Beauty And The (Wet) Beast

At the end of October (yeah...) we spent a long weekend in Copenhagen.  Arriving in the evening we took the train from the airport and easily made our way to the hotel.  

To Mariah's credit she has learned to streamline the traveling part of these trips to help reduce my stress level - if I know we have accommodations and know exactly how to get to them from the airport I am a much happier camper.  Once I get settled in I am generally golden, but time-lines and traveling bits have a tendency to prompt unsolicited and somewhat irrational levels of anxiety in my brain.  Though the prolific nature of our travels have somewhat desensitized me, I have found the best coping mechanism has been to just not think about it until absolutely necessary.

In any case, we arrived at the hotel around 10:00pm and got settled in, then hustled around the corner to a pizza restaurant we had passed by earlier and were pleasantly surprised at how good it was.  Now, I realize pizza originates from Italy, but there is just something about American style pizza that is just...better...  Some Italian is likely to slap me on the street for this statement, but it's really hard to beat a thicker crust, a proper sauce and piled on toppings (can you tell I miss Papa Murphy's?).  The pizza in this restaurant was closer to the American vein and really excellent.  Walking blind into a restaurant (which often happens to tired, hungry travelers who don't care any more and just want to eat) can yield some horrifyingly mediocre meals (some downright "meh"), especially in tourist locations, so this was a very pleasant and welcome surprise.  We rolled back to the hotel with full bellies and slept hard for the early morning.

We walked.

The day was gorgeous!  Fairly cold, but the sun burned in a clear sky and made everything shiny.  The light was a bit pale, but decent for pictures.

We walked.  We walked and walked and walked and walked and ate and walked and walked.

Pictures were taken along the way.  The rumor was that our next (and final) day in Copenhagen was not going to be nearly as nice, so we took advantage and saw EVERYTHING.  Well...within reason.  It was a beautiful city, but I didn't find anything about it that really struck me, other than it was very comfortable.  Though not particularly exciting, it seemed like it would be a wonderful place to live (no, we don't have plans) - a slow pace and quite.

One thing that didn't help was that the Tivoli Gardens, one of the oldest amusement parks in the world and a main attraction for Copen

hagen, was closed (one month out of the year to prep for Christmas and we happen to land on it).  I doubt this would have blown me away, but missing one of the main attractions of a city was a bit unfortunate.

We did however happen upon the BODIES exhibition, a controversial educational exhibit where real human corpses have been pulled apart and preserved in such a way that you can see what everything looks like on the inside (sort of like an exploded gadget or building diagram...but with humans...).  This was an excellent exhibit and a lucky find.

Something that did blow me away was everyone's American accent.  Everyone we interacted with (mostly shop clerks and waitresses, but s

till) spoke amazing English with a flawless American accent.  I kept having to ask Mariah if they were actually American.  Generally we have found that, if you are in big/tourist cities, everyone that you need to deal with speaks English, but this was impressive.

The day was brilliant and by the end we were about as exhausted as we could get...and we walk a lot at home...

For our second day, The Beast.  The big, buckets and frogs, if-you-can't-swim-in-your-socks-I'm-not-doing-something-right, wet beast.  It rained.  A lot.

One interesting thing about Copenhagen is that it sits on a river that defines the border between Denmark and Sweden.  We found out you can actually take a train from Copenhagen over to Malmö (in Sweden).  Since we had seen the whole of Copenhagen the day before (fortunately), we decided to get more country for our money and got on a train bound for Sweden.

The train ride was about thirty minutes.  Talk about foreign relations.  The rain was wet.  The poor weather didn't exactly paint the prettiest picture (I took no pictures, sorry).  Malmö is supposed to be full of parks and green spaces, but after about ten minutes walking in the rain...we didn't give a sh*t...  We found our way to a castle and thought that would be worth a look as we hadn't been into any castles in Denmark.

Walking into this castle was like walking into a surrealist painting.  It seemed normal enough at first, though there were lots of small children running around the lobby, screaming in preparation for some kind of class walk through.  As we began our journey, however, the surreality began to reveal itself.  First stop was an art exhibit filled with some of the most bizarre modern art (sculptures made of junk, video projections, pre-recorded moans - I don't really know how to define it) that we had seen in a while.  A guy (possibly the artist, maybe a caretaker) was standing within the exhibit staring at people as they passed by.  He looked intent on answering questions, but that intent and intensity (while surrounded with all of these bizarre artifacts), had that "I'm fixin' to drag you inter mah truck and saw yer legs off," kind of vibe to it.

The rest of the castle was just chocked full of random, incomprehensible junk.  My brain felt like a bumper car as I wandered through, bouncing off one car only to spin around and bang into the next.  Some of the elements were historical/educational exhibits, but small facts about how a prince's cat died or how his uncle had really bad gas.  Some rooms were just filled with random objects like stuffed gorillas and old shoes, bronze cats and peacock feathers.  Objects were interspersed among the "historical" exhibits.  It was like OMSI + castle + fun-house + asylum.

Towards the top there was actually a room of just the castle, the king's bed chamber, but by that time I was fighting back an aneurysm (or maybe a seizure) and had to get out of there as fast as possible.  We walked quickly through town as the rain sank into us and decided we needed to get out of Sweden.  Back on the train and into the hotel to desaturate (my wool jacket was still wet for the plane ride the following day).  

I'm guessing Malmö, under better conditions (and less strange), would have been a wonderful experience.  For now, however, my recommendation is: stick with Copenhagen.

Go here to see all of the pictures.