I spent several days in Copenhagen with a friend from Knox, Rachel, who is studying there this term. Though it feels like years ago, luckily, while I was there, I wrote everything down. And now, lucky you, I have pictures.
Day 1: I arrive in Copenhagen after lots of travel, and meet Rachel, who is also arriving from a vacation in Barcelona, at the airport. There are flower stands all over the city, and we look for one Rachel knows is quality, so I can bring her host family flowers, as a thank you for letting me stay with them.
Rachel's host mom meets us at the train station and is incredibly nice. Also, like everyone here in Denmark, she speakes English, an added bonus. Rachel's host parents and we eat what is described to me as a typical Danish meal for dinner: open face sandwiches with whatever you want to put on them, including some liver, which the cat also loves. Rachel and I almost immediately conk out for the night.
Day 2: We begin the day with a Danish breakfast: Mousli, liquid yogurt and orange juice, which was also what I found for breakfast foods in Germany. Rachel and I head downtown to watch the changing of the guards at Amalienborg, the palace where the Danish royal family lives.
It's like any other guard changing ceremony, fun to watch, and Rachel and I do so for a while before leaving to check out the famous Little Mermaid statue, based on the Andersen fairy tale. It's small, but very pretty, a landmark of Copenhagen.
Upon noticing other tourists and walkers enjoying ice cream cones, Rachel and I, not to be outdone, decide to get some for ourselves, and since we're without our parents, we get ice cream before our lunch of street vendor hot dogs, a much more common phenomenon here in Denmark than in Scotland.
Since today is our simply-walk-around-and-check-things-out day, Rachel and I wander down Strøget, the pedestrian/fancy designer shops street, and check out Nyhavn, or New Harbour. She also shows me where she goes to school here, the Danish Institute for Study Abroad, as well as the famous round tower of Copenhagen.
Here's the view from the top:
Rounding off our day full of walking, we check out in one of the pastry shops that makes Denmark famous (Lagkagehuset, this one is called) and enjoy a real danish before heading back home for the night, enjoying a nice dinner with her family, and finally meeting her host sister and brother, Andreas, 12 and Rebecca, 10, who were staying with their grandmother in another part of Denmark before now.
We play a bit of football (soccer, as I haven't heard it called in a while) and it's interesting to watch this new style of parenting. The Danes are firm believers in not letting their children win, as American parents do so often, as well as not letting them feel they're better than anyone else. Throughout my trip, I ask Rachel and her parents a lot of dumb questions about how children are graded at school and about special education and extra help in school (taken seriously) and gifted programs (non-existant).
Day 3: Rachel and I sleep in, as we've been up late and have both been walking and traveling. Once again, we make our way downtown, and this time our first errand is lunch. We find pizza slices and eat them in the square downtown, and immediately begin the seach for some sunscreen, primarily for me, since my skin is unnaturally pale. It's a long search, during which I get sunburnt, anyway, and which is broken in the middle by Rachel's proclimation, "if we can't find sunscreen, let's get ice cream instead," which is exactly what we end up doing. This, and we buy a hat.
We take a boat tour along the canal and see some new sights of Copenhagen, like these:
After the tour, of course we get another pastry, in true Danish style, or perhaps in true tourist style, and see a film at the Copenhagen cinema, the grand theatre. Rachel humors me and we watch a korean film, Poetry, which Rachel says is a typical film to show in a Danish theatre: one with a sad ending. And the ending certainly is sad - it's not something you'd ever see in mainstream America - but the film is excellent, as far as I'm concerned. Since it's a little late when we get out of the film, the café we wanted to eat in after the show is closed, so we walk through a lit up, nighttime Copenhagen instead, especially enjoying the lit-up amusement park, Tivoli
and then head home to eat there.
Day 4: Saturday morning we realise we don't have time to do much in the city, since Rachel's parents have planned a big, Danish Easter dinner for that afternoon. Rachel's been reading my blog, so she suggests we go visit the famous cemetery before dinner. The bikeride there takes a little under half an hour, and we walk around the huge cemetery for a while, which is also quite the tourist attraction and a sort of park - people are lying about under the trees. We see the most famous grave there, that of Hans Christian Andersen,
and marvel at the cemetery itself, which is huge, airy and sunny.
We bike back and enjoy a delicious Easter dinner and some company from the people Rachel's parents have invited over, who, Rachel admits, are speaking English much more than they normally would, since the two of us are there. Our dinner, which everyone insists is a typical Danish Easter dinner (though, of course, the Danes are hardly religious) consists of lots of different types of liver, which we put on brown bread, pickled herring, a Danish treat lots of people apparently don't like but which I thought was delicious, and various other delicacies: olives and other types of meat and fish, including locks filled with avocado, two of my favorites, as well as Easter beer and shots of cognac. Needless to say, everyone has a good time.
We finish with dessert, lots of fruit, cheese and some sweet nuts, and play a fun game which is a lot like bowling (everyone rolls balls down the grass and tries to get their ball closest to a previously marked point). I lose.
Day 5: Rachel has been wanting to show me the Glyptotech, and has been wanting to see it herself, so we begin the day here. There's lots of cool art in this museum and even more cool architecture, one reason Rachel wants to see it; her Modern Danish Design professor told her class that it was one of the buildings Rachel and the rest of the study abroaders had to see before leaving Denmark. Indeed, the architecture is pretty incredible. Case in point:
So we enjoyed the Glyptotech immensly. Rachel likes architecture; I like art museums. What more could we want? Following in that vein, we stopped by a place called the Book Café. Now, really, I ask you, what more could you want? Since Rachel insisted throughout my trip that she take several pictures with me in them so people checking out my Facebook/blog/photo albums could have some real proof I was actually here, here's me in the book café:
True to its name, its walls are literally lined with books. Basically, it looks like my house, except they're constantly serving people food and drink. Sweet deal. After a lovely meal, we head home for some football with the kids and one of their friends, who love the sport, though they get knocked down a whole lot. Though the three of them put together are a quarter of my size, they easily cream me.
Day 6: Christiania. Unless you're from Denmark or have been there, this may not mean a whole lot to you, but it's the most-visited tourist site in Copenhagen, which is funny because it's not extraordinarily attractive. Formerly military barraks, the buildings in now-Christiania were gradually abandoned as the military moved out. Of course, poor Danes thought, "Well, now, isn't that a wasted building I wouldn't have to pay rent on if I just snuk in and lived there." And that's what they did. Christiania is still a free state today, and though its super-hippie residents do have to pay to use the land there, they don't technically pay rent. It's just as well - those who don't live in the former military barraks handmake their houses out of anything and everything they can find, making for an interesting landscape.
Rachel and I spent a lovely morning and part of the afternoon there, checking out the creativity and innovation the free state allows, buying some souveniers, and drinking Christiania's own, signature beer.
Unfortunately, reality reared its ugly head, and I eventually had to leave Christiania, its warmth, its sunlight, its open-container laws and its grafitti, for colder, grayer, less socialist Scotland. After a short flight and a long busride, I was back where it felt like home - modern, white buildings and designs replaced with beautiful, Medieval, majestic stone, realising once again after my travels, that it really is good to be home.
