48 Hours in Copenhagen

As we've said a number of times, we took a two-day trip to Copenhagen, and now it's time to share the full report.

To start, I must admit that I'm a bit of a geography nerd and I've spent a fair amount of time studying maps of Europe. I should probably thank my sixth grade teacher for that...it seemed like a wasted effort to memorize the world map at the time, but it sparked an interest and now I find that it's a wonderful base for travel. Thanks Mrs. Mayer! It also helps put things in perspective when visiting museums and reading about these countries' histories. So for those of you that aren't nerdy like me, I recommend checking out Copenhagen on a map. As you'll see, Copenhagen is on the East side of Denmark, near Sweden and roughly at the point where the North Sea and the Baltic Sea meet. This made the city an ideal location for traders to gather and the port still appears to be quite active today.

I never studied European history in school, but have learned in these last two months that both Sweden and Denmark were once European powerhouses. Turns out the Nordic countries (Norway, Sweden and Denmark) have more to their history than vikings that rampaged, pillaged, burnt and explored. They also have a very rich history of powerful kings that appeared to do nothing but attempt to prove their dominance by building the most incredible buildings and by doing everything possible to increase the size of their territories.

Now these same countries are pacifists, aware of the fact that their populations are so small that any influence they wish to have on the world must come from the economic sector and the ability to form allies.

Before you read further, I want to let you know that Miranda has done an incredible job of adding captions to the photos in the Picassa album, so if you'd rather see the story with matching photos, I'd recommend that you check that out.

So I've provided you with the background, now on to the real story. We left our apartment at 5:00 a.m. on Friday and took a cab to the airport north of town. Check-in and security were a breeze
(we didn't even have to take off our shoes or take our liquids out of our bags), then we enjoyed an easy one-hour flight down to Copenhagen. Apparently they recommend arriving two hours early for all international flights, but we could have arrived ten minutes early and had nothing to complain about.

The airport in Copenhagen was pretty cool. They had a fairly nice shopping mall inside with a lot more stores than you'd see in a typical American airport. Of course there were duty free shops everywhere, but we couldn't handle the currency conversion from Swedish Kronor (which we're just starting to think in terms of) to Danish Kronor, so everything seemed expensive and consequently nothing was purchased. Turns out everything actually was expensive, so we lucked out by following our gut instincts.

The first thing we bought were Copenhagen Cards, cards that gave us free access to all public transit as well as free admission to about 75 different museums and discounts at additional museums and restaurants. We were told that you had to attend about three museums a day for three days in order for the cards to pay for themselves, and since we were only there for two days, we decided to pack in as many museums as possible.

The Copenhagen airport is very close to the city center and it's fairly easy to travel between the two using public transit, but unfortunately the trains are very poorly marked within the airport. We ended up hopping on a train that took us directly to the city center and not to our hotel like we planned. It wasn't a huge deal as we were able to switch to the subway at a later point and move off in the right direction, probably only costing us five minutes extra.

Once off the subway we came up to the ground level, took some photos, looked at a map, and promptly walked in the exact opposite direction of our hotel. I didn't mind, my camping backpack is awesome. Miranda on the other hand had two small carry-ons that were fairly dense and didn't appear to be much fun to carry. A wheeled carry-on might have been better, but there were enough cobblestones that I'm sure those would have been carried after just a few minutes.

We kept hiking, trying to pinpoint our location on our maps, but the maps didn't have the details we needed, and it turns out that the canals and bridges we were crossing formed a nice triangle instead of a square, and no matter which way we turned seemed to take us back to the exact same intersection. We finally located a street that appeared on our maps and set off in the direction of the hotel. Our hotel was actually the tallest building in Copenhagen, so it seems like the task of finding it should have been fairly easy, but the four-story buildings formed perfect walls, and it wasn't until we came to a park on the way to the hotel that we finally saw the building towering before us.

