Trip Report: Denmark, Day 4

On day four we took the train to Roskilde, about 30 minutes, to see the two main tourist sites in that town. 

This isn't one of them.

The first is the Viking Ships Museum. In the 1950s, scientists discovered five Viking ships that had been intentionally sunk in Roskilde Fjord to prevent invaders from using the shipping channel. They started a long process of bringing up the ships and restoring them, and today they are in this building right here.

There's also a big outdoor area where they work on using Viking techniques to reconstruct ships and there are a bunch of activities you can do if you have children and need to entertain them. Rope weaving and such,

It was a beautiful day, although chilly and windy. In general we did a poor job of packing for this trip and we each bought a new sweater at H&M one day to compensate. It's hard to recall what 62 windy degrees feels like after four months of heat and humidity.

Here they are working on building a new boat according to the specifications of one of the ships dredged up from the bottom of the fjord.

Ships!

This is what one of the warships looked like when it was in use.

And this is one they have out in the water that is an exact reconstruction built using only Viking methods and materials. It was pretty interesting! It looks just like a regular modern ship!

We went to the little cafe in the museum for lunch and I thought, "oh, I'll just get a little ham sandwich." And this is what I got! It was huge and amazing! I couldn't even eat all that.

Ben ordered the pulled pork flatbread and it was similarly delicious.

Then we walked back on this pretty little path to the Roskilde town center.

The other big thing in Roskilde is the Cathedral, Denmark's biggest. It's where all their kings and queens are buried ("Denmark's Westminster Abbey," says Rick Steves).

It was pretty impressive!

Around the central part of the church are little chapels that have been built on over the years, according to each monarch's style and how they preferred to be buried.

This archway dates from 1280.

Then we wandered a bit in Roskilde and headed back for Copenhagen.

We got off at the Østerport station, which was different from our usual stop. It looked about the same distance from home, though, and we thought it would be good to try something new. Unfortunately for me, it turned out to be right next to the Kastellet, which Ben had been sort of obsessed with since we arrived. He really, really wanted to go in there and walk around. It's an old military citadel that is still in use but is also a park. This is what it looks like from above.

I'm a nice wife so I agreed to go in there. It was pretty!

Then we walked right by the National Art Gallery on the way home. It was about 4:00pm but we are usually pretty efficient in art museums so we popped in to look around.

And then we got to go home and sit down until dinnertime.

Unfortunately, right before it was time to leave for dinner it started hailing. We had an umbrella and the hail was small, but still. We took the bus most of the way and then got caught running around for only a little bit in order to find the restaurant, Kodbyens Fiskebar, which was in the meatpacking district.

The food was really wonderful. To start we got a big bowl of mussels to share. 

And then for dinner we each had fish (me: baked cod, Benjamin: pan-fried hake) with the same vegetables of kale, squash puree, et cetera.

Benjamin got raspberry sorbet for dessert (the picture is off-center because he kept trying to do a thumbs up in the photo).

And I got chocolate cake crumbles with ice cream and crunchies.

It had stopped raining so we stopped in at Tivoli on the way home. Tivoli is one of the oldest amusement parks in the world and is right in the center of town. We didn't see any reason to visit, per se, except that everyone says it's really pretty at night, all lit up. It was included in the price of the Copenhagen Card, so why not?

At the end of this day we had walked 30,015 steps. That's like 14 miles! My feet were dying. I made Ben promise we would never do that to ourselves again, and he agreed it was a bit much. We took it slightly easier from here on out.

Trip Report: Denmark, Day 3

For our second full day, we decided to stay in Copenhagen and explore a bit more. There is this great thing you can buy called a Copenhagen Card that gives you free entry into almost every single tourist site and activity in the entire region, including free public transit, so the first thing we did was head toward the tourist information office near the central train station to pick ours up.

We passed this cafe on the way. Unfortunately we didn't see a single actual cat on the entire trip, though! I guess that's how you know you're in a civilized society, no random cats wandering the cities.

Fred had told us there were people in the train station set up to help refugees coming through Europe from Syria so we stopped by to see.

The bike situation is Copenhagen is intense. There are full-sized bike lanes on every single street and they were always busy. We saw people riding bikes while smoking, talking on their phones, texting, and holding umbrellas. Professionals! We thought for a few days that everybody just left their bikes on the street without locking them up and somehow there was a societal understanding that nobody would be a jerk and steal them. Later we learned from talking to Danish people that that is not the case, however; their locks are just small and on the back wheel, so we didn't notice them. Bike theft actually is a big problem.

