Copenhagen

Pretty new harbour

We spent the Labour day long weekend in Copenhagen, though it's not called Labour day anymore, just early May bank holiday.  And it's not really a bank holiday since everyone gets the day off

We had a bit of a nightmare adventure trying to get there, it felt like the holiday was a bit cursed from the start.  We had another run in with the First Great Western brand - this time their Gatwick Express arm of the company.  There was a fire on the line somewhere - what is it with FGW and fires, do they employ recovering pyromaniacs or something?  I mean that's very admirable, giving them a fresh start and all, but perhaps you should be doing something to halt the excessive fire lighting?

Cherry blossom in Tivoli

Dave with one of the palaces behind him - run round II

And this was the Friday night before a long weekend, everyone wanted to get to Gatwick.  The train station was just getting more and more crowded, people were jumping over barriers to get to the platforms, it was total chaos, but nothing was moving.  So we jumped in a cab, bad move.  Central London traffic on the Friday evening of a bank holiday, man it was bad.  I was convinced we weren't going to make it.  I've never missed a flight before, but I guess the run of good luck had to end at some point.  And we were flying with one of those budget airlines which have 40 minute cut-offs for check in.  So I thought there was no way.  We leap out of the taxi, after trying to pay him in euros for some reason and sprint to the check in desk.  We actually got there about 40 minutes to spare, and since it turned out that there were a few people still waiting for the Copenhagen flight I thought we would be OK.  Or at least we should make it onto the plane.

We were flying with Norwegian air, first time with them.  It was total chaos, I thought it was just because they had to deal with the knock-on effect of the Gatwick Express breaking down.  But we were in Gatwick again last week, and walked past their check in desk and it was the same absolute chaos then as well.  So I think that's just standard.

Looking across to the Churchill park, with added swan's nest

Cherry blossom going crazy

As we are waiting there we had people who had arrived late holding their mobile phones out, telling the check-in staff that they had the pilot on the phone, and that he would hold the plane for them if they could get checked in.  There were people with babies just being completely ignored, people pushing in, desperate to get on the flight.  It was just a free-for-all.

We got checked in and then we had to run through the airport, that was a bit of fun, luckily the other people checking in late to Copenhagen were much older than us, so we knew they would take a bit of time.  And even better was that for once there was no line at security, which was a boon.  We made it fine, we were the second last people on the plane, we had passed the old couple just after duty-free.

Strange pirate ship at Tivoli

Awesome roof at the National museum

At the other end we waited like saps for our luggage to arrive.  It should have been blatantly obvious that there was no way our bags would have made it to the plane faster than we had.  So really we should have saved ourselves the 20 minute wait and gone straight to the missing baggage counter.  We fill in our form, and it is at that point I realise we really should put a name tag or some form of ID on the bag, in case these situations do arise.  They tell us that in 95% of the cases you get your bag in the next 24 hours.  The real pain was that all the Copenhagen guide books and the map I had borrowed from the library were in the bag.

No bag arrived by Saturday afternoon, so we go out to our fancy dinner, still wearing the same clothes I had worn to work on Friday, and come back hoping that our bag had arrived.  To find that there was a suitcase in our room, only problem was that it was the older couple's.  Aaaargh.  It is at this point that I'm thinking perhaps it's actually the old couple who are cursed and we are just being caught up in their bad luck.  Since they had done everything they could (their bag didn't even look like ours) they had all this ID in the front pocket of the bag (that's how we knew it was theirs).  At that point we cracked and went and bought a toothbrush.  But what happens once the tags on your bag get mixed up?  Because my name was on the luggage tag of their bag?  Luckily they must have been at home when our bag was delivered to them, because the airline company rang the hotel first thing in the morning to say that they were dropping off our actual bag that day.  And they did, so 12 hours before we were due to fly back home, we get our bag back.  Let me tell you the shower after receiving the suitcase was one of the best, knowing I could change into all clean clothes.  That's really one of the best feelings.

Really weird painting, the painting is actually reflected on the pole in the middle

Copenhagen itself was great, they are a good looking people the Danes, everyone is really tall, and fit and surprisingly well-dressed.  They definitely don't go in for the same chain shops that we get in London.  And awesome shoes.  Their shoe companies really have to expand into the rest of Europe so we can all have their great styles.  And everyone spoke English, so so well.  It really makes you feel lazy, because it wasn't just the young people, but everyone, even the really old people.  And you are thinking, when did you learn it?  Surely there was no way they were teaching English when they were at school!

It certainly made the bag re-claimation a lot easy.  But even though everyone we met spoke English, the one person who didn't was the taxi driver from the airport.  What is it with taxi drivers at airports, can they not ever get any other fares?  Every time I have caught a taxi from the airport, they haven't known where to go, we couldn't communicate with them, and then they don't even drop us off at the hotel and you have to end up wandering through the streets to get to the hotel.  And yet the taxis you catch during the rest of the stay are all really good.  It's something really weird about airport taxis.

The royal palace

Spring - time!

Overall Copenhagen was a really pretty city, and we had some great runs there.  It helped that the weather was fantastic, there's something about beautiful blue skies, not too hot and running along the sea front to put you in a good mood.  Too bad I couldn't take any photos though, since my running camera was trapped in the lost suitcase.