The hotel was quite nice. A Radisson with a small pool, an actual athletic club inside, and a pretty fancy casino downstairs, Casino Copenhagen. We dropped off our bags, searched through our books for interesting museums, circled everything on our maps, then set out on foot to explore.

On day one we decided to explore the city center, and chose to save the statue of the Little Mermaid (not the Disney version, but the Hans Christian Andersen version) and the Carlsberg brewery for day two.

We saw a lot of stuff on day one. Correction, we saw a lot of amazing stuff on day one. The museums were incredible, yet the city failed to impress me. Everything was compared to Stockholm. Don't know if that's fair or not, but Stockholm is just a prettier and cleaner city. We also haven't seen Stockholm's museums, so I didn't even count the museums in my cost/benefit analysis.

Here's a quick rundown of what I can remember from day one: Some museum called a Glyptotek full of cool statues and mummies, the Hans Christian Andersen world (should have known not to go when I saw it was connected to Ripley's Believe It or Not!, because the displays made the animals at Chuck E. Cheese look real), the National Museum, the Round Tower (an observatory with an incredible view of the city), and a trip to Fredricksberg Park and the outside of the Carlsberg Brewery (not the entrance though). We spent a lot of hours just walking the streets too, but these are just the things I can label.

I did my best to compare the cities from the perspective of a guy walking the streets. Copenhagen was full of extremely old buildings mixed with buildings erected in the last half a century. I'm sure modern architects of the world love the blend, but in my mind it really takes away from the city's charm. The streets weren't that clean, and we saw one block where the sidewalk was lined with dog feces spaced about three feet apart, continuing for about one hundred meters. The people seemed to dress a bit trashier and, as the Swedes warned us, the Danes drink a lot of beer. In Stockholm you see coffee shops. In Copenhagen you see beer gardens and pubs. The beer gardens looked like a lot of fun, and it looked pretty relaxing to take a six-pack to the nearest canal or park and share a drink with your friends while soaking up the sun, but there were just enough out-of-control drunks to make me realize that this atmosphere of casual drinking wasn't all that glamorous.

There were 7-elevens about every four blocks, and these served as the neighborhood liquor stores. We saw one drunk guy pick a fight with the 7-eleven cashier who thought he saw the guy stealing beer. Another drunk guy was creating trouble in a coffee shop at the central train station, then later appeared on the same bus we were riding, holding a big bottle of Smirnoff Ice in each hand. He started walking around and talking to people, which resulted in malt beverage being poured all over some unfortunate lady. Then there were the rowdy groups of frat-aged boys running through the pedestrian malls. To be clear, these events were not taking place during normal bar hours but were instead happening in the middle of the day. In the end I realized how much I appreciate Sweden's tight grip on alcohol sales. The public intoxication probably has more to do with cultural differences and the fact that we were in the main bar area than government regulation, but I can see why the Swedes are afraid to deregulate with neighbors like that.

One impressive thing was the number of bikes. Bikes everywhere. It seemed like there were as many bikers as there were cars. Perhaps more. I thought a lot of people biked in Stockholm, but Copenhagen totally wins the gold in that event. And...95% of bikers followed the traffic laws! It was so unreal. Then again, somebody needs to teach the Danes about the benefits of wearing a helmet. I don't like wearing a helmet either, but come on. I assumed everybody would know better by now.

Day one ended with sore feet and a 10:05 p.m. return to the hotel. We had hoped to hop in the pool, only to learn that it had closed five minutes earlier. We should have learned our lesson from this mishap, but as you'll see, it was the first of three such incidences. Having woken at 4:00 a.m. that morning it didn't take long for us to fall asleep for the night.

The next day I got up for a run. I peeked out the windows at a nice sunny day, not one cloud...too bright to actually open my sleepy eyes more than a crack. I closed the curtains and was a bit groggy, so it took about 10 minutes to change into my running clothes and get my shoes laced. I went back to the curtains to find a sheet of fog so thick that I couldn't see much more than three or four feet. I ended up on the treadmill.

