Copenhagen in January

Since we have never traveled with a pre-ordained itinerary (except in Israel that one time), we don't know what we might be missing, as travelers without a plan. There are upsides to both methods.  If you know what you are doing when you wake up, then you don't need to spend any time making decisions.  But if it turns out you need a nap in the middle of your planned day, then that might throw everything off.  If you already have tickets to something, then you don't worry about all the other stuff you might be missing.  And so on.

We did spend some time the night before making a list of places that interested us.  Some of them were just too far away, many of them were closed on Mondays, and some were just things to make sure to see but did not require any commitment of money.  We have these two-day bus passes, so we had a strong incentive to ride the bus as much as possible (and not the Metro so much because it is underground and you can't see anything).

I wanted to just get the feeling of where we are in the daylight by riding a bus around town first, so that's what we did. It is the middle of winter so there is nothing blooming and the trees are bare. The buildings are massive and old but well-maintained. The famous and fanciful Tivoli Garden is closed this month but we could see through the fence what a jam-packed amusement park that is, and there were nice beds of blooming hyacinths and purple cabbage.

A big amusement park right in the middle of town. We saw the same thing in a city in Sweden also.

There are canals and boats and lots of water in general. Many more cars and wider roads than in the smaller cities in the Netherlands.  Rebecca, being competitive and biased, had to verify that Copenhagen actually has more cyclists than any other city.  In fact, 50% of its residents commute by bike, so they win. But Copenhagen did not find its way into her heart -- all day she kept trying to figure out why people feel so strongly that this is the city to visit.  She cited this fact (from somewhere) that you know within 0.3 seconds whether you are attracted to a person, and she says that she also knows very quickly whether a city has something special for her.  Prague did not, Vienna did.  Alas, Copenhagen was not her cup of tea.

I have not been traveling non-stop for the last three weeks, so I am not quite as quick to judge. I will say that I should have done more homework before we got here because it would have been more fun to know something about that palace or that large square, but it is still always interesting to be in a new city.  A disappointing number of American businesses have taken up residence in the downtown pedestrian mall area (in other cities you might not think of it as a mall, but this one just looked more current day commercial than Maastricht or Amsterdam).  There is a lot of attention to the detail of moving water through all these areas with impermeable surfaces.  I guess they have learned some lessons. With wide sidewalks, paved bike lanes, hard-scaped median strips, bus lanes and car lanes, they have to have a place for water to move, so we are constantly stepping over little berms and ditches (Jon and R. probably didn't notice this, but I am always wishing for less pavement).

We got off the bus and walked toward the harbor,

saw the Opera House looming in the near distance, crossed some bridges and got back on another bus, headed to a museum I had picked out.  When we were in Spain, I realized that we all spend a lot of tourist time admiring the castles and palaces of royalty and the rich and we don't often get to learn about the regular people. So I wanted to go to the Museum of the Worker.

First we needed some sustenance so we went down to this period piece of a cafe (truly, on purpose, a cafe that sells food from the 1950s, with the look and feel of that time).  Everything was in Danish but our waiter patiently translated the whole menu for us.

Lots of fish, pickled fish, some traditional potato dishes, all as open-faced sandwiches.  Jon ordered traditional Danish pickled herring, Becca had a potato-egg-herring sandwich and I had a vegetarian dish that was created after the war to resemble a fish sandwich when they had a shortage of fish. It looked like a piece of fried fish but it was a large slice of parsnip.  Delicious.  Their parsnips are not at all stringy, it was tender and tasty. Nothing like fish but I loved it.

From left; parsnips, pieces of  pickled fish with hard-boiled egg and potatoes and whole slab of  pickled fish and onions.
All are on bread, although the pieces of chewy whole grain strain the definition.

Then we went up to tackle the museum.  Once again it was almost all in Danish, with a few English signs sprinkled around.  It was hard to get a grasp of the story line, but the basic message was that Danish workers had to adjust to factory life with the Industrial Revolution, they organized early, they were persistent in their efforts to get better conditions, there was a strong socialist movement.  We got a better idea of what human automation looked like about 75 years ago. There was a whole floor devoted to show a real apartment that three generations of Danish workers lived in for almost a century.  It seemed like there was a lot of focus on the 1950s at this museum and we were reminded that the people in the US who just keep saying they want to go back to that time must be white men because it wasn't so great for all the other people. It probably wasn't even completely great for the white men but they "remember" the part about the women doing all the support work and taking care of all the home details without a fuss. (At some point I know I heard R. whisper to Jon that there may be a reason that we tend to go see the rich people stories. Democratic socialism doesn't compete with royalty.)

We returned to 2018 and walked through some more cityscapes.  Rebecca continued to feel underwhelmed.  Probably it is like going to a movie after everyone in the world has said it is the best movie ever, and then you find that it isn't really as good as they kept saying.  We stopped at a Moroccan cafe near our building and had a delicious veggie samosa with three salads (what we really wanted).  The beetroot salad was everything we could have hoped for. And the chai latte came in a huge glass, which is not characteristic of this region.

Back to our apartment for naps and recuperating.  After a few hours, I started to feel that we should get back outside one more time.  It took lots of discussion to get us all back out the door (Becca did not feel the need but she reluctantly joined us).  It was raining and cold. 

The bicyclists were not deterred by the rain.

I wanted to go back to Nyhaven and walk through that area since it is one of the neighborhoods that just looks old style Danish. We did that but it got windier and colder and wetter and that was enough of that.  We had to wait for a return bus for way too long. Stopped at the local supermarket for some more chips, a cucumber, some cherry tomatoes so Jon could make us some very satisfying sandwiches for a late dinner (as we were walking around, R. vetoed every option for dinner as too expensive. If we are going to spend twice or three times the normal amount of money, then the food has to be that much better, and we know that won't be the case... she is even stricter than Jon about spending money.).

I felt better that we had gone out once more, R. told me I need to get over that feeling that we need to do more -- but who gets to go inside and call it a day at 4:15 PM? Had I known it was raining so hard, I might not have been so insistent. But I got to see the Opera House in its nighttime lit-up version, we looped through all those touristy areas on the bus again and recognized them, and Rebecca told us everything she could remember of the first four books of the Narnia series that she read many, many years ago. That is how Becca copes with being in places she would rather not be in, as her siblings well know.