September 29, 2009: Copenhagen

We awoke in Copenhagen ready to go explore. We stopped at the corner market, picked up some food for the room, had some breakfast, and headed on our way. We spent the late morning and early afternoon on a serious walking tour. We walked from the hotel down to Kastellen, a star-shaped former castle.

Entrance to the castle

You could walk inside the base and take a walk around the walls. The castle gave a nice view of the harbor and all the wind turbines installed there. Ah, wind turbines. It was nice. We also visited a variety of statues around the castle, like the Little Mermaid.

I don't now what was going on here

From Kastellen, we headed into town. We saw a little restaurant called Café Petersburg that looked promising, but we weren’t quite ready for lunch, so we moved on. We visited one of the world’s most expensive churches. I forget the name, but was covered in marble and statues and was quite impressive. It was perfectly aligned with a road that leads to the current palace, the palace gardens, and across the harbor was the new opera house - which lead to some pretty cool site lines.

Fancy Fancy Church

The opera house

We continuing touring the town, passing by the famous Nygen district, which consisted of colorful row houses aligned along a canal. Most of the houses had restaurants with open air seating along the canal, looked like an awesome place to hang out during warm weather.

Nygen

From there, we made our way towards the main downtown district with the opera house, parliament, and other government buildings. A main plaza in town had a display of “100 Places to see before they’re gone”, all about global warming. Sad. The Climate Change Summit is scheduled to be held in Copenhagen in December.

After that we walked down the main walking/shopping corridor. We stopped for a beer and a hot dog in a French roll at a little sidewalk café. It was a well deserved break.

We continued from there to the City Hall, where they were preparing to announce the 2016 Olympics later that week. A large stage was being erected at City Hall, and there were signs promoting the games all over the city. You could feel a strange energy in the city, maybe it is always like that, but it seemed Olympic- related. We also saw a few motorcades drive by, likely carrying Olympic delegates. I believe the representatives from Madrid and Rio were already in town. We did not see Daley, Obama, or Oprah. Damn.

City Hall

From City Hall we walked past the Tivoli Gardens, the train station, and Hard Rock café. We even stopped in there, but only to use the washroom. Tivoli Gardens looked really fun, but alas, it was too late in the season and was closed. We proceeded to walk over and see the King’s Garden, the Botanical Garden, and the outside of Christiansburg Palace.

Cute couple at the Botanical Garden

It was getting late and we were hungry, so we decided to try and make our way back to Café Petersburg. It was all the way back across town, but what was a little more walking? We made it back to the restaurant. As with most European restaurants, we didn’t know if we should sit down, wait to be seated, or order at a counter. I found a waiter and asked him for a table for 2. He looked at me dumbfounded, so I asked if he spoke English. In a perfect accent, he very sarcastically said “yes, most of us do”. Ass hat.

So I said we wanted to eat; he informed us that the only thing they serve this late is a traditional Danish hash meal consisting of meat, potato, and onion. We decided to give it a try. As we were discussing, the waiter obnoxiously flagged me down to seat us at our table. He was acting like a pretty big douche nozzle, we almost left. Luckily we did not.

The waiter put in our food order and asked us if we wanted a drink. We both ordered Carlsberg. He asked us why. We said because we like it. He told us that Carlsberg was cheap beer in Denmark, like our Budweiser, and offered to bring us something better. We agreed. Hell, we had been enjoying Carlsberg all trip, they taste a lot better than Budweiser. If that is bad beer, what does good beer taste like? Well, it turns out, it was pretty f’n good. The waiter brought us a bottle of Fur Beer, and it was the best beer I ever tasted. There was no bitterness, it wasn’t watered down, it actually tasted good. I almost didn’t care there was liquor in it. It was, however, a nice bonus. We ended up having another flavor of Fur Beer later, also delicious.

The best beer I've ever drank. Fun fact: I have drank many beers.

Then, our massive platter of food came. It was indeed a fried mixture of potato, onion, and beef, topped with HP sauce and a fried egg, and holy crap was it delicious. I could not stop eating it. And as a little surprise, it was served with a side of beets - Shannon’s favorite.

Delicious

As we devoured this food, we made conversation with our waiter. He ended up being a really interesting guy. He told us about the history of the restaurant (it’s older than the US), some gossip about the Queen (her husband is a closet homosexual and the second kid isn’t his), noted that foreign dignitaries ate at the restaurant all the time, and the Queen just walks around town with two bodyguards, nothing more. That was certainly a wee bit different than what we’re used to in the US. All in all, it was an awesome experience, we actually felt not like tourists, but like locals for a brief moment. This was one of my favorite experiences in Europe. Fat and happy, we headed back to the hotel.