After my run I woke up Miranda and we were on our way into the city to find breakfast. Doesn't it suck that nice hotels don't offer continental breakfast, yet cheap hotels do? Seriously...

So we ran into a language barrier. The Swedish and German word for breakfast is "frukost." So naturally, we kept going to Danish restaurants that were advertising "frukost," all of which were closed. Turns out that "frukost" is Danish for "lunch". We didn't realize that we were looking in the wrong places until 11 o'clock in the morning, at which time we gave up on our search for breakfast and settled for lunch at Burger King. Sad, I know. As an aside, "middag" literally "mid day" means lunch in German, but means "dinner" in Swedish. In addition, the Swedish word for afternoon is "eftermiddag" or "after middag," which comes before "middag" the meal. I wish these languages could just get together and sort this stuff out. I'd happily join them as an independent consultant, assuming they need a logical person to help.

After lunch we took off on a more organized adventure. Miranda had found a tourist map that showed a recommended walking tour taking us through some of the best parts of the old city, seeing parks, castles, cathedrals and the like. The path also took us past the statue of the Little Mermaid, which I previously said was a must. The hike was supposed to take around three hours, even though it could be walked in about an hour and a half. Thanks to our Copenhagen Cards we finished the trip in closer to four and a half hours, making sure we hit all of the good museums along the route.

The tourist hike really improved my stance on Copenhagen. Call me a dork, but while we explored certain ideas popped into my head for blog comments. If we had left after day one this would have been a pretty nasty blog. During day two we saw the more quaint side of the old city. And even a few rays of sun. Still not as pretty as Stockholm, but much more scenic than the first day in Copenhagen. The parks were incredible, as were the cathedrals and palaces. The Little Mermaid had a huge gathering, and as the tourist TV station in the hotel said, she's pretty much the national monument of Denmark...so very Danish.

About the time we finished our town walk the rain really started coming down. My tiny umbrella wasn't sufficient for two, so we were fairly wet by the time we caught a bus to the Carlsberg Brewery. The goal was to get to the brewery by three o'clock, but due to our museum stop to see the excavated ruins of the palaces in Copenhagen, which ended up being both bigger and more interesting than expected, we didn't get to the brewery until 3:59 p.m. We didn't think it was a big deal considering everything is open until at least five o'clock, right? Wrong. The brewery closes at 4:00 p.m. If you want to get inside, arrive at 3:00 p.m. So there were were, soaking wet on the far edge of town, feet even more sore than the day before, getting a big gate shut in our face. The old man that greeted us at the gate was incredibly kind and apologetic, but it was still a bummer. I almost cried.

Just made me think of something funny. Copenhagen must be a huge tourist town. Everybody in the shops and restaurants greeted us in English. In Stockholm, everybody is treated like they're Swedish. In Denmark, either we looked like tourists, or everybody is treated as a tourist. I don't think we stood out that badly, but who knows.

Before the trip to the hotel we ended up seeing the Old Main building of the University of Copenhagen, the Rosenberg Park and Palace, another pretty cool park, Kastellet (an old military fortification that's still in use today, the moat and dike are shaped like a star, cool to see on the map if you can find it), the Little Mermaid, the Royal Palace, the Marble Church, the ruins under the royal castle, the central train station and the Amber Museum.

The rest of the night was spent exploring a couple other areas of the city. We found a coffee shop, walked past the main restaurant strip, grabbed a bite to eat, hit up the amber museum, did some more wandering, then went back to the hotel. After laying down for about ten minutes we went down to the pool. It was 9:30 p.m. We were both tired, so a 30-minute swim sounded quite nice...nope...on Fridays the pool closes at 9:00 p.m. I swear we were cursed. We ended up watching a women's handball match on TV then heading down to the casino. We had about 15 Danish Kronor (roughly five dollars) and decided to waste those on slots instead of converting it back to Swedish Kronor. It was wasted in no time.

That's pretty much our trip. We had another early morning trip to the airport and were back in Stockholm by 8:00 a.m.

Copenhagen is a cool city, but I still like Stockholm better.