Last two days in Copenhagen

OK, it's been really busy, and this blog has not been updated since Thursday. I now am sitting at a hotel in Italy on Monday afternoon, seeking to reconstruct the events of Friday and Saturday based on my fading memories and a few photographs. So here goes.

Friday morning took us to the northern part of the city by the harbor. We saw all three "little mermaid" statues, the "original", which we had seen on the canal tour, the larger "fake", created to promote a restaurant, and the "modern", in a harborside sculpture garden where we hung out for a while with the yachts and cruise chips. Guess which one is in the accompanying photo?
Then we visited the "Kastellet", a star shaped fortification built in the 17th century, with a castle, a church, and a windmill. We hung out for a while next to the windmill, watching some large wading birds, and getting chastised by a security guard for the faux pas of walking our bicycles into the "no bikes" zone. I sincerely promised to never do this again.After the windmill, we rode downtown, encountering a column of royal guards marching in the bike lane along the way. Lunch was at Restaurant Barock in Nyhavn, then we walked to the museum at Amelienborg palace, the winter residence of Queen Margaret II. The museum contains a variety of historical artifacts concerning the Danish monarchy, including a number of photos of the recent wedding of Prince Frederik to an Australian woman. Australian royalty? Who knew! We went inside Frederik's Church next door, and viewed the spectacular dome, decorated with frescoes of the twelve apostles, with Judas having been appropriately replaced by Paul. Finally we climbed the spiral brick walkway to the top of the Round Tower and enjoyed the panoramic view of the whole region before descending again. From the top of the Round Tower, the new bridge from Denmark to Malmo, Sweden can be clearly seen. Friday was capped with a nice Mexican dinner in Fredriksberg.

Saturday morning, Anna met us for breakfast and a few photos before Rosanna and I headed off to the airport for our next adventure...

Biking in Copenhagen

Wow! After biking around Charlotte, Copenhagen offers a whole new experience in urban cycling. Bicycles are literally everywhere! There are as many or more of them on the road as cars, and besides well maintained and ubiquitous bike lanes, they have their own traffic signals. Rosanna and I went this morning to Baisikeli, where we met the proprietor Henryk, and rented a couple of city bicycles.

I told Henryk how much I envied the bicycle culture in Copenhagen, where automobiles, pedestrians, and bicycles coexist in seemingly balanced numbers and peaceful respect. When I mentioned that I do some urban riding in Charlotte, but I do not always feel safe, he told me that the situation was much the same in Copenhagen in the 1980s, but a few devout cyclists and the rising price of fuel gradually created the cycle utopia they have now. So maybe, as gasoline in North Carolina approaches $4 per gallon, there is hope for an evolving bicycle culture in Charlotte.

All Danish bicycles have an engraved serial number. After stolen ones are recovered by police, and long after the owners have been reimbursed by insurance, Baisikeli refurbishes them. Initially they are rented for use around the city, by people like us. But eventually, the bikes are converted for transportation, farm vehicles, and even ambulances, before being sent to Africa. We saw a photo of one of the ambulances, basically a bicycle with a stretcher for a trailer. Not coincidentally, "Baisikeli" is the Swahili word for "bicycle". Proceeds from the bike rentals are used to for the African relief effort. It's a real win win win situation.

After Anna got out of class, we all took a bike trip to Rosenborg castle and walked around the gardens. There are a number of statues, including one of a Danish queen named Caroline Amalie. Someone at the bike shop told us a story about one of the kings hiding a key for his lover underneath the lion's tongue outside the castle, so Rosanna looked for the key, but it was not there. Lucky for her, since a stern looking guard was on duty. We had a nice lunch at a sidwalk cafe, Pussy Galore's Flying Circus, named after the character in the James Bond movie "Goldfinger".

After lunch we took a bike trip to Christiania, a utopian alternative community that started when some hippies in 1970 took over an abandoned Danish army base. I shudder to imagine what would have happened in the good old U.S. of A. if hippies had taken over an abandoned U.S. Army base; I certainly don't think their descendents would still be living there in 2008. But that is the case in Christiania. We first walked our bikes down the main street (Pusher Street), past rows of street vendors and bars with live music (including a sort of a bluegrass band). Moving out of the "business district", we rode our bikes all the way around the lake (or it it a bay), pausing for photographs before heading back and cycling through the "residential district". As much as I admire the pretext, it seems on first glance to be a disorganized jumble of "interesting" people, and randomly constructed housing, from the sublime to the ridiculous. It's as if there was a rock festival and noone ever went home. I wouldn't really want to live there, though I might have thought so when I was a little younger. Still, it seems like there should be some kind of middle ground between the consumer-driven capitalism run amok that we live in and the fairly extreme utopian vision of Christiania.

Finally, we had a wonderful dinner at Spiseloppen, a surprisingly normal restaurant in a loft on the edge of Christiania. What an amazing day this was! Thanks Anna!

Made it to Copenhagen

OK, so after an overnight delay and a few hours on the phone with the airline "help desk" (Ha !), we managed to skip London and book a flight directly from Newark to Copenhagen, as originally planned, only 24 hours late. Rosanna and I did not reserve seats next to each other; we both wanted a window seat so that we could lean against the window and sleep. Rosanna slept a little bit on the flight. However, seated next to an innocent looking but unpredictable elbow monster in a seat that would not recline, Ed was up most of the night. Finally we landed a little before 8AM in Copenhagen, where customs was a breeze. Anna met us at the concourse. The mother and child reunion was only an ocean away. We took the train to the Hotel Sct Thomas in Fredriksburg, a "suburb" (do they use that word here?) of Copenhagen. Anna went to her class at the university while Rosanna and I took a short but needed nap at the hotel. In the afternoon, we had a wonderful lunch at Riz Raz, a favorite vegetarian Mediteranean buffet of Anna's. We walked around Copenhagen for a while, then took a boat tour from Nyhavn (pronounced "Newhaven") of the Copenhagen canals, seeing all the old & new parts of the city from the comfort of our seat, important, since we were still pretty jet-lagged. Particularly impressive was the waterside Copenhagen Opera House.
It is early evening now. Anna has now gone off to orchestra rehearsal, where SymfUni: The Symphony Orchestra of Copenhagen University, conducted by Frederik Stovring Olsen, is preparing for a performance of operatic pieces.

Rosanna and I went out looking for a bite to eat. We ended up getting a Kronenberg 1664 draft beer at Cafe Viggo on Værnedamsvej which, as the reviewer says, is a "a seriously nice place to hang around". The cafe is full of wonderful, large wall drawings of the great Belgian comic strip character Gaston Lagaffe. Then we grabbed a sandwich and chips at a blast from my past, one of the 7-11 convenience stores that seem to be on every corner in Copenhagen. And we headed off the hotel, and the first full night's sleep in a while. ZZZZZ.....

First post: All stoked up and nowhere to fly

Our long awaited european vacation got off to a sputtering start this afternoon when the initial leg of our trip, a flight to Newark, was delayed beyond our connection time. So, we are now booked on a series of flights tomorrow, first to Newark, then to London (Heathrow), and finally on to Copenhagen.