Linkopi @ Linköping

Copenhagen: beautiful city with helpful people and delicious pastries!

Day 1: walk walk walk walk walk and walk some more!

after a bus ride of about 7 hours, we finally crossed the Malmö - Copenhagen bridge and arrived in Copenhagen at 8am. we started what would be a day full of walking. on our way to finding our hotel, we stumbled upon attraction number 1:

Tivoli gardens! It's an amusement park that's supposed to be fairy tale-ish. By the looks of it, it looked pretty old and grim. It's right smack in the middle of the street, exactly across from the train station. Maybe 'coz it's closed during winter, but it looked a little lacklustre and not worth the hype about it.

Anyway, we found our hotel quite easily as it was just a couple of hundred of metres from the railway station. The receptionist was very friendly and helpful and is the first of the many nice danish people we were to encounter on this trip. Although it was 830am in the morning, he gladly gave us the keys to our room and told us we could have breakfast after moving our stuff in. here's the room we got. a 4 bed room for both of us and rongwei. it's quite big and the beds were comfy! only problem was that it was on the 4th story and there wasn't a lift around. eeks.

here's breakfast! there was quite a spread of hams and breads. and danish pastry of course. the pastry was delicious! light and not greasy. its the first time i ate 2 pastries at a go and still wanted more. and i did have more the next morning. yums!

after breakfast, we set off for our day of sightseeing. at the corner of the street that our hotel was on was a bakery. i couldn't resist the thought of baked goods and had to go in to take a look. here's a very cute thing i saw in the fridge. haha..the man said it's filled with cream and the green thing is marzipan. sounds awfully sinful and tempting but i was too full from breakfast. too bad it was already closed by the time we got back. =(

ext to tivoli gardens was a museum called the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. We didn't manage to go into the place to take a look but checked out it's garden and found some pretty interesting statues. The monstrous statue was the first to greet us when we walked into the place. It looks like the monster from the scooby doo movie. The windows were also pretty interesting, with the nazi sign on some and 9 dots on some other. There were also figure heads of apes, hippopotamus, elephants and other african animals on the window grills.

on our way to the national museum, i noticed the very cool traffic lights they have. it's just hanging in the middle of the junction! just like those we see on tv.

there was also a vintage volvo parked at the side of the road and there were many more to come. vintage citroens, jaguars, merc, etc etc. and new cars as well! porche suvs, volvo c30, and alot more pretty cars. oh! and the cabs are all merc cabs. or some bmw and some chryslers. crazy europeans.

at the corner of the museum, there was this very pink little paper marche pig looking out of the window. haha..it was quite cute but i never found it inside the museum. the national museum was free entry and had alot of things to see. we went back on sunday as well and spent alot of time looking at the exhibits spread across 3 stories of the museum. here as some of the things we saw on the first day: andy lau's face on a denmark paper! haha..this isn't an exhibit. This is a real paper about the film festival and his face was plastered over several windows in the city as well.

now these are the real exhibits. there was stuff from lapland, from china, japan, africa, australia, basically everywhere around the world.

getting out of the museum, we stumbled upon christianborg, a palace that was built on an entire island itself. we even saw a horse carriage with people in royal clothes on it going into the palace grounds but were too slow with out cameras. haha.

too bad the palace was undergoing renovation and the tower was bandaged up and also 'coz its winter. else, it'd be a really pretty sight with the flowers. the top of the tower was a stack of 3 crowns. we saw a chess set in the museum that was the same. the king was a stack of 3 crowns and the queen was 2 crowns. interesting.

here are a few random shots of the surrounding of christianborg. and that's the canal that's surrounding the whole island. kind of like singapore river, only cleaner. the water's so clear you can see all the way to the bottom of the canal.

unknowingly, we walked into the city centre. the city centre had a makeshift ice skating rink right in the middle of it! if only we had time and skates! and as we were walking, we heard this whistling that didn't stop. and we finally saw what it was!

royal guards! complete with the furry hairy hats! it was super cute. like a scene right out of some fairy tale cartoon! made our trip completely worth it and thanks to bb for his quick camera skills! there was also a flower market at the corner of the street. completes the european experience! this photo is dedicated to my mum. haha..check out the size of that amber rock! amber is one of the products of denmark. and it is beautiful even at that monstrous size. haha.

