National_Geographic_Traveller_India_May_2017

In Focus | FESTIVE SPIRIT
Growing
up in the
Bombay
of the 1980s
and ’90s,
my make-believe world included characters from Hans Christian
Andersen’s fairy tales: a girl so tiny that one of her suitors was
a frog, another girl who proved she was a princess because she
could sense a pea lodged beneath her bed of 20 mattresses.
Andersen’s world was ruled by whimsy and magic. I didn’t
realise how much of his stories had coloured my imagination
until I walked the streets where he lived in Odense, Denmark.
The first sign that our group of five journalists and our host
were in the 19th-century author’s hometown, was the traffic
signal outside the railway station of Odense. The traffic light’s
little green and red men resembled Andersen in profile, complete
with coat, top hat, and cane. On the pavement, footprints in the
author’s giant size 46 created a trail to Andersen attractions
across the city.
Around a corner marched golden-haired princesses with
wands and crowned princes with sceptres, all singing. Their
invisible pied piper was none other than Andersen, who is
celebrated for a week every August in his hometown. The
Hans Christian Andersen Festival, started in 2013 by a group
of local businesspeople, hosts parades, street performances,
ballet, theatre, and 3D light shows, all inspired by Andersen’s
magical world. In keeping with the festival theme of “anything
can happen”, drummers banging on trash cans would suddenly
fill up a square, or we’d turn down a street to find a canopy of
umbrellas swaying overhead.
Odense may be Denmark’s third-largest city, and just a twohour
train ride from Copenhagen, but it exudes an air of the last
century. As we wandered lanes away from the festival bustle,
we passed pretty half-timbered houses, restaurants serving
traditional Danish food like fried pork belly with potatoes, and
quaint cottages with windowsills displaying porcelain figurines.
We paused by the museum to Odense’s other celebrated resident,
Carl Nielsen, and peered down a narrow cobblestoned street
that looked the same 500 years ago. And yet for all its old world
charms, Odense was a hub for robotics, with the national test
centre for drone technology inside the Hans Christian Andersen
Airport. It was mind-boggling.
At 14, Andersen caught a bus to Copenhagen where he
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84 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC TRAVELLER INDIA | MAY 2017