Taking advantage of the being in Sweden for a limited time, we decided to visit København. We went by train, which turned out to be really cheap compared to traveling inside Portugal. Thanks to Dopplr, I got a recommendation for a hotel, which was really good.
We started to visit Christiania, a small self-proclaimed independent state (but currently under Danish law) inside the city. It looked like an hippy camp from the 80s with a lot of graffiti’s and stands selling drugs1. Before living I decided to ask about it to a woman that had been working there for over 20 years and we had a nice chat about it, and learned a lot (way better than wikipedia!).
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We then visited a lot of places, saw a lot of churches, we went up to the Round Tower, which I recommend, since you have an overview of the city, with some posters pointing out the most important buildings. It also had a tiny museum about Tycho Brahe that was explained in the Tycho Brahe Planetarium the following day. Both included the tools Brahe used to make his astronomical observations. And in the planetarium I got to launch a spaceship.
During the trip we went to a couple of museums, but skipped the Danish Design Center for lack of time. We visited the combo of Ripley’s Believe it or Not! Museum and the Hans Christian Andersen Museum and while the first one was well made (considering I wan’t interested in the theme[2) the second one was kind of poor, given the importance of the author. After that we went to see the Little Mermaid Statue and it was a disappointment: it was really far away from the centre (and we walked, it was night and really cold!) and it was a small statue of a girl on the rocks with her legs melting. Not worth it.
We still got to visit the National Museum that had a lot of exhibitions, from the awesome Danish pre-history to the contemporary Denmark and still got to see most of the Ethnographical collection. What I loved the most was the early natives’ mythology and the price: it was free!
But the most amusing moment of the trip was when we wanted to visit the Royal Palace and they said there were no guided tours that day, but if we wanted to see we could enter. We went through a side-door and it was like an airport, with metal detectors, bag x-rays and all of that. It was the most secure palace I had seen so far. We climbed 5 levels of stairs to find a small corridor. Naif enough, we started to look at the paintings, thinking it was a very lousy palace when the security guard told us to go through a door. “Oh, the real palace!” I though. But the result was a live session of an audition with a Minister in the official parliament.
Awesome 2-day trip and we can say we saw most of the tourist points, and learned quite a lot about the city.
1 No I didn’t buy or consume any. Straight-edge.
2 The most amusing part was discovering that Brahe had a silver nose and also crossing a bridge full of spinning effects to make you fall.
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