We went into the National Museum, which was a really good museum, they had a big sections on Greenlanders and whaling and that sort of thing.  Which was pretty interesting, I don't know how people live in that sort of environment, they had all the fur clothes they wore.  Which apparently only last a year and then they have to make whole new outfits, and everything is done completely from hand.

They also had almost like the best-of from around the world.  It wasn't very big, but every culture would have some artifact representing them in the museum, so you had a samurai knight armour, and the Indonesian shadow puppets + orchestra all laid out.  That sort of thing.  But then even more interesting was that the whole other half of the museum was purely on the Danish and Scandinavian history, man they really fought each other a lot.  You kind of imagine that they should have been banding together against the rest of Europe, but no the Danes and Swedes seemed to be constantly at war.  And Norway was actually under Danish control for hundreds of years, I never appreciated that.

The crown jewels

We also went to the royal palace - where I don't think the royals actually live there, they have another palace somewhere.  This is where the crown jewels are kept.  It was a bit of a different experience from the Tower of London, where you have to ride travelators around, no photos and hundreds of guards.  Here just a couple of bored people on stools.  Though they did have massive vault like doors.  I wonder how fast they close when the alarms go off, and how long the air supply would last.  They were very ostentatious jewels.  They didn't have the massive stones that the English jewels have, but they seemed to make up for that in sheer numbers.

They really went in for that smart phone bar scanning thing that you see around nowadays.  It made me think that perhaps it's time to install that app, no more need to hire audio guides.  The palace is built in this park, which on a lovely sunny day was full of Danes.  We even managed to have a nap on the grass.  It's not often that the weather is nice enough to fall asleep outside.  So thumbs up to Copenhagen.

The lights and roller-coaster at Tivoli

The little mermaid - without tourist or industrial estate

One thing I really wanted to see was Tivoli, it's like Luna Park in Sydney, but way nicer.  It's a fun fair, but also a garden, and a light show.  Well not really a light show as such, they just had a lot of pretty lights around the place.  It's the one thing about Copenhagen which is in all the guide books, but I'd never been.  We ended up going 30 minutes before closing time, since I wanted to see the lights, but it didn't get dark until late, and I'm too scared to go on any of the rides.  The great lady at the entrance let us go in 2-for-1, she thought that was the fairest.  Oh man I was liking the Danes.  And it was pretty fun inside, pretty big.  They have all these musical performances on as well.  It seemed to be mainly school-aged performers, I guess they are cheap.  The first thing we saw was a xylophone orchestra, I have to say I've never seen one of those before.  And with the lights, and the cherry blossoms, it was a nice way to end an evening.

The courtyard in Thorvaldsens Museum - where he is also buried

Of course the other thing which is in all the guide books is the Little Mermaid statue, it's actually a long way out of town, we only saw it because we went for our second run of the holiday, another good one, but a bit tougher than the first.  On the other side of the harbour from her is this big industrial estate, so it's actually quite hard to get a photo with (a) no tourists in shot and (b) no massive warehouses.  That's why this one is so tightly cropped.  Having seen her, I'm not 100% sure why she is so popular.  Perhaps it's more that the story she represents is so popular.

The Pope Pius VII plaster cast of the Vatican statue

The colourful interior of Thorvaldsen's museum

The other thing which is becoming much more popular in Copenhagen is good food.  I did try for Noma, but that was a bit half-hearted since I didn't hold out much hope of getting a reservation there.  In the end we went to two great places.  The first was Relae restaurant, the chef used to work at Noma, and given the fact that Noma was just getting over their poisoning of customers I wasn't too upset not to be eating there.

The food was really good, though some of it was pretty weird, we had things like caramelised kelp, I think it was the Danish version of salted caramel.  The oysters were wonderful as was the pork.  And they keep giving you lovely bread, which I was probably very ill-mannered in using to sop up every last bit of delicious food.  This restaurant was in a suburban location, near the cemetery where Hans Christian Anderson is buried, so we got to see his grave as well.  We also found it really hard to hail a taxi from the street here, it was very weird, either all the taxis were full or perhaps they aren't allowed to stop on main roads to pick people up.  So it was a bit of a trek back to the hotel.

The second place was at a much more trendy location, in the meat packing district, or what used to be the meat packing district.  It was about 500m from our hotel, so thankfully no trekking this time.  You walk into what is really a whole estate of warehouses, where you could buy fish and that sort of things.  And one of them has been converted into a fish restaurant - fiskebar.  You can't go to Denmark without trying the seafood right?  Another awesome find. I had to have the rollmops, lets just say they are better than the ones you get out of the jar, it's pickled herrings for those who may have missed trying that delicacy.

The horses exercising outside Christiansborg Palace

And once again everyone spoke the best English, oh man, it makes travelling too easy.

Jason and the fleece - with added tree stump

The final stand out for me was the Thorvaldsen museum, he was probably Denmark's most famous artist.  He was a sculptor in the late 1700-1800 and lived for a long time in Rome.  Right in the middle of Copenhagen, next to the Christiansborg Palace is his museum, just full of his sculptures.  The audio guide is really good, definitely adds to the museum.  One of his more famous pieces is probably the Pope Pius VII grave monument in St Peter's.  One slightly amusing aspects of his work is that the audio guide was saying that he liked to add a tree stump or something to the piece, to give it a more naturalistic setting, but really it was so the heavy marble had something to lean on and that the ankles wouldn't break.