We just spent two and a half days in Copenhagen, to start our summer vacation. The first day we arrived early in the afternoon, and it was raining and just dark, dank, and uncomfortable. Well, maybe not that bad, but since we walked from the train station to our hotel in the rain, it felt that way. I thought it would be at most a quarter-mile, but it was more than twice that far, so we got twice as wet. We were exhausted from the flights (Laurie and I were on different planes, on different airlines, to get good ticket deals), so we broke my self-imposed rule of staying up until at least 8:00, and went to sleep around 4:00… and slept until 6:00 the next morning!
Our first full day in town was nicer. It was still gray, but we got out and didn’t get wet. We decided to visit Dragør, formerly the ferry gateway to Sweden, now a small fishing village because they’ve built an incredible bridge from Copenhagen to Malmö. It was still gray, so our pictures look, gloomy, but it was nice, and an adventure to take the Metro, then a train, then a bus, then a bus back to a train to a bus. We got pretty good at navigating the transportation system.
Back in town we just walked though the main commercial district. The town square is near our hotel:
By the late afternoon, it was pretty nice outside. Here’s a view over the river of a church whose spire is spiral:
There’s apparently a legend that the architect killed himself when somebody claimed the spiral went the wrong way, but that didn’t really happen. They made it into a movie, however.
Our last full day in Copenhagen was very nice, so we went into the center of the Sealand peninsula to Hillerød, and visited Frederiksborg Castle, a national museum:
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The inside is amazing. One large room has an incredibly ornate ceiling, with some inset dioramas of important advances in Danish technology and science. You can’t tell from the picture, but this ceiling section is three dimensional, not just a painting:
The grounds are gorgeous, too. If you lived in the castle, you could look out at them like this:
Now we’re on the train to Stockholm, to begin our cruise. We’ve got free Wi-Fi on the train, so I’m able to post this entry in transit. I’ll put up more if I get a chance. Which isn’t likely to be on the ship, where they’re charging something like $0.90 per minute for Internet access!
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