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?!