A Day in Denmark – 16/02/23

I’ll admit that this blog post title is a bit misleading but don’t worry…the next blog post title will also be misleading so I’m being consistent. We didn’t actually go to Denmark for a day although Nathan and I have done that before. We learnt the hard way that a four-hour visit to Esbjerg Fish Museum does not make up for 24 hours on a very rough North Sea ferry. Doesn’t Nathan still look a bit green in this photo?

This time we flew and the whole enterprise took more like three days than one. But I thought it was a catchy title and I’ll explain as I go along.

The first few hours away from home were neither interesting nor in Denmark….but I’ll explain them anyway in case they’re useful to others. Our flight was at 6:40 on Thursday morning and so, after doing some maths, I decided to book a hotel at Stansted the night before to avoid Nathan having to drive in the ungodly hours. We only live 25 minutes from Stansted (as long as the M11 isn’t closed) but it was much more relaxed doing that drive on the Wednesday evening rather than in the morning. Plus, the price for hotel plus parking combined wasn’t much more than just booking longstay parking on its own.  We stayed at the Novotel, which is right next to M11, and the parking was all very straightforward once I looked at the documents for this year instead of the ones from 2019. Hey, even the best-laid plans can go awry, right?

It wasn’t an amazing night’s sleep as we were a bit cramped and one of us kept kicking another one of us but I was never going to sleep well knowing that we had to be up at 3 and out by 4. But we made it and were on the 4am shuttle bus to the terminal which got us there around 4:10 (for a sum of £4 per adult). Remarkably, Stansted was pretty much flawless – maybe it was because ours was one of the first flights of the day but we checked in our suitcase in less than 5 minutes, breezed through Security and were eating a Wetherspoons breakfast by 5am. I know, I should boycott Wetherspoons but sometimes it is a necessary evil. And it’s a necessary evil with a good breakfast.

From there, everything continued smoothly. We took off on time, landed ahead of time and found ourselves in a modern art corridor at Copenhagen airport around 9am local time.

Once we’d got our suitcase back, we followed signs for the “Tog” (train) and found a bank of ticket machines which could sell us a ticket to København H  – Copenhagen Central Station. The train line was the Øresundstag, which were grey trains with red writing, and it seemed to run every 15 minutes or so. It’s a few minutes walk from Arrivals to the station platform so allow for that – and for buying a ticket – but again, it was a pretty smooth process. I managed to get the ticket I needed without putting the machine into English but there’s a button to do that which probably would have helped.

Anyway, we arrived in central Copenhagen around 10 and walked to the Hotel Scandia to leave our luggage there, ahead of our 3pm check in time. The smiley man at the desk offered us an upgrade to a suite with immediate check in for a very reasonable price but I could feel the early start catching up with me and I knew that if we took his offer we’d all crash out and miss most of our day.

So we pressed on and went to a hipster coffee shop called Social Brew where we fuelled up on coffee, hot chocolate and pastries. I must confess at this point that I didn’t really attempt to speak any Danish the whole time we were there, apart from saying “tak” every so often. I usually try to use a few words but so many of the places we went to had the menus in English and the staff spoke English to other customers in front of us, even if neither party was actually English. So I gave into it and just used English wherever we went. I’ll have to go back to Austria sometime to make me feel like less of a monoglot.

Once we were caffeinated, we headed into what looked like the main part of town on the map. I didn’t have an aim in mind, just to wander and see what we could see. The weather wasn’t amazing – drizzly and misty – but, again, we knew we didn’t have time to waste. So we started walking in an north-easterly kind of direction to see what we found.

The first thing we found were these statues, which represented the planets of the solar system along with their respective gods:

I think the spacing was meant to be proportionate as the first four were clustered together on one plinth. We’ve seen similar ideas on the Isle of Wight and at Ruislip Lido but these looked like they had been there longer than either of those.

There were a few space-related things to see in Copenhagen but we’ll get on to those later.  At this point, we were skirting around the edges of Tivoli Gardens which is one of the main tourist attractions but isn’t open in February. The kids were delighted to spot the Kahoot! offices and were also amused to see an Irish pub next to and English pub (the Scottish pub was just around the corner) with a Burger King and McDonald’s facing each other across the street. We were truly in an international kind of city and one that felt reassuringly familiar.

