Where’s Snarky?
June 2012 Prague Copenhagen
Friday in Copenhagen
Alpha bravo camembert; a more conventional museum; the opposite of rainbows and unicorns; bikes everywhere.
Copenhagen is clearly going to be a more laid back experience than Iceland, so I expect that I’ll have less to say about it. That’s partly just the nature of the city, and partly a reflection of the fact that I haven’t done any prior research on it, so I have less of an agenda here.
We arrived late and took the Metro to downtown Copenhagen, where our first hotel awaited us. Hotel Opera is pleasant, in a somewhat funky old-world way. The lift is eccentric, the room is nice but small, and the hallways are lined with charming photos of long-forgotten movie stars. It’s interesting, to a modern eye, to note how old and imperfect they were: wrinkles abound, and almost everyone has slightly imperfect teeth. Photoshop and cosmetic surgery are so routine nowadays that their absence is striking.
In any case, the best part of the hotel was hearing the night manager making a reservation over the phone: “It’s a bit complicated, so I’ll spell it for you. That’s S as in Sebastian, O as in Octavio, G as in John…” The hotel breakfast was crowded but good. The Danish, ironically, was adorned with colored sprinkles and would have been right at home at Safeway, but the pâté and cured meats were excellent.
The weather today was mixed, with bright sunshine interspersed with heavy rain. Once we’d moved hotels (to a very nice and modern business hotel) we took a boat tour along the canals. I’m not a huge fan of that kind of thing, but it was a good introduction to the city. After lunch, Martin went off to rent a bike and ride around the city while Dad and I went to a museum. After our museum experiences in Reykjavik, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect at the Statens Museum For Kunst, but it turns out to be an art museum.
The Danish exhibit is excellent, and greatly expanded my previously non-existent knowledge of Danish art. There were some quite excellent pieces, with a suitably morose Scandinavian outlook to keep things interesting. Grim reapers stealing babies from wailing mothers, families being evicted and thrown out into the snow, that kind of thing.
Dad went back to the hotel to rest, and I spent a couple of hours getting pleasantly lost by myself. Copenhagen is a fun city to explore, and is by far the least motorized city I’ve ever been in. Most streets are travelled almost exclusively by pedestrians and bikes, with occasional cars navigating the throngs. Dedicated bike lanes are ubiquitous, and everyone rides everywhere. It’s easy to mistake a bike lane for a sidewalk: they’re wide and in many cases are elevated above the street (the pedestrian sidewalk is further elevated).
Homeward bound
A funny place for a bicycle race; a funny place for sandcastles; terror and eels: two great tastes that go great together; what’s red and white and has ten thousand legs and needs to pee?; a notable final dinner.
Today’s explorations began at the Rundetårn (round tower, for those of you who didn’t pay attention in Danish class). It’s a large round tower that was originally built to house an observatory in the 17th century. In its current manifestation, the Rundetårn primarily serves as a vantage point for tourists to survey the city. I love exploring new cities, and it’s particularly fun to spend some time in a high place, mentally retracing my journeys from the previous few days. Copenhagen is a tricky city for the unwary to navigate: it has a large number of towers that serve as convenient landmarks, except that they all look the same.
The interior of the Rundetårn is a large spiral ramp rather than a stairway. The ramp has seen some interesting traffic over the years, including the tsar of Russia (who ascended on a horse) and a race on penny farthing bicycles (the winner ascended the tower in an impressive three minutes).
What art forms do you think of when you think of Denmark? If you’re anything like me, you don’t think of sand sculptures. One of the benefits of living in an industrialized society, however, is that if you don’t happen to have a sandy beach handy, you just truck in some sand and make one. Copenahgen apparently makes a habit of doing that every summer, and this year’s effort features about 20 large and impressive sculptures produced by teams from around the world, about half of which were organized around a theme of “history of the world”.
Moving on, we hopped the train to Tivoli for lunch. Tivoli is a large walled garden that serves as a general-purpose tourist trap / amusement park. We found a suitable place for lunch, and tucked into some smørrebrød (traditional Danish open-faced sandwiches). My smoked eel and scrambled egg lunch was delicious, and I have to say that my enjoyment was enhanced by the screams of abject terror coming from the victims of the amusement park rides. For dessert, we grabbed Nutella and banana crepes at a street vendor. The crepes were only so-so, but Nutella can mask a multitude of sins.
Our walk to dinner took us past one of the city’s large public parks, where giant screens were showing the Holland versus Denmark football game. The Danish team colors are red and white, of course, and the crowd was festooned with clothing (and in some cases face paint) in those colors. Copenhagen seems to take a liberal view of public drinking, and the streets were awash in six-pack wrappers. When you put a six pack or two of beer into a football fan, guess what happens next? The authorities had risen to the occasion by constructing a giant open air urinal which essentially consisted of a long pipe with numerous attached funnels.
The fans we saw were boisterous but mostly in good spirits (perhaps because Denmark won), and while we saw a lot of trash and broken bottles in the streets, we didn’t see any real hooliganism.
Dinner was without question our best meal of the trip. We went to Koefoed, a lovely little restaurant that specializes in Danish food sourced almost exclusively from the island of Bornholm. It’s one of those places that has a very small menu that they do very well. Everything was excellent, although the highlight was probably an elderflower sorbet with flakes of dried strawberry.
