Ah, Copenhagen....

I finally have a few minutes to sit and reflect on our recent trip a little bit. The groceries are bought, the dishes are washed, and zillions of tomatoes have been harvested from our garden. So now, time for a little reminiscing.

Copenhagen served as the bookends for our cruise. It was there we embarked and disembarked from the Veendam, our beautiful cruise ship. I didn't have any particular expectations for the city...I looked forward to seeing it, but didn't expect to really fall in love with it. Little did I know what was to come! In fact, knowing that we were returning to Copenhagen, even if only for a day, was one of the things that consoled me on the sad day that our amazing cruise came to an end. During our too-short visit, the city became comfortable and almost homey to me. Husband and Zauditu felt similarly. I think I could enjoy living in Copenhagen for a while should the opportunity ever present itself. We certainly found the Danes to be consistently pleasant people. And EVERYONE speaks English, which was good because none of us had even the slightest grasp on Danish. It's sounds largely unpronounceable to me, though not quite as much as Icelandic, as I would later discover.

The city is imminently walkable. In fact, walking is one of the two major ways that people get around in Copenhagen; bicycling is the other! Cyclists are everywhere, and remarkably, they follow traffic laws and yield to pedestrians! (Ahem, many American cyclists!). Bicycles are parked everywhere you go, often in large numbers. All major roads have bicycle lanes. Danes are serious about their bikes! How refreshing: a city whose design encourages means of transportation that don't pollute the environment and help people stay in shape. Of course, the fact that cars are insanely expensive in Denmark (not to mention the cost of gas--2 to 3 times more expensive than in the U.S.) also factors into the wide-spread use of feet and bikes to get around. But I don't think that this is an unfortunate situation at all. Quite the contrary. I am often frustrated by the lack of easy walkability (is that a word?) in American cities. In many places, you really have to have a car to get around efficiently. That sucks!

I loved walkiing all over Copenhagen. There were so many fabulous places to walk to, and the journeys themselves often became the destinations. I particularly liked three areas of the city. The first was the area around Copenhagen University with its cute shops, cafes, narrow cobblestone streets, and beautiful academic buildings, some of them dating back more than 800 years! I also loved the Strøget, a long, winding street lined with restaurants, coffee shops, stores of all kinds--souvenirs, Ilum department store, toy shops, book stores, and MANY clothing shops--and street performers. The Strøget is a pedestrian-only route, so strolling along it was a particular pleasure. And if you follow the Strøget all the way from the square where the town hall is to where it ends, you come out at Nyhavn, another delightful place. At Nyhavn, one of the canals winds into the city a bit, and beautiful, brightly painted rowhouses dating back hundreds of years line the waterfront. Some are private residences (including one that Copenhagen legend Hans Christian Andersen, pictured in the statue at the beginning of my post, lived in for a while), but many have cafes on their ground floors, and all of these cafes have outdoor, water-front seating. We discovered the best lobster bisque in the world at one of Nyhavn's establishments, and went back three times to try to get our fill. Yum!

Another fun Copenhagen destination: Tivoli! It is in the heart of the city, and it's an old-fashioned amusement park. You can have a good meal there, watch a ballet, listen to professional musicians play a concert, ride a roller coaster, play silly carnival games, eat cotton candy like Zauditu, or just sit and enjoy the magical lanterns that light the place up like a fairy kingdom in the evening. It is a truly special place. And Zauditu and I screamed our heads off on a fantastic roller coaster that we rode. Husband rode too, but I don't remember if he screamed...he was behind us, I think. Anyway, when we weren't screaming, we enjoyed the view over all of Tivoli and beyond that the coaster afforded us. What a neat place!

Two funny Copenhagen observations: the Danes LOVE ice-cream (as do Norwegians and Icelanders, as we were later to discover)! I noticed that whether it was 8:00 am or midnight, ice-cream shops and stands always had customers. People walking around Copenhagen more often than not seemed to be carrying ice-cream cones. We definitely enjoyed some good ice-cream during our travels, especially at a funky little ice-cream shop in Nyhavn.

Second: Copenhagen is currently covered with cows. No, not live ones! There is a city-wide art exhibition of cow statues painted by different artists (similar to Chicago's cows of a few years ago, or Washington, DC's donkeys and elephants). The cows were just going in while we were visiting, so we kept discovering new bovine friends as we wandered. Some of the painting on the cows was quite entertaining (and in some cases clever).

Zauditu and Husband kept mentioning Danny Kaye's singing about "wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen" on a pretty Disney technicolor set in an old movie. I haven't seen said movie, but I think the late great Mr. Kaye was on to something. Copenahagen is definitely on my list of wonderful places that I want to visit again. It is charming and homey all at once, sophisticated but not pretentious, and its streets are filled with friendly ice-cream-eating folks and their many adorable, (mostly) blond children. Take a walk through Copenhagen some summer evening, and just soak it in. You won't be sorry.