Copenhagen – Second city on our two month trip around Europe

The first thing you need to know about Copenhagen is that if you see a building and it looks pretty old, the likeliness is, that isn’t the original building.  It has about an 87% (sometimes higher) chance that it actually burnt down, usually more than once, and was rebuilt after that.

In fact, our tour guide on the Free Walking tour we took, kept asking us the question: “Are Danes just hella irresponsible, or are they actually crazy pyromaniacs”.  To be honest, I’m still not entirely sure of the answer.  All I know is, we thoroughly enjoyed walking around town and being asked, “do you think this is the original building” and our guide responding with “no, the original burnt down”.

I’ve got two words for you: Lego Store!  Enough said right?  We had never gone into a Lego Store before and I can’t say that we were disappointed.  We felt 10 years younger just walking through the door and couldn’t contain our excitement with walls and walls filled with amazing lego toys.

I also found it incredibly interesting that Tivoli Gardens which was one of the first amusement parks in the world was actually visited by Walt Disney in the 50’s and supposedly that is where he got his idea to create Disneyland from.

The Little Mermaid statue, which is actually 7th on the list of most disappointing sights in Europe, wasn’t actually that disappointing for us.  We weren’t expecting it to be huge anyhow.  The most disappointing bit of it was actually the fact that there was a bus load of tourists in front of it and we couldn’t get down to touch it or take a selfie with it.  For interest sake, the Mona Lisa is first on the list.

I’ll tell you what wasn’t disappointing though, the food.  Oh My Goodness, The FOOD!!  I can’t even describe it.  A few days into our travels, we learnt that the easiest way to find ourselves a decent grocery store was to Google our area and then look at the reviews of the stores in the area we were staying in.  In Copenhagen, we were lucky enough to be staying just around the corner from an Irma, which just happened to be a budget friendly store, but also had an incredible selection and was just amazing all round.  We were staying in what can only be described as a Formula 1 Hotel (if you’ve never stayed in one in South Africa, they are basically the cheapest of the budget hotels with a shower that is always over the toilet and usually bunk beds that don’t have enough space for you to sit up without knocking your head).  I think whoever designed the shower over the toilet situation, probably thought they were doing people a favour.  They could take a shower while sitting down, or kill two birds with one stone and do your business while showering!

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So, even though our accommodation sucked, we could have amazing food for dinner and so we did.  We bought the most incredible pre-packaged foods like crab and prawn salads, parma ham, cheeses, salmon, meatballs and of course the all important dessert for later.  Which ended up being Cutie pies with strawberry mousse inside.  It doesn’t matter if it’s written in Danish, I can always tell when it is dessert.  It’s a gift 🙂

If there was one thing I couldn’t stop trying to find on our trip and that was always the local cuisine.  I wanted to know what the delicacies were.  I wanted to taste what people had been eating in each city for hundreds of years, but do you think that I could find it.  That would be a no.  As it turns out, most locals don’t really want to eat the traditional food of their nation.  Do you know what they want to eat?  They want to eat Italian or Asian cuisine.  That seems to be the norm and pretty much 90% of all the restaurants we passed, fit into one or both of these categories.  It’s sad to feel like people might be losing their heritage, especially when it comes to food, but I do understand the need to try new foods.

 

In the Nyhavn (New Harbour), there is this really famous tattoo parlour.  The story goes, that this big, burly man came in and asked for an anchor tattoo and another nautical themed tattoo and said to the tattoo artist at the time “Do you think that those will suit me”.  The tattoo artist responded with “Yes, I think those will look wonderful Your Majesty”.  The burly man had actually been the King of Denmark at the time and apparently there is a lovely photo of him still in the tattoo parlor with is shirt off and beer in hand.  Apparently he was one in a list of many royals who are very relaxed and don’t have to show off or spend ridiculous amounts of money.  The current royal family are much of the same.

Copenhagen, being where Hans Christian Anderson is from, is just filled with fairytales.  Not all of them with happy endings (in fact most of them don’t have – Disney embellished a lot with The Little Mermaid).  I did find one very interesting though that that was the story of Agnete and the Merman.  As the story goes, Agnete was a young woman who was passing by the sea and caught the interest of a merman living nearby, who decided to emerge from the water and propose.  She was an adventurous spirit, so said yes and went to live with him under the waves.  They ended up having seven mer-kids together and things were going well, until one day Agnete heard church bells and wanted to visit the land and her old life that she sometimes missed.  Now, here is where it gets interesting.  I have actually read about 5 different endings for this particular story, but I like the original one that I heard from our tour guide instead.  Once she was on land once more, she was told to never cross foot into holy ground, but her mother asked her to come with her to a church service, and she forgot for just one second about the holy ground rule.  She crossed onto holy ground and could never return to the see or her husband and children again.  An artist loved the story so much that there are now bronze statues of the Merman and his children waiting for their mother to return underwater in the Slotsholm Canal (see picture below).

In conclusion, always listen to your guide, if you go on a free walking tour around any city.  They always know how to save you money and usually can recommend a good place to buy local food or beer etc.  In our case, our guide told us to not even bother going into Tivoli Gardens, but instead to go into the Tivoli Food Court, walk to the back outdoor and peer over the hedge to see inside the gardens.  He reckoned that if all else failed, we could always jump over the hedge and tackle the elderly guard to get inside.  🙂

Oh, and always always always try the desserts.  They are usually, I mean always worth it.