Denmark: Day III (Copenhagen)

Thursday, June 9^th:

Inside the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek Museum:

            Rain today. We woke up to some rain so we decided to sleep in and to wake and explore the things close to our hostel. We stopped at a local Koffe (Coffee) café to grab a fruit smoothie and a croissant before heading to the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek museum of art. Inside this museum were massive collections of ancient Mediterranean art, Ancient Egyptian art, French sculpture art, and tons of Danish and French paintings. Jen’s favorite was an exhibition of female bronze sculptures made by Degas, while mine was the Egyptian Art and the French Impressionist paintings of Toulouse-Latrec, Gaugain, and Manet (including a personal favorite painting, “The Absinthe Drinker”). We spent well over three hours in this massive museum before leaving as the rain had subsided!

Manet's The Absinthe Drinker:

            Before grabbing lunch we made our way inside the Sankt Petri Kirke (St. Peter’s Church) as it was closed the previous day. It is (I think) the oldest church in the city, and very basic but pretty inside. We walked some more over to the shopping district of the downtown area and ate lunch at a little bagel shop called The Bagel Company. I had a smoked salmon bagel that was particularly tasty. We did a little shopping afterwards and walked into the church inside the Rundetårn, also known as the Round Tower. Inside the church was perhaps the most ornate organ façade I had ever seen, and someone was playing it to boot! We explored the magnificent church before going up to the top of the Round Tower for some views of the city. This tower used to house a library and still holds an observatory that was used by Tycho Brahe for his astronomical observations that led to some of our currently accepted theories.

View from the top of the Rundetårn (Round Tower) of Helligaand's Kirke and Christiansborg Palace:

            As the weather had subsided for the day, Jen and I decided to do as the Copenhageners do and to get some bikes to ride around the city. It is estimated that half of the 1.5 million or so people who live in the city use bikes as their main method of transportation, and it is very efficient! Copenhagen also has a bike system called “City Bikes” with which you can slip in a 20 DKK coin into the right kind of bike, ride it around, and return it to a similar City Bikes stall and get your coin back; free bikes! We rode our (rickety) bikes first to the district of Nørrebro to the park where the Assistens Cemetery is. Inside this cemetery are the graves of great Danish minds such as Niels Bohr, Hans Christian Andersen, and Søren Kierkegaard, all of which we viewed. Since we had the bikes, we decided to reach parts of the city that were difficult to walk to from our hotel, so we headed to the northern-most part of the downtown area to see the Little Mermaid Statue (Den Lille Havfrue).

The Little Mermaid (Den Lille Havfrue):

            We rode way up to see this site, which is surprisingly super small given the tourist attention it gets. The statue is just a few meters off of the shore, and it resides here because Hans Christian Andersen, a Danish writer, wrote the Little Mermaid story. Next we rode down to the Gefion Fountain, Copenhagen’s version of the famous fountain in Rome. Immediately adjacent to the fountain is a beautiful church called Sankt Albans Church, and a peculiar area called the Kastellet, also known as Copenhagen Citadel. This area is surrounded by old fort ramparts and is open as a public park now. We walked around inside, wondering what the buildings were used for now that the military had moved out, and decided it was time for dinner. We made our way back down to the Nyhavn area near the docks and had a dockside outdoor dinner of King Crab legs with a bottle of Chardonnay at a restaurant called Nyhavn 37. We also enjoyed a Gazpacho appetizer and had a traditional Danish dessert called Rødgrød med Fløde which was mostly ground up berries with crème. Very delicious! After dinner we stayed and watched a brief bit of a free dockside Danish concert before heading back for a beer and some early rest. I think the bikes took a lot out of us, especially for me—my bike was so old and struggled to move that I had to peddle very strenuously just to get it moving!

The Sankt Albans Church near the Kastellet: