We had five days here and it also marked our first attempt at Airbnb, which worked out great. Perhaps most importantly, the apartment we rented had a washer/dryer, so finally, some clean clothes.
It is a fantastic city and we had a great time. The only slight drawback is that it is absurdly expensive. The biggest issue is that nothing is cheap. A small cup of lousy coffee from 7-11? $5. Pint of beer at a dive bar? $9. So we opted for the Free Walking Tour of Copenhagen, which - as we were reminded numerous times - was the #1 rated activity on TripAdvisor. It was a great time and we managed to see a bunch of the key sights.
Parliament building:
One section of the Royal Palace:
The candy store next to our apartment:
The Little Mermaid statue (which was billed as the "most disappointing landmark in Copenhagen." To be fair, it is a bit underwhelming, but the cool rainbow overhead made it almost worth the 30 min trek to go see it. Impressive photography work by Alexis...):
Nyhavn (or "New Harbor" - one of the nicer and more touristy parts of town, i.e., $15 beers rather than $9):
Christiania, which for lack of a better term, is an autonomous hippie community that was formed in the early 1970s and operates under its own set of rules. For example, there is the Green Light District where the buying and selling of marijuana is not exactly legal, but tolerated:
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Unfortunately, one of the three rules of the Green Light District is "no photography allowed" (the other two rules are "have fun" and "no running." Seriously).
And, last but not least, the Carlsberg elephants:
Speaking of Carlsberg, we had no clue how popular the beer is in Europe (and worldwide). It has been the one beer that we've seen in most bars across the few countries we've visited so far. So a trip to the brewery was in order. Alexis made Mike this nice collage.
Al's instragram skills are progressing nicely.
The Carlsberg brewery also houses the largest collection of unopened beers (Guiness Book of World Records certified!).
A collection of this size probably deserves two pictures. The rows like this go on and on and on. We just wish that either of us could remember or had bothered to write down what the actual count is. Seems like a pertinent piece of information...
We also tried to be a bit thrifty when it came to lunch. Mike has pledged to not take food pictures on this trip, but these hotdogs looked way too good to not take a picture.
Apparently hotdogs are very popular in Scandanvia. You can buy one of these on basically any street corner and we would shortly discover that they are featured prominently in hotel breakfast buffets. Mini hotdogs for breakfast? Mike couldn't be happier.
Finally, although he is likely not reading the blog, we just wanted to send a big thank you to Frederik from JP Morgan in London, who graciously spent an hour of his time speaking with us about Copenhagen and some of things we should do there, including spending Saturday night at Tivoli Gardens, which is an amusement park founded in 1843 and smack in the middle of the city (next to the central train station, in fact). And I'm sure most of you know that the Langers love theme parks, so this was an easy sell.
While we didn't actually go on any of the rides, it was a great place to spend the evening. They had free live music and LARGE pours of wine (Mike's beer included for scale).
So thanks again Frederik, who also suggested an idea for Norway - rather than spend time in Oslo, pick somewhere remote on the water and spend a few days there instead. Which we did and will post about shortly...perhaps even later today (although given our track record so far, believe when you see it)!
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