Copenhagen

We were supposed to be in Japan right now, but of course, that was canceled by covid-19. We were supposed to go camping in the Four Corners area last month, but that was canceled too. So I decided on some travel retrospectives, posting pictures from trips from before I started this blog.

The first set will be from a trip we took in 2015 to a number of countries in Scandanavia. Our first stop was in Copenhagen Denmark. Like Amsterdam and Venice, Copenhagen is a city with canals.

We arrived in the middle of a heatwave, and people were enjoying their time outside.

Copenhagen is a city with lots of bicycles, as well as three-wheeled cycles. Even carry your dog on the back of your bike.

The city has lots of interesting buildings and statues. This is a statue of Hans Christian Anderson, famous Danish author.

They seem to like spiral towers. This one is at the Church of our Savior.

This spiral tower is on Børsbygningen, the Stock Exchange. It is known for its distinctive spire, shaped as the tails of four dragons twined together, reaching a height of 180 feet.

Here be dragons.

We rented a VRBO apartment in the Vesterbro neighborhood, a non-touristy, “real people” neighborhood. We really liked the area, and it was about a 30 minute to the center of Copenhagen, or there was excellent public transit. There was a small park across the street with this statue, where someone provided a wool cap.

This quirky picture was a store window in the neighborhood. I don’t understand the symbolism, and although we walked past it several times, the store was never open.

These are Smørrebrød, Danish open-faced sandwiches. They were very good!

I just liked this one.

In Copenhagen, we visited Christiania, the sorta hippie idealist counter-culture community. I was carrying my big camera, and all kinds of people were yelling at me to “keep your hands off the camera.” Cannabis is illegal in Denmark but widely tolerated in Christiania. The community there is afraid of people taking pictures of potential drug transactions and providing the photos to the police. This attitude certainly did not make us feel welcome, and we did not buy anything from the crafts stalls. Cmon, an undercover narc would have the sense to use a small surreptitious camera.

This was a picture as we entered Christiania.

And this picture was as we left Christiania.

One of the sights we really enjoyed was Christiansborg Palace, which is where the current government is housed. Colloquially, Christiansborg and the government are frequently referred to as “Borgen,” which means ‘the castle.'(Borgen is pronounced Born.) We were very interested because we loved the Borgen TV show about the first female Danish prime minister. A wonderful show, which the NY Times described as a Nordic version of The West Wing. So we had to go there.

Here is Susan outside the entrance to Borgen.

After paying our admission fee, we had to put on blue booties to protect the floors.

Once inside, there was essentially no security. That was pretty amazing. We passed a staircase with a chain across it limiting access; the sign said the stairs led to the Prime Minister’s office.

I am glad we had the booties; the floors were nice.

This is the formal dining room for state dinners. Wow, they even let members of the proletariat like us enter! A very impressive room to visit in person.

Our guidebook highly recommended the Rosenborg Castle, built in the 1600s. As always, Rick Steves was right. Rosenborg Castle, and especially the Treasury, were very impressive.

Here, at least, there was security.

View of the gardens from the palace.

We saw three throne rooms in the Castle. This one has two thrones, presumably for King and Queen.

This throne room has one chair, with a rather shabby pillow.

And this is a different kind of throne.

The Danish Royal Treasury in the basement was quite impressive.

This is the coronation crown for Christian IV, with seven pounds of gold and precious stones.

Our guidebook describes this golden ring as follows: “After a queen was caught having an affair after 22 years of royal marriage, her king gave her a special present, a golden ring showing the hand of the promiscuous queen shaking hands with a penis.”

These are drinking tankards.

This is the top of the right-hand tankard in the above photo, showing a carved Greenland Inuit. BTW, Denmark has controlled Greenland for hundreds of years.

I was impressed by the collections of toy soldiers, which appear to be made out of gold.

Our guidebook described three sites outside of Copenhagen, suitable as day trips. They were the Roskilde Cathedral, the nearby Viking Ship Museum, which are west of Copenhagen, and the Frederiksborg Palace, which is north of Copenhagen. While there are good train connections, these day trips would take two full days. On the web, I found a tour company that would take us to all three sites, as well as to Kronborg Castle. With a van, they can do all of this in one day.

