Back to Copenhagen – Part 1

After I had booked the Tauck tour of Scandinavia, I was having lunch with a friend of mine who had spent time in Denmark. When he saw how little time we spent in Copenhagen, he told me, “You have to go back to Copenhagen.” So, at the end of the tour in Oslo, I flew back to Copenhagen for a few more days. When we landed, it was rainy and dreary, which suited me just fine. After all the touring of the last two weeks, I was ready to do nothing. Rain was a good excuse to hole up in my hotel room, which is just what I did. That gave me time to plot out my dinners for the next three nights. If you haven’t figured this out yet, I am an enogastronomic tourist. (I’m not sure that’s even a word in English!). In Italian, the word for traveling for the purpose of eating good food and drinking wine is “enogastronomia”. Anyway, that’s me.

Den Lille Fede

 When I plan my travel, I decide where I want to eat first and then arrange everything else around that. As luck would have it, one of the places I was considering was very close to my hotel. I was even more excited when I discovered that I could make an on-line reservation for one person! The vast majority of restaurants will not take reservations for a solo diner, so I always start out with a favorable impression of restaurants that do. It shows that they care more about the customer than the bottom line. Anyway, the restaurant is called “Den Lille Fede” and it features seasonal New Nordic cuisine. I’ll spare you the course by course description (which is available upon request); but, I will tell you that it was one of the best meals I have ever eaten.

The "Little" Changing of the Guard

The next day was museum day. I had two major ones lined up – the Danish National Museum and the Carlsberg Glyptotek, a major art collection. It was a nice morning, so I decided to walk. It was probably at least a mile, but walking in a new city always helps me get a feel for what life is like there. Copenhagen just has a really nice vibe. It’s both a tourist city and a place where real people live and work. . .  and ride bikes! You really have to be careful, because the bike lanes can be more treacherous that the car lanes. I just happened into the square in front of the queen’s residence at the precise moment of the “little” changing of the guards, which happens every two hours. I have to believe that the uniforms these Danish soldiers wear was the inspiration for the wooden soldiers in “Babes in Toyland”. It’s a great show. I’m sorry I never got to see the major change, which happens just once a day.

The bicycles of Copenhagen

I had a great visit in the National Museum. I started at pre-history and made it as far as the Reformation before I just couldn’t absorb any more. I was particularly interested in the Viking period and the early history of Christianity in Denmark. I am sure that the Danes would not appreciate my saying this, but based on the medieval religious art on display, there does not appear to have been much of a local culture. Almost all the artwork and religious artifacts seem to have come from Germany. Of course, the border between southern Denmark and northern Germany was pretty fluid until the end of the First World War, with territory changing hands frequently. I browsed through the museum shop, which had some great books in English, but there was no way I was going to buy and carry them. Stopped at a very old-school Danish place right across the street for lunch. I wanted the roast pork sandwich, but there must have been a misunderstanding, because what came out was a giant plate of steaming roast pork, red cabbage and boiled potatoes – it doesn’t get more Danish. I thought about sending it back  . . .  but I didn’t. I rationalized that I was doing a lot of walking. Ahem.

The room of heads

Next stop was the Ny Carslberg Glyptotek. Yes, it’s the same Carlsberg as the beer.  Rick Steves’ guide says this about it, “Scandinavia’s top art gallery is an impressive example of what beer money can do.” Well, no matter, where the money came from, the museum is impressive. Both the building itself and the collections it houses are stunning. Like many older museums, its organization is a bit baffling. I never did find the French impressionist collection. Just wandering around, though, provided a true feast for the eyes. There was quite a collection of Roman portrait busts; one room was just filled with heads. It was borderline creepy. I saw as much as I could before I started to fade. 

Since I was right near the train station, I decided to stop and get information about going to Roskilde the following day. I learned that I could get the train at a station much closer to my hotel, so that was good news. I was going to take public transportation back to the hotel, but since I still hadn’t seen Copenhagen’s Lutheran Cathedral, I decided to walk back by means of a route that would let me do that. The cathedral is right next to the university, where some kind of street festival was going on. It was the oddest juxtaposition to walk into this vast space where someone was practicing a Lutheran hymn tune on the organ and “We all live on a Yellow Submarine” was blaring right outside. The cathedral itself seemed almost devoid of spirituality. It's classical austerity now seems like a harbinger of the almost total secular culture of modern Denmark. I walked back through one of the more Bohemian neighborhoods I had seen to date. My feet and I were glad when we got back to the hotel.

Nyborg, Copenhagen