on our way to the next stop, we passed through their residential area. this is just one of the many blocks of apartments. it's kind of like HDB flats isn't it? only more like lego buildings. after all, lego came from denmark! that vintage car at the right bottom is a citroen by the way. really cute.

next stop, Rosenborg Castle. the park surrounding the castle is huge! and there's the classic moat around the castle and little ducks swimming around in it. we didn't go in to see the treasury and the crowns but the environment was worth the visit.

after visiting rosenborg, we walked to the marble church, Marmorkirken. It's a super handsome and grand building. With the largest church dome in all of scandinavia inspired by the pantheon in rome. It took 150 years to build the church..with the first stone laid in 1749 and finally opened in 1894. We were in time for the 1pm climb to the top of the dome and we did! all 270 steps of it, regular stairs and winding stairs summed up! and after all the walking! super tiring. haha. but it was all worth it. this is why:just look at the birds eye view we got of the whole city! all the spires of the churches and the castle towers were in full view. it was breathtaking! after struggling down the very tiny spiral steps, we crossed the road to amalienborg, yet another palace. as with the other palace, this one was under renovation too and only one museum in one of the buildings was open. the museum exhibited the interior of the castle and the rooms of some of the royalties. it was super luxurious and just the way you would imagine royalties to live. i don't have any photos because no phototaking was allowed..but bb took some wit his phone. haha..i'll upload it another day.

here are two unoccupied guard stands. notice the little heartshape cut out on it. the danish coins have heart shapes on them too. it's like alice in wonderland. haha.

after visiting the museum, we finally made our way to visit the little mermaid. by then, we had already been walking for 7 hours! including climbing up the marble church! my poor legs.

and there she is. the famous little mermaid. who was badly vandalized. she had pink paint over her back. some people are really just crazy and senseless. anyhow, there's also this really old, medieval looking church near the little mermaid, called the St.Alban Church.

there's also a star shaped island next to the little mermaid called Kastellet.

as the name suggests, there's a castle on it. and a windmill. there were alot of people jogging on the island and it was quite pretty. by this time, our legs couldn't take it anymore and we took a bus back into town. haha. back in town, the sight of so many pigeons bobbing their head was too tempting to pass up. i went to chase pigeons! but they wouldn't budge. stupid pigeons. probably too fat to fly! anyway, our next stop was the round tower. we got lost on the way and were standing in the corner of the street peering at our map when this lady approached us and asked if we needed help. she was so kind to point us in the right direction and also to notify us that there are riots going on in copenhagen and we should be careful. huh?! riots? haha..we had no idea! but thank god we weren't in the riot zone.

before scaling the round tower, we visited the church of trinitatis right next to it. it's nice and bright and had an interesting looking organ. i'd like to see that organ being played.

the round tower has a 209m long spiral ramp inside it and yes, we climbed this ramp. it was surprisingly less torturous than we thought, probably because it just went on and on and suddenly, you're at the top. oh..and not to mention the toilet break at the middle. a really old toilet which christian hans anderson probably sat on. the view from the top isn't as breathtaking as the marble church but if we hadn't been to the marble church before that, we would probably have been wowed by it. this link is for those who want to read more about the round tower. haha. and at about 6, we finally sat down to a pizza buffet dinner randomly picked out in the middle of town. the pizza wasn't superb but at least better than pizza hut. but instead of having pizza, we all attacked the salad bar more. one interesting thing, the pizza place only had one danish waitress. the rest were all chinese. there're alot of chinese in copenhagen. everywhere you go, you can hear some chinese being spoken.

the last stop of the day was the planetarium which was quite a disappointment. it's actually an imax cinema and the tickets were a whooping 80 danish kronos! that's more than 20sgd. crazy. but our copenhagen card entitled us to visit the planetarium which was quite old and run down. but the giant beanbags and the constellation display was nice.

and with that, we finally walked back to our hotel, and snubbed our plan to go to norrebro, another part of town which comes alive at night and which was also where the riots were at.

day 2: more walking!

