As I mentioned in the last blog, my first stop in Europe was Denmark, where I was meeting up with my friend Meredith Saggers, who many of you know. Mere makes somewhat frequent trips to Uganda for work, so on her way back to the US, she was able to take a few vacation days to meet up with me and explore Scandinavia and the Baltics for 10 days.
The one downside to not having any set plans for most of my travels is that I end up spending a lot of time every day or two figuring out where I'm going next, where I'm going to stay, how I'm going to get there, what I need to see/do while I'm there, etc. Mere was gracious enough to do the lion's share of the planning for our travels, which was a very refreshing change for which I'm eternally grateful. Thanks Mere!
Day 168 - Sunday, July 8
First stop: Odense. I arrived at 8am to the Copenhagen airport, where I met Mere, and we jumped on a train to Odense, which is a smaller town a couple of hours west of Copenhagen (though still the 3rd biggest city in Denmark). We met up with a couple of Mere's friends that she had met in Ecuador who live in Odense.
Odense seems to pretty much shut down on Sunday. So, despite amazing weather, the streets were mostly empty and most of the shops were closed - it was a little odd. Mere's friends were nice of enough to show us around the city. A few photos as we explored:
Hans Christian Andersen's house in Odense's old town (below). It's hard to tell in the photos, but all the doorways in the Old Town looked like they were made for the set of
The Hobbit, apparently people used to be a lot shorter back then:
Eventually we ended up at a cool bar, where if you drink 8 pints in a day, you get your own mug. As you can see, a few people have taken advantage of this:
Enjoying a beer with Mere's friend Sarah, one of our tour guides for the day:
We debated hanging out for a while and getting our own mugs, but Mere was drunk after 1, so we had to scrap that idea. (Okay, maybe that's not entirely accurate.) Mere had mentioned that she ended up staying out much later than expected the previous night because it didn't get dark until very late at night, but I was still shocked when 10:00 rolled around and it was still very light outside. Two weeks later, I STILL haven't gotten used to this phenomenon, which was even more pronounced as we moved further north. It makes the 14 hours of sunlight in New Zealand in February seem like a short day.
Day 169 - Monday, July 9
We headed back to Copenhagen on Monday morning. Despite the rather ominous skies, we took a boat tour of the city, which started and ended at Nyhavn Harbor. Nyhavn is definitely a very picturesque area, and, as Mere pointed out, Words with Friends would be way easier if we combined consonants the way the Scandinavians do.
And then we explored a little bit on foot (undeterred by a little bit of rain). But first we stopped for pastries (this would be a recurring theme):
Then we climbed an old steeple, where it was so windy at the top that it made some young girls cry, and I demonstrated my amazing self-photography skills (or maybe it took a few tries - no need to get caught up in the details):
Then off to the hippy commune,
Christiania, where Denmark turns a blind eye to open sales of marijuana in all forms, but photos are prohibited, for obvious reasons. We took some anyway:
Day 170 - Tuesday, July 10
On Tuesday morning, Mere told me that she had gotten an email from an address she didn't recognize saying she had left a credit card and driver's license at a hotel. Not having lost any such items, she dismissed it as a likely scam, which was my initial reaction as well. But then I realized I didn't have my credit card or my driver's license - or my apple charger. Oops. Imagine that, I left something behind. So I emailed them and asked them to send it to the car rental counter in Norway, thinking that would give it as much time as possible to get to Norway before we flew out.
As many of you know, I enjoy my red wine. But red wine doesn't go very well with hot weather, so it had been a while since I partook. With the transition to much cooler weather, I decided I wanted some wine. So we grabbed a bottle and drank it on the street, while Danish people judged us. In their defense, it was 11am. After lunch we headed to
Tivoli, an amusement park in the middle of the city. But when we got to the front gates, I realized I didn't have my book bag. Somehow, I had walked about 10 blocks without it occurring to me that I was no longer wearing a bag. Luckily, after backtracking for a while, it was still sitting at the picnic table where we grabbed lunch. I'm kind of a mess.
So after retrieving the bag, we spent the rest of the evening at Tivoli, making the most of our unlimited ride tickets.
A photo as we walked back around 10pm or so:
Note the color of the sky - so hard to get used to
so much to comment on here. (1) eating carbs is always a theme with mere. (2) love the illustration for no hard drugs. (3) you are a mess! criminey. i can't even believe how few things have actually been lost this trip. (4) oh, and i love the story about the wine. it makes me want to drink some in my freezing cold office actually. i'm not sure how well that would go over either.
ReplyDeleteI can't believe you didn't mention the trampolines we found in the middle of the sidewalk! Perhaps that was just a highlight of Copenhagen for me :). And you called the Danish people Dutch again :p.
ReplyDeleteSorry, when the blogging doesn't happen until weeks later, important details like sidewalk trampolines sometimes get accidentally left out. And I'm pretty sure I only made the Dutch-Danish mistake because after hearing you do it so many times, it started to rub off.
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