink church in the country, the nickname could also be applied to the Catholic cathedral in Da Nang, which was also painted the same shade of pink at some point. I have no idea where this color scheme comes from. I cannot recall seeing any pink Catholic churches elsewhere in the world.

This photo was taken in June of 2025. I’ve made several passes at Tan Dinh Church during various visits to Saigon, and this is the first image I am happy with. I’m shooting from the second floor patio of a coffee shop across the street, and as the clock on the church notes, it is just past 5:30 on an early summer afternoon. The sun is behind some thin clouds near the horizon; while there is plenty of light available, it is diffused and softened by the clouds in a way that matches up nicely with the pastel palette of the church. As always, the sensor on the mirrorless Nikon Z7 II does an admirable job of capturing the scene.