Day 2 started at 9am, when we had our breakfast at the hotel, checked out, locked our bags in the lockers and set off for the museum again. the day was beautiful! big, bright sun! first we've seen in a long while.

we went back to the museum again 'coz we wanted to get the free museum booklet that came with our copenhagen card and also 'coz we have already covered everywhere we wanted to go to the previous day. this time round, we had fun at the museum!

there's a little children's museum and being the big kids that we were, we had fun playing with the stuff on display. and i also had fun playing with this little baby girl who was super adorable. we got to fight like vikings on a viking ship too! haha.

after that, we wandered around looking at the other more serious exhibits that we didn't see the previous day and that we couldn't play with. bb took close to 200 shots of the exhibits and i can't possibly upload them all here but we'll try to put it up on the web album soon! but here's my favourite photo of the day:

hahahaha.

there's also this very intricate paper cut out. look through the hole and this is what you see:

nice huh!

after roaming around the museum for a long time, we went back to christianborg to see the castle ruins under the main tower.

it wasn't anything much, just some piles of rocks and a couple of old wells. but the models of the castle were nice. and an eerie tunnel which upon photo taking with flash, revealed a picture pasted at its end.

and no trip would be complete without some shopping! haha..we headed back to the shopping streets to check out the shops. but after going into a couple of shops, bb n me decided we were too lazy and tired and just sat at the benches at the side of the street listening to a man playing the violin while waiting for rongwei to get his shopping fix. haha.

it was a very relaxing way to spend time and that man was very talented. later on, we walked down the streets and saw alot of people eating ice cream. and my sweet tooth told me i needed one too! we eventually found a candy shop selling 10Kr ice creams. it's quite yummy!! and eating ice cream during a winter day is really good 'coz the ice cream doesn't melt at all.

we also found bigger than face size rittersport chocolate in the candy shop!

and we had danish pastry for lunch! delicious. better than any pastry you can get at delifrance.

after our yummy pastry, we took a train down to roskilde, a town half an hour outside of copenhagen to see the viking museum.

the train station at copenhagen looks a little like the train station in harry potter right? haha. this is the roskilde church which was unfortunately under renovation too. i read that it's the oldest church in scandinavia. it's huge and set atop a slope and would be a beautiful sight from the shore if not for the huge tentages around it. there's a beautiful park just below the church, on the slope. and there are huge bungalows on around it! the park is really simple, with huge field of green green grass, a little stream leading down to a pond with ducks waddling in it. no wonder the europeans like to picnic and lie on the grass in summer. i'd like to do that too. and here's the viking museum, our last touristy spot. it's a pity that it's winter. else you can take the viking ships out and see them in action. but the surrounding was yet another breathtaking sight! clear blue sea at sunset. the right place at the right time!

and what's a trip to denmark without a carlsberg?! although we didn't manage to visit the carlsberg museum, we got our carlsberg at the roskilde train station before heading back to copenhagen. And for 10.50kr, about 3sgd, we got a good beer that's better than the carlsberg in singapore.

after visiting the viking museum, we went back to copenhagen, had a hard time finding this turkish buffet place and had help from another 2 kind danish men. and the same situation too. we were just standing at the corner with a map and they approached us. thank you kind danes! the buffet was pretty good, with a nice spread of food but no kebab! after dinner, we made our way back to the hotel to get our bags and headed off to the bus stop for our ride home.

the ride home wasn't smooth! we were stranded at gothenburg where we had to wait for 4 hours for our bus back to linkoping. little did we expect the train station to be closed! and it only opened at 4am. so we were stuck in the cold at 2am in the middle of gothenburg.

thankfully, there was a shell petrol kiosk nearby and we spent 2 hours there doing nothing. apparently, it's pretty common for them to have people like us waiting around in the kiosk.

we eventually survived this tiny ordeal and got on the bus at 6.15am, tired and ready to sleep the whole way. but the sun was just rising and it was beautiful. i kept my eyes open to take some shots before heading off to dreamland as the bus took us back to linkoping.

better than the northern lights! haha..and a consolation for the 4 hour wait.

thank you bb for planning this trip! it was fun and good for the leg muscles! hehe.

and yes! i'm finally done with this post! hope you all enjoyed the photos! next stop, ski trip this sunday in the middle of exam week!

love, jL

posted by jL-yZ @ 5:39 PM