Crossing Hans Christian Anderson Boulevard felt like we were moving into the older part of the city. The plaza outside the Rådhus was under construction so not quite the old-school elegance you might see in the brochures. It was still raining so I hoped we might stumble across somewhere of interest where we could shelter for a bit. The first place we saw that the kids *might* like was Warhammer and I think we’d looked around one of those in Windsor a few years when on a similarly rainy walk. It is a very specialist shop and although my kids are of the geeky persuasion, they are not yet painting tiny figurines. But it boded well for more geeky shops they might like and sure enough, we soon found a generic games shop with an impressive array of dice options. The little dice goblin was in her element.

Then we found the big hitter – Faraos Cigarer, which was a shop for live action role playing. They had weaponry and armour and a mocked up tavern with bottles of mead. “Everything is so cool” squealed Eva while I tried to persuade Reuben not to wield *all* the swords.

We didn’t buy anything because we were travelling light and an adult-size full-body shield is not travelling light. But it made the DnDers of the family very happy. The same brand also had a comic shop across the road but I had had enough geekery for now and was ushering the rest of them towards some culture.

And here it was  – the Rundetaarn or the Round Tower. See if you can figure out how it got that name.

For around 100DKK (about £10) the four of us could shelter from the rain and climb the spiral ramp to look out over all of Copenhagen. The climb is fairly steep but easier if you stick to the the bit near outside wall, which is more steps but a gentler gradient.

Along the way there are glimpses of the magnificent church that the tower is attached to:

And hidey holes just big enough for a skinny teen:

At the top of the ramp there’s a 360 degree viewing platform which would be spectacular in sunshine but was still pretty good in the drizzle:

It’s accessed by a short flight of spiral stairs which has a one-way system controlled by red and green lights. Reuben took this all a bit too literally and was counting down the seconds until the green light, regardless of whether there was anyone coming down the other way. From the viewing platform there was another tiny flight of steps up to a mini-planetarium which was closed on the day we were there but you could still get the idea.

On the way back down Eva wanted to have a look at the art exhibition that was off to one side. Unfortunately she doesn’t quite understand how glass works and walked straight into a glass wall. The exhibition was pretty tho:

All that climbing had given us an appetite so we headed to the nearest hipster burger place – Jagger, which was a couple of minutes’ walk away. Eva had the halloumi burger, which she rated delicious, and I had a very nice Katsu burger. It wasn’t super cheap but nothing in Copenhagen is…and it was very relaxed, which was what we needed after a long morning.

Revived by some food we decided to wander a little further and discovered the Kongens Have – the King’s Garden. It probably wasn’t the ideal day to visit but we admired the extremely rectangular trees:

And hung out in the sandy playground a bit:

The gardens are home to one of Copenhagen’s castles  – the Rosenborg Slot  –  and something intriguingly called “the Jazz Lawn” although it didn’t look overly jazzy.

There was also a statue of Hans Christian Anderson, which had a QR to hear him talk. I think the sound file might be slightly confused though, as the statue mentioned being on his own boulevard and pigeons pooping on his top hat. This statue was a long way from the boulevard we’d crossed earlier and definitely didn’t have a top hat. There is another statue which matches the description but we didn’t manage to swing by and check if it had the corresponding file.

Overthinking about HCA made me realise quite how tired I was and quite how far away from the hotel we were. We turned around and started walking back through town, with a stop at the Lego Store on the way. I mean, you have to do something Lego-related when you’re in Denmark, don’t you? Eva built some minifigs  – Lute Girl, Blue-Hair Guy and Karen – and we all got scanned by the minifig machine to see who we would be. Eva’s was a bit terrifying:

There was also a very cute rendering of Copenhagen in Lego:

As we wandered back to the hotel, I started wondering about finding a toilet. Near the courthouse, there was a pissoir which I rightly assumed was only for boys. Happily, the other side of the cubicle was a “Missoir” which was the equivalent for girls. Sadly, it was exactly like a pissoir for girls – a hole in the ground with instructions on how to squat. We moved on. Fortunately there was a much better equipped bathroom in the Metro station outside the Rådhus so I didn’t need to master the Copenhagen Squat. 

And on that delightful note, I will leave you for now. As predicted, as soon as we checked into the hotel we pretty much crashed out, only emerging to buy some food at the local store for a hotel room picnic. Eva, inventive as ever, had a crisp-and-homous pitta pizza:

We had another day and another country to tick off but that is another post…