Copenhagen is a really, really great city.
So beautiful, and so much to see and do. We were a group of 7, Marine & Marie-Amandine (France), Pablo, Carlos, Alberto, Elena (Spain) and myself. We woke up suuuper early (3ish? although some of us didn't bother going to bed...) to catch the train to Stockholm, and sort of blundered around Stockholm C for a little while trying to find coffee and the right spår (track... but we didn't know that :P ). Sleeping on a train when you can't find the lever for the seatback is pretty much impossible as well, so me and Elena resorted to looking through my Scandinavian Europe lonely planet guide (that's what my last post was about... I realize the picture is really bad, but it's cool that I posted it from the train, right?).
When we finally got to Copenhagen at 11:30am, we didn't really know what to do, being exhausted and not being able to check in at the hostel until 5pm. We ended up with a really nice walk down Strøget (really famous shopping street) and a cheap boat tour, then walked to the statue of the little mermaid. It was nearly impossible to get a picture of the statue, because every tourist in the city was there also, trying to take a picture (or twelve) with it. At that point we realized our hostel was in the complete opposite direction from the park we were in, on the other side of the city... and the streets don't go East-West so we zigzagged across the city with all our bags for close to 9km over an hour and a half... the boys joked later (yoked... Spanish people always have this problem. Also cheap/sheep/ship/sit) that we didn't need to do any city tours, we've already seen the whole city...
The next morning we really slept in, so we didn't have too much time to see museums/castles etc, but I still feel like we saw a lot of the city. We climbed all the way to the top of Our Saviour's Church, the tallest building in Copenhagen (I think?) with stairs all the way up, that disappear into the spire. After, I was just sort of following the boys (they are all Spanish so logically always speak Spanish) and ended up in Christiania. I recognized the paintings on the walls from the Rick Steves video I watched with Dad ages ago... but I realized it a bit too late as we had already wandered into the Green Light district where they were selling every type of marijuana (legally). The 'market' area was only about a block or two long, the rest of the self-contained city was actually really neat. It reminded me a bit of Tofino or Gibsons or some other tiny little hippie town, or something out of the musical Rent?... with really old neat shack-style cafes and restaurants, and some really artsy/fairytale houses and apartments and mini gardens and strange little works of art. It wasn't like a big settlement of homeless people, more like a functioning city. And, they were just two days from celebrating their 40th anniversary as a little ... settlement?... so they had some decorations and posters up, and some bagpipe players and other oddities. Overall it was really neat, and I'm really glad I wound up there accidentally as I don't think I would have ever thought to go in there.
After that little adventure we spent some more time wandering around the city. It really is very pretty. We tried out the Nationalmuseet, but we were all too tired to enjoy anything except the giant skeleton of a prehistoric mammoth thing (auroch? see the pic!). Then we went into some really nice royal gardens, and cooked some spaghetti back at the hostel. Next day we again had all our bags. The guys really wanted to go to the Carlsberg brewery, but we ran out of time. We ended up finding an outdoor art exhibit and a couple of flea markets, and yet another nice park to eat our ham sandwiches. I swear ham sandwiches were the only thing those guys ate. Breakfast lunch dinner, white bread with ham slices. Oh except for our spaghetti night.
Literally about half an hour after we got home, we went out to a costume party for the international students (dress up something to do with your city or country), which was really entertaining. There was a bullfighter, a cookie, some lederhosen, an eiffel tower, Scary Spice (from the Spice Girls), a couple of Berlin walls, a LOLcat, an Argentinian soccer player, Mozart, and a bunch of other really random costumes. Luckily I had my giant Canadian flag (thanks mom) and some olympic gear so I was set.
Last night, Annika asked "Hej Fiona, wanna go to Stockholm tomorrow?" Guess what I said, I bet you're right! I was pretty tired but I am never sure when people are going to be available to go places, so I said "Of course!!"
It was a really nice sunny day. We set out to Gamla Stan, really nice to walk around. We found a Mint museum that was free on Mondays, which was sort of neat but too many coins!! Then we did a (really expensive) boat tour which was also really nice, but unfortunately I forgot to charge my camera after Copenhagen so it died during the boat trip. We didn't want to spend any more money so we just wandered around on one of the islands trying to find Rosendal slott, which as it turns out is extremely small and not really a castle at all... quite disappointing. But the landscape was really nice. We are going to go back another day (once Annika's scholarship money comes in... hahaha) to the Vasa museum, check out the shopping, maybe Drottningholm, and other bits.
Copenhagen photos: here
Stockholm photos: here
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