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Published: July 13th 2008
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The good thing about bank holiday weekends is that they make travel to little places seem acceptable. We didn't know too much about Denmark, nor about Copenhagen - but we thought three days would probably be right. The bad thing about bank holiday weekends is that you want to cram as much into those three days as you possibly can. This means we took the earliest flight that we could on Saturday morning, which in turn meant that we had to get out of bed at 4am. This kind of thing gets your mind working at odd angles. A question I asked myself was "what kind of people are on the 7:30am flight to Copenhagen?". The answer: Kiwis. As far as the eye could see or the ear could hear we were surrounded by the New Zealand accent, jandals and singlets. Look out Copenhagen, you're about to have an big ol Kiwi injection!
Copenhagen's airport is only 12 minutes away from the central train station, making it the city in Eurpoe with the closest airport. This is good, because when you've had an early start and spent a few hours in a plane, you feel cheated by the trip into
the city. You're close, but no cigar.
Though we had the directions for the bus to our hotel, it was a beautiful day and we thought we'd walk. Having the sun beating down on you is an uncommon sight in the U.K., so you tend to make as much of it as you can. We picked up a map from the information centre on our way - but more importantly we saw a cellphone shop called "Dan's Phones". Awesome, I'm a legend in Denmark.
With such a splendid day in the offing, our first and only port of call for the day was Tivoli Gardens. Essentially it's a huge amusement park that has been operating for over 150 years. You can be pretty relaxed and just buy an entry ticket to walk around the gardens, or you can go all out and buy unlimited passes to all of the rides. The price was pretty steep (you cannot travel to Denmark on the cheap) so we just strolled the garden - however we did buy a few ride concessions. Notably, we had a ride on the oldest working roller coaster in the world.
First opened in 1914, this
wooden coaster has been operating unchanged for the best part of 100 years. Like most of the older wooden coasters, it doesn't go upside down, however it does have some pretty sharp turns and drops. Most unusually and perhaps unsettling, is that it has a driver. There are 9 cars in the coaster and the driver/brake man sits in the middle carriage. He has ear muffs, a comfy seat (possibly from a bus), a seat belt and his hand placed firmly on a long wooden brake lever. He spends a lot of his time looking over his shoulder - when he had to slow us down, he also had to make sure that we didn't go so slow that the other coaster caught up to us...
We spent the rest of the day taking in the sun, breathing the clean air and relaxing while we took it down a notch from hectic London life. Sudden exposure to all this natural goodness and lack of tension proved too much for me and I ended up with my first migraine in a long long time. At one point it got so bad that I got confused about where we were and
who I was.
The next day we decided to do a bit of a walking tour of Copenhagen. On the way we passed "Dan's Furniture", cool - but a little weird. The first stop of the day was the natural history museum. It used to be a part of the royal palace and hence one wing was given over to the royal family. It's weird to think that one of them is an Aussie. Incidentally, her face is everywhere - they seem to simply love her. Which is a little odd as in the museum we got the feeling that though Denmark is quite a liberal place, there is still a lot of stigma attached to being a foreigner.
We walked through the famous Nyhavn Port with all the multicoloured houses and the old boats tied up at the docks and took plenty of photos. From there we continued to the obligatory photo with the little mermaid. As with most brass statues, there are parts of her that get touched more often that others, giving those areas more shine. On our way back through the city we decided to go up the "Round Tower".
The tower is
much wider than most medieval towers - the reason for which becomes quickly apparent once you're inside - it has no stairs. The entire tower is one wide spiral slope. It's wide enough for you to drive a car up (which one of the royals acutally did) - or perhaps a horse drawn carriage. I doubt this is an option though because the stones are quite slippery and the slope is quite steep - meaning that Cheri and I were having trouble enough with our hiking boots. The sprial is 210 meters in length and rises 36 meters - someone good at math should be able to work out the incline. They once raced Penny-Farthings to the top. The winner did it in just under 3 minutes. From the top you get the best view of all Copenhagen.
The last day couldn't be more different. It was raining. A. Lot. It was like a shower. A cold shower. On full. All day. Definately an indoors day - so it was a good thing we did the outside things yesterday. We spent all day darting and ducking into shops and museums. Naturally we visited the H. C. Anderson museum - I love the fact that nearly none of his stories have a happy ending, and yet he is one of the best loved children's writers of all time.
As we dashed down the road to a souvenir shop I also caught sight of "Dan's cafe". It was as I was getting slightly weirded out by my apparent fame and then realised (by buying a fridge magnet) that Danish for Denmark is "Danmark". So actually, all of these "Dan" places weren't named after anyone called Dan at all.
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Russell
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Chez Dan lives on!
I don't think you can work out the incline of the round tower unless you know how many revolutions it has. Yes, that was math geeky.