Advertisement
Published: December 6th 2007
Edit Blog Post
This was my first trip out of UK since I came to UK to work in August. I chose Copenhagen as my first "out-of-UK" trip because my cousin Ben happened to be having student exchange in Copenhagen from August to December.
Before stepping onto Denmark, I already had quite of lot of "Danish encounters". When I was small, I played with Lego, a Danish product. As a child I also listened to fairytales such as The Little Mermaid, The Ugly Duckling, etc, which were written by H.C. Anderson, a Danish. In every supermarket around the world, there are Danish butter cookies for sale. In most bakeries selling Western pastries, it's hard to miss the crusty round pastry which is (interestingly) called a "Danish". Living near the sea, it's hard to miss ships and containers belonging to Maersk, a Danish company and the world's largest shipping company. Even in my home-town Singapore, which is 10000km away from Denmark, one can find Copenhagen airport trolleys in Tanah Merah Ferry Terminal... (The original CPH stickers, complete with CPH's telephone number & address, still remain on the trolleys.) It's quite amazing to have so many "Danish encounters", considering that Denmark is a relatively small
country in Europe...
Anyway, back to my trip... After spending one night in Stansted Airport (refer to my previous post), we boarded our Easyjet flight, which departed Stansted at 7am GMT and arrived at Copenhagen 1.5 hours later. As the plane approached Copenhagen Airport, we caught a glimpse of the Copenhagen skyline glittering in the morning sunlight. We also saw a row of giant windmills out in the sea and the famous Oresund bridge in the distant background.
Upon landing, we were greeted by the elegance and efficiency of Copenhagen Airport. Despite only 2 passport counters, the queues were short and fast. The curvy metallic luggage trolleys and the simple and elegant interior design of the terminal were fine examples of Scandinavian design. Directions were pretty straight-forward, and we were out into the arrival hall earlier than we expected. My cousin Ben was already waiting for us in the arrival hall, and he brought us to the brand new Metro station (the airport extension only opened in Sep 2007) where we would catch the Metro to our destination - Nørreport.
We went to our hostel (near Nørreport Station) but our room was not ready for check-in yet,
so we left our bags at the hostel lobby and went out for a walk. We headed towards Amalienborg (the royal residence of the Danish monarchy) because we wanted to catch the changing of the guards at 12 noon. As we approach Nyhaven, we saw a small contingent of Danish soldiers marching towards Amalienborg. Around the marching contingent was a large "contingent" of camera-trigger-happy tourists, and we (as tourists) also joined the crowd and followed the soldiers to Amalienborg. Once reaching the square of Amalienborg, the incoming contingent marched towards the outgoing contingent, and the exchange took place. Meanwhile, a group of policemen tried to control the large group of tourists and prevent them from getting too near to the soldiers... (The scene reminded me of the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace in London.) Once the changing of the guards was over, the big group of tourists began to scatter. We took photo with a guard on duty before heading to the water-front and walking north towards the little mermaid.
When we reached the little mermaid, we saw a big group of tourists staring and taking photos of a small dark sculpture out in the sea. We
were a bit disappointed because of the large number of tourists and a "not-so-beautiful" backdrop of factories and shipyards on the other side of the harbour... (The dark gloomy clouds in the horizon seemed to make things more depressing.) As we were getting ready to leave, suddenly there was a downpour of hail... Ice pellets were raining from the sky and were hurting my ears (as I forgot to bring an umbrella or hood). Nevertheless, the scene was quite pretty and romantic, and my friends and I were gasping with wonder as we never saw this weather phenomenon before in our whole life... Unfortunately, the ice melted quickly upon landing, and ground was wet instead of being covered by a white blanket.
In the afternoon, we decided to find a place to eat. We went to the Strøget, a busy pedestrian shopping street. We wanted to find a place where we could have traditional Danish meals, but to our surprise, we couldn't find any Danish restaurants. All the restaurants we saw were fast-food (like McDonalds), Meditarraean, Asian, Latin American, etc. In the end, we decided to go to a Mexican restaurant. One thing we realised after reaching Copenhagen was
that... everything was so expensive! A meal in the restaurant costed me almost 100DKK, which is around £10!
After lunch we went back to the hostel to check in and to have a short rest. The sky began to turn dark at 4pm, and it was completely dark by 5pm. Nevertheless, we decided to go out for a evening walk. We walked to Christiansborg and took some photos, then walked along the Strøget and bought some souvenirs at a gift shop. We went to Rådhuspladsen to take more photos, and later we saw a Hard Rock Cafe (which made my friend Elsa very excited because she's a fan of Hard Rock Cafe). After my friends bought some souvenirs from the Hard Rock Cafe shop, we decided to make our way back to the hostel because it was freezing cold at night. (Meanwhile my cousin Ben went home.) We bought some bread and spread at a supermarket, and then had our "budget" Danish-style dinner in our hostel.
So that's how I spent my first day in Denmark! So far I had good impressions of Copenhagen, but I just found the weather too cold and windy... In comparison, the weather
in UK was rather mild!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.291s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 14; qc: 64; dbt: 0.0855s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb