Happy Idiots: Year 3

The third round of the Happy Idiots tour started on Tuesday night when we flew from Miami to Copenhagen. We are spending five days visiting the city in part to visit Sue’s niece Jillian who is studying art there for the semester. We took an overnight flight that stopped at Heathrow and we arrived in Copenhagen mid afternoon on Wednesday. We checked into our hotel and made arrangements to have dinner with Jillian, then went for a walk. Copenhagen is quite far north 55˚ north, and it gets dark early, sunset was 4:23pm at this time of year.

We left the hotel as night was falling, wandered up Nyhavn and found a nice little park called Kongens Have (King’s Garden). We walked through the park and, much to our dismay, found that the gates were locked when we tried to leave. Apparently, the garden closes at 5:00 p.m. and they simply lock the gates. (In organized countries they expect you to pay attention and take responsibility when you don’t – crazy!) There was a young Danish woman there with her bicycle and she told us that she thought they did a sweep before they locked the gates, but apparently they did not. She had managed to get the number of the guard service and had called them. They were relatively non-committal about sending a guard to unlock the gate. Another woman appeared and climbed over the six-foot gate. We waited a few more minutes and then decided to climb the gate too. Sue went over first, and then we passed the bicycle over to her, with the help of a nice tall man who was walking by. The young lady was just about to climb over when a guard appeared. He lectured us (well, really, he lectured her, because it was in Danish and I have no idea what he said) (you don’t need to understand the words to know you’re being chastised), and then unlocked the gate. A perfectly appropriate start to this year’s wanderings. (Although we had heard that the Danes are standoffish, many people stopped to give us advice, help me over the fence or hoist the bike.)

We headed for a Latin American (read Mexican) restaurant called Llama. I am not sure it was meant to refer to the animal or the Spanish word for to call. Either way, Jillian showed up with a couple of friends and we had a very nice dinner, even if I struggled to stay awake – I am sure it was the jet lag, not the Mezcal.

Thursday morning, we headed for the Assistens Cemetery to play dead person bingo. It was about an hour walk and the weather was sort of cooperating. It was mid 40s, cloudy and quite windy. It is not a very large cemetery so we easily found Soren Kierkegaard, Niels Bohr and Hans Christian Andersen. From the cemetery, we wandered back past our hotel and to another park called the Kastellet which is a 17^th century fortress with ramparts. More importantly, we took the required photos of the little mermaid statue that is just outside the park. Once we had our photos we turned right around and headed for the hotel as it was nearly time for me to start working.

During the afternoon, Sue and Jillian walked over to Freetown Christiania, an enclave within Copenhagen founded by hippies in the ’70s that has an uneasy alliance with the city and the weed dealers who are allowed to ply their trade on one street as the police look the other way, which works as long as they don’t cause any problems. The website says to beware of crime, but we didn’t see anything remotely threatening. Living there is free and people build and maintain their houses however they like, but you have to apply to become a resident and be invited. Jillian and I wandered the paths along the canals and although we were mere steps from the Metro, we felt like we were in the middle of nowhere. When we got tired, we stopped in a cafe and Jillian introduced me to dirty chais with oat milk. Delicious! Finally, we stopped by her apartment so I could see it and learn to ride the Metro. As you might expect, it’s very clean and efficient.

For dinner we had Thai food from a little place called Charm. The food was delicious, and the place was very near.

Friday, we had another fun-filled day. We decided to head to the Tivoli Gardens, but at the last minute decided to skip the gardens, which are mostly an amusement park, and go to the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek which is an art museum across the street from the Tivoli Gardens. It was wonderful. The artwork is interesting, but more importantly, the architecture of the buildings is fabulous. It is essentially two buildings built around two open courtyards, one of which as been used to add a third building. The first two are older, gothic style buildings, and the new one is thoroughly modern austere. It is very cool. We wandered from there through a series of parks, including the botanic gardens (each time careful to check if and when the park would be closed) and then back to the hotel so that I could get to work.

Sue spent the afternoon at the Designmuseum Danmark, which had a huge exhibit on designing for the future taking into account both sustainability and living a less frenetic life. My favorite in that section was a chair made of mycelium and the video that showed the fungus growing into a foamlike structure. In another area, the museum paired abstract art with furniture and architecture that were inspired by it. I definitely recommend a visit if you happen to be in CPH.

For dinner, we found a great little Indian/Pakistani place called Sahil. It is apparently the oldest Indian/Pakistani restaurant in Copenhagen. One thing we have learned is that food can be called the same name and be completely different. We ordered what we thought were going to be samosas covered in sauce, but they were deconstructed samosas. They had the crust, but it was broken up into what is usually the filling. Delicious, just not what we expected. On another food note: Danish food may be bland, but the Thai and Indian were appropriately spicy.)

Saturday was our only full day of being tourists in Copenhagen, so we did the only reasonable thing – we went to Malmö, Sweden. It is an easy trip, we took the metro to Copenhagen airport then hopped a train to Sweden. The train took about 30 minutes to get to Malmö. We visited the Malmö castle, which has been converted to a modern art gallery. It was interesting to see how they had repurposed the space, and we wandered through the halls, then through the town of Malmö. We then decided that we wanted to see the castle that inspired Shakespeare to use Elsinor in Hamlet. It is called Kronborg Castle in a town called Helsingør in Denmark. We had two choices, we could grab a train from Malmö to Helsingborg, Sweden, then take a 20-minute ferry to Helsingør or, we could take the train from Malmö , back through Copenhagen and change to the commuter rail train to Helsinør. Please remember that Sue gets seasick looking at the water. Of course, we decided to take the train to the ferry. Better to go in a circle than doubleback, I say.

We bought our tickets for the train, then promptly got on the wrong train. It was headed in the right direction, but didn’t stop at Helsingborg. Luckily, we realized that and exited at a place called Lund, which I don’t think was named after Ingrid Bergman’s character from Casablanca, but it would be funny if it were. We quickly changed tracks to grab the commuter train that stopped at Helsingborg. However, there appeared to be an express train that was going to arrive in Lund 10 minutes after the commuter train but was supposed to arrive 10 minutes before the local. At this point, I should probably tell you that it was nearly 2 p.m., and it only just occurred to us (by us, I mean Sue) to look up what time the castle closed, which was 4 p.m.

It turned out that the express train wasn’t express, and we arrived in Helsingborg at 2:40, just in time to see the 2:40 ferry leave. We boarded the 3 p.m. ferry and arrived in Helsingør at 3:20, found a cab to take us to the castle, but the driver didn’t really know how to get us close. We arrived at the ticket booth at 3:40, after sufficient warnings from the staff that there was only 20 minutes to see the castle (and confirming that they made sure not to lock people in), we ran through the place. The staff there is great. They gave us hints on were to go and in what order and one person opened a closed door for a short cut to one of the areas that we would not have been able to see if we had gone on the traditional route. Another gave us a few extra minutes to take a couple of photos on one of the ramparts. They are great. The place is amazing, and the greatest, creepiest part is the underground passages that run under much of the castle.

We then took the train back to Copenhagen, settled into the hotel for a little rest and headed out to dinner at an Italian restaurant called Spaghetteria La Perla. It did not compare in any way to the Italian food we had in Italy or New York, but it was very good, and we thoroughly enjoyed it. Can’t go wrong with lemon sorbet floating in limoncello.

And finally, some random photos of Copenhagen. It is the start of Christmas season…