Copenhagen
Last month I went on a ten day vacation to Copenhagen and Paris with my mother. The adventure started when I tried to check in for my flight at the Seattle airport. My itinerary was to fly to Toronto, meet my mother there and then fly to London-Heathrow and then on the Copenhagen. For some reason the United agent could only give me a boarding pass to Toronto and check my bag through to Heathrow. This was not good because we didn’t have a lot of time in Heathrow and the idea of having to go through customs, pick up my bag and re-check it was not very appealing. To make a long story short, when I got to Toronto I was able to get one of the Air Canada baggage agents to go back into the bowels of the airport and retrieve my bag for me. It took about 2.5 hours to get my bag and get it rechecked through to Copenhagen. It’s good that I had a 4+ hour layover!
I met Mom at the gate and we flew on the London. The flight was fine and I managed to get a few hours of sleep. In London we had to connect to Copenhagen. A few weeks before our trip, Mom and Dad had made a similar connection in Heathrow and had to deal with a horribly long line to get to security. This time Mom and I just walked right through! The flight to Copenhagen was fine and I managed to get about another hour of sleep. Both of our bags arrived in Copenhagen (yay!) and then we took the train into the city center. One thing I love about Europe is how well connected the public transportation systems seem to be. I think we arrived at our hotel 25 hours after I’d left my apartment in Seattle.
We started the next day with breakfast at the hotel. I love Scandinavian breakfasts. The bread, the cheese, the yogurt, I love it all! Our first stop of the day was the The Little Mermaid, a condo building that used to be a torpedo hall, the new opera house, the Royal Library and the world’s fastest drawbridge (Seattle needs a few of these). It was a great way to see Copenhagen. We also spent a lot of time spotting and identifying different Nordic flags. After the canal tour we walked up to Nyhaven (another canal) and then back to our hotel along a pedestrian shopping street.
The next day we took a 50 minute train trip to Helsingør to visit Kronborg Castle. This is the setting of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. How cool is that!? He just changed the spelling to Elsinore. We walked through the castle, learnt a bit about its history (the king used it to collect a fee from all ships wishing to enter the Baltic) and looked across the strait to see Sweden. After taking the train back to Copenhagen we went out for a traditional Danish lunch of smørrebrød. These are open faced sandwiches with a buttered slice of rye bread topped with meat, fish, cheese etc. I had salmon with egg and Mom had shrimp and caviar. Lunch was delicious and we were glad to have tried a traditional Danish dish. Later that afternoon I went for a 4 mile run around Copenhagen’s Lakes. It was a great run on a gravel path and a really neat way to see a different part of the city.
On our final morning in Copenhagen we attempted to go to on a tour of the Royal Reception Rooms at Christiansborg Palace. We’d hoped to see the set of 17 tapestries depicting the history of Denmark. Unfortunately the Queen Margrethe was in the Palace (this Palace is not her residence but is, among other things, the main Parliament) so they weren’t running any tours. Instead we visited the Royal Library and then took a leisurely walk around the city. After lunch we took the train back to the airport and flew off to Paris!
The rest of my Copenhagen pictures are here.