There were eight of us in the van, and we had a great tour guide. He was a graduate student in History, and he was smart, funny and knowledgable. I did not know much about European history, but there were a whole bunch of wars between Denmark and Sweden. With tongue visibly placed in cheek, he told us how the Swedes were awful, bloodthirsty tyrants, and evil people to boot. (The next week we heard reciprocal comments from a Swedish tour guide.) Of course, Denmark and Sweden are now major trading partners and there has been peace between them for three hundred years, but it was fun for him to role-play as he told us about the history.

Our guide also told us that Bluetooth wireless technology was named for Harald Bluetooth, a Danish king who ruled more than a thousand years ago. I was skeptical, but Wikipedia confirmed this fact. The naming was based on the analogy that Bluetooth technology would unite devices the way Harald Bluetooth united the tribes of Denmark into a single kingdom, and the Bluetooth logo consists of runes for his initials, H (ᚼ) and B (ᛒ). I am a big fan of Wikipedia!

Our Guide. It has been five years, so I don’t remember his name, which was Danish and hard for us to pronounce correctly.

Our first stop on the tour was Roskilde Cathedral, dating from the twelfth century, and contains the tombs of nearly all of the Danish Kings and Queens.

Our guide told us about Christian I, and the chapel of Frederik V, and it seemed that all of the kings were named Christian or Frederik. I asked him whether all of them were named Christian or Frederik, and he said basically yes. According to Wikipedia, every Danish monarch for the past 500 years has been named Christian or Frederik. And they were all men. Except for the current monarch, Queen Margrethe, who has been on the throne since 1972.

This is the tomb of Christian IV, who was on the throne from 1588 to 1648.

They put their sword on top of the casket.

The altar.

Nice ceiling.

Nice carvings.

This is a model of the tombstone for Margarethe, the current queen, who is 80 years old. It is called a Regentparrets Gravmæle. It seems weird to have designed this while she is still alive. It is much more attractive than the tombs of all these old kings.

We also visited the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde. Around the year 1070, five Viking ships were deliberately sunk in the fjord at the entrance to Roskilde harbor go prevent an enemy from attacking from the sea. The ships were recovered in 1962, and form the basis of the museum. They also have a workshop where carpenters build ships using thousand-year-old methods and tools. And they have replicas of the ancient ships.

And, the tourists can play Viking and propel the ship with the long oars.

While on the waterfront I got a nice picture of some pink flowers, which I think are foxgloves, and also an interesting shot of a guy wading in the shallows, towing his boat.

Our next stop on the tour was Frederiksborg Palace, which Rick Steves describes as the “grandest castle in Scandinavia,” and refers to it as the “Danish Versailles.” Who am I to disagree? It was very impressive.

At the entrance is the famous Neptune’s fountain.

Neptune surveying his domain.

The castle is built on a lake.

A cheerful lion.

The inside of the palace was very nice too. A bed for a king.

The Royal Chapel is the most famous part, and I enjoyed taking photographs there. They hold weddings here, and the advice is to book long in advance.

The organ, built in 1610, is gorgeous.

The details on the organ were truly amazing.

There was this beautiful golden globe, made in 1657. On the outside, it has zodiac pictures, and the inside has a mechanical model of Copernican heliocentric solar system.

And, like Versailles, Frederiksborg Castle has beautiful gardens.

The last stop was Kronberg fortress, in the town of Helsingør, Denmark. The castle is famous as the location of Macbeth’s Hamlet, with the Danish name “Helsingør” anglicized to “Elsinore.” The fortress is historically important because it is on the narrowest part of the Øresund, the sound between present-day Denmark and Sweden. It is only 2.5 miles across the water to Sweden. When the fortress was built, both sides of the sound were controlled by Denmark; at other times in history, Sweden controlled both sides. The strategic value is obvious, as the fortress controls access to the entire Baltic Sea.