Copenhagen Cards purchased, we walked over to Christiansborg Palace to take a tour. Christiansborg has burned down twice, most recently in 1900ish. The royal family moved out after the first fire and never moved back in, but they still use the palace for events and state occasions. The Parliament and Supreme Court are also here.

You can wander around in the Royal Reception Rooms but you have to wear these stylish shoe covers.

There was one whole giant room full of these weird tapestries, which we loved. We bought a bunch of prints of them to frame.

Official thrones!

Underneath Christiansborg you can visit ruins from the first castle built on the site by Brother Absalon, the founder of Copenagen, in 1167. That one was demolished in the 1300s and another one built in its place, called Copenhagen Castle.

After the castle we were starving so we stopped at a place on the Strøget, Europe's longest pedestrian shopping street, for lunch.

We got a pizza. It was good.

Then we went back to Nyhavn to take a canal cruise. Everyone said the canal cruise was worth doing even though it seems like a cheesy tourist thing to do. It was nice! We ended up getting off halfway through because it took us to an area we had wanted to explore anyway.

This is the Black Diamond, the Royal Library. One of the most interesting things about Copenhagen (and Denmark in general) is the mix of old and new. They are really on the cutting edge of modern architecture but also interested in preserving their fancy past.

The Opera House.

This is a bunch of tourists photographing a very small statue of The Little Mermaid. For some reason this is a very popular tourist sight. Our AirBnB host's girlfriend has lived in Copenhagen for a long time and said she has never even seen it. We didn't really understand what the point of it was.

We got off the boat in Christianshavn, a neighborhood across the main canal from the old city center. This is Vor Frelsers Kirke. You can climb up that twisty spire but I figured it would be a bad idea what with my crippling fear of heights, plus there was a long line of people waiting to go up.

The interior of the church was pretty.

Then we walked over to Christiania, a "freetown" area founded in 1971 on an old military base that considers itself separate from Denmark. They all live in a commune-type atmosphere - nobody owns property and they vote on who gets to live where - and marijuana is sold on the street. They don't allow photographs because of the whole selling drugs thing - even though the police don't seriously enforce Denmark's drug laws within the borders, it's still not considered a cool idea to take pictures of who exactly is selling the weed. There were all these booths set up lining the main street with nets over the top half, so you couldn't see the faces of anyone working there. It was interesting! Lots of people sitting around smoking weed at picnic tables. We probably would have been pretty into this scene about 15 years ago. As it was we just wandered through, found someone working in a hardware store who let me use his bathroom, and then left.

Re-entering Denmark!

We were starving and passed a bakery on the corner so decided to stop in. I snagged us some chairs and put Ben in charge of picking something for us to eat and he chose this enormous strawberry tart. Somehow we managed to finish it all off, though.

We had a nice view from the bakery!

Then we walked toward home and stopped at the Rundetaarn (Round Tower), an observatory built in 1642. The interior is one long ramp you can climb for views of the city.

This is a little square near the Rundetaarn area.

Our apartment was situated just up from the Botanical Garden so we were able to cut through as a little shortcut to get home.

Unfortunately, when we got home, we discovered the Crazy Lady had been around. Morten had warned us when we arrived that a woman whose daughter lives on the second floor had spent most of the past year harassing the building in various ways. As her signature move she often shoves toothpicks ("tooth sticks," he said) into the outer door lock so nobody can get inside the building. He said she hadn't been around in a couple of weeks so he hoped it wouldn't be an issue for us. The second day he texted to say that she'd apparently been taken away by the police at some point while we were out, but I guess they let her go because the next day she was around again and we came home to this:

I texted Morten and he was very apologetic and had his neighbor buzz us in. Of course, now we were essentially trapped in the apartment - we didn't want to risk leaving again and then having to deal with figuring out how to get back inside. So Ben stayed home and I went across the street and ordered us a sandwich and salad to split for dinner. It was a GREAT sandwich, but I did not take a picture. We were starting to get kind of outraged at how good all the bread was in Denmark. Why can we not have good bread in the United States?

I was still sick and we had obtained some more medication during the day. It's hard being sick in a weird country! All their medication is different. Fortunately we figured out the word for pharmacy (apotek) and found a professional guy who hooked me right up with some more serious cough drops and nose spray.

We then spent the evening watching Arrested Development on Netflix. It was in English but all the episode titles were in Danish, which was funny. Danish never really stopped being funny. Why are there so many letters?!