Copenhagen

View from Our Room

After a pleasant 5-1/2 hr train ride, we arrived in Copenhagen  yesterday.  There is lots and lots of sunshine here.  We decided to orient ourselves by using their hop on/hop off boat/bus combo.  The boat ride meandered down canals full of historical buildings along with new modern type architecture.  The Danish love lots of glass with unusual shapes.  In fact, the hotel we are staying in was built by the son of the architect who built the Sydney Opera House.  It's called Copenhagen Island Hotel and it's surrounded by water on 3 sides.  Our room overlooks the harbor and last night we watched fireworks over Tivoli Gardens from our hotel window
. 

Little Mermaid

After the boat, we hopped on the bus for the land tour and then treated ourselves to lunch in a cute little area called Nytorv.  We visited the royal castle and the botanical gardens.   Richard took this nice picture of the Little Mermaid.  Tomorrow, we'll go to Tivoli Gardens.  Check out our Pictures by double clicking on them and selecting slideshow.

As predicted by yesterday's sky and Weather Underground, we awoke to a chilly, wet and windy morning.  Oh, well - we can't complain -  most of our weather the last few weeks has been awesome.  After breakfast at the hotel, we rented bicycles and pedalled our way to the National Museum.

By the way, the bicycle is a popular form of transportation here in Copenhagen as it appears to be in Austria and Germany. See Bicycles in Copehagen.  The entire city is set up with bike paths to make it easy and enjoyable.

Inside the warm and dry museum, we toured the stone, bronze, iron and Viking exhibits.  Richard recently read the Earth's Children Series, a fictional account of people living 35,000 years ago in Europe, a time when Denmark was still covered with ice. Neverthless, the museum displays the skeltons of a giant deer and an auroch, animals thought to be plentiful until hunted to extintion.  Also, flint tools were on display; lots of pages are given over in the Earth's Children series to flint tool making. 

After walking through the exhibit Denmark through the Ages, we mounted our bikes for a ride to Christania, Copenhagen's hippie community. This place is a bit controversial in Copenhagen - they have cleaned up some of the drug use there.  It was full of peace symbols and painted buildings all reminiscent of the 60's era. Following a quick look around, with the weather improving, we rode over to Nytorv, the "New Harbor" for a lunch of pea soup.  That warmed us up!

A ride down to the Little Mermaid and then back to our hotel completed our bike adventure and tour of Copenhagen. It's a wonderful city that we would recommend highly.

Sadly our European Vacation has come to an end and tomorrow morning we fly home, on a airplane, not a bicycle!  Can't wait to see Mom, our friends and our dear kitty, Bleu!  Thanks so much to Angela for taking care of him.