From Stockholm it was a pleasant five and a half hour train ride to Copenhagen, with one change at Malmö. We had visited the city once before, in 2016, and were looking forward to reacquainting ourselves with it. At the same time, it was nice not to be worried about seeing everything we could, since we still have many memories (and photographs) of our last visit.
We picked up the key to our AirBnB from a lockbox in a 7-11 beside the train station. I messaged our host when I was there and she remotely unlocked it, which was a first for us, and actually pretty cool.
Our apartment was in Vesterbo, about a thirty minute walk from the station. After having been sitting most of the day we were both ready to move, even with our luggage, so we decided to walk.
Our apartment was on the corner of this building, immediately above the Madame Bum takeaway restaurant. No, not a name that would fly in Canada, but not a problem in Danish. We were starving and a bit tired by the time we’d got our stuff in, so we ordered Thai food from downstairs. It was quite good.
This was the view out the corner window later that evening: a truly spectacular sunset.
We decided to spend the next day mainly strolling the city, enjoying the street vibe. Copenhagen is a great city for walking and people watching.
When we were in Copenhagen in 2016 we’d booked accommodations at the last minute and had trouble finding a place, because it was Pride Weekend and Copenhagen was one of two European Cities of Pride that year. This time, coincidentally, we were once again visiting during Pride week.
This is Frederick’s Church, an evangelical Lutheran church dating from 1749, and just one of many impressive buildings we walked by.
After walking most of the way across the city centre, we decided to find a restaurant for a late lunch. This is Restaurant Nyboder, where we stopped. It was mid afternoon so the place was mostly empty, aside from a group of six older folks at the table at the back of the room, just visible at the right of the photo. Our waitress later told us that this is a group of elementary school friends who have been meeting every year for the last five decades. She was very flattered they’d chosen her restaurant for this year’s meeting. And the food was very good.
After lunch we decided to treat ourselves to a boat tour. Copenhagen is very pretty from the water, and we had fond memories of the tour we took back in 2016. So we walked from the restaurant to Slotholmskanalen, where the tours start.
A selfie, just to prove that Greg was on the boat.
Special Pride-themed tours with drag queens were starting from the dock two down from where we boarded. From the cheering and the laughing, it seemed like they were all having a lot of fun. There were also opera-themed tours with a couple of singers performing. We were on a “normal” tour.
This is Det Kongelige Teatre Operaen, the home of the Royal Danish Opera. The resemblance of the theatre to a diving board has not gone unremarked – Red Bull holds an extreme diving competition from the roof every few years.
Just past the theatre is Marinestation Københaven, the Copenhagen Naval Base. The sign at right translates as “military area, access prohibited.”
The Queen’s Yacht is moored just beside the naval base.
We pulled up briefly beside the famed Little Mermaid statue, which is much better viewed from shore.
From there we pulled into Christianshavens Kanal, a residential neighbourhood originally constructed to look like Amsterdam, in the hopes of attracting Dutch merchants to the city. The ploy was unsuccessful, but it’s a thriving and highly desirable neighbourhood. See the little boats in the canal ahead of us, with the numbers on the stern? Those are boats you can rent to do your own self-piloted tour. And, just a few minutes after this photo was taken, we got to watch one of them slam into a very expensive looking moored boat. Unfortunately we were past too quickly to see the aftermath.
This is the spire of Vor Frelsers Kirke, The Church of Our Saviour. The twisty part is an outside spiral staircase that you can pay to climb. Apparently the view is marvellous, but we didn’t go ourselves.
The captains of the large tour boats really earn their pay navigating some of the tiny bridges on the way back through Slotholmskanalen. This one had maybe fifteen centimetres clearance on either side. After our tour we headed back to the apartment for a quiet evening.
Saturday was Pride Parade, and of course we weren’t going to miss that. However, since it was arriving in the centre of town about 3:30 pm we had plenty of time to see some other sights first. We decided to head to the Christiansborg Slot (Palace), which is on the small island encircled by Slotsholmskanalen, where our boat tour had started the previous day. Christiansborg is the seat of the Danish Parliament, the Danish Supreme Court, and the Danish Prime Minister’s office, making it the only building in the world to be home to a country’s three executive branches.
There’s a large riding ring and showground on the back of Christiansborg, which was being used for an all-day equestrian event. This is a row of old carriages, waiting to promenade.
There were more carriages and a milk wagon waiting in the Christiansborg courtyard.
The inside of the palace is mostly neo-baroque (like this room) and neoclassical.
In addition to housing Denmark’s three executive branches of government, parts of Christiansborg are also used by the Danish Royal Family. We considered lodging a complaint about having to skip the library on our visit, but decided discretion was the better course.
We’re thinking of expanding our dining room and redecorating in this style. Any thoughts?
Every room we visited was spectacular. In this shot you can also observe Karen’s footwear: visitors are required to put plastic booties over their shoes to protect the floors from damage.
What do you get the woman who has everything for her fiftieth birthday? If she happens to be the Queen of Denmark, you promise her a series of seventeen tapestries illustrating the history of the country from the Viking Age to the future. Then you get artist Bjørn Nørgaard to design them and contract a team of sixty French weavers to do the actual work. Of course, this will take ten years, so she won’t actually get to see them until her sixtieth birthday party.
One of the rooms in the palace had a series of panels in the doorways celebrating various professions. We managed to find one for each of our kids, at least approximately. For Jared, our writer, literature, as represented by bookbinding.
For Shona, our Nurse Practitioner, medicine.
For Tristan, our welder and aspiring blacksmith: metalwork.
Of course you can’t have a proper palace without a throne room.
Our tickets also included a visit to Christiansborg’s original kitchen in the lower floor at one end of the palace. It’s no longer regularly used, but all the stoves have been converted to gas and are ready to go on demand.
Unlike the more formal parts of the palace, the decor here is strictly utilitarian.
Every pot, pan and utensil in the kitchen has an individual serial number and a recorded weight, presumably for stock taking.
The equestrian event was still running when we left the palace and had segued from carriages to a military riding demonstration. In this event the riders had to collect a cup of beer while riding at a gallop. There was incentive to do it well: the rider got to drink whatever remained in the cup at the end of the pass. As you can see by the splash, the rider on the right was more successful.
From Christiansborg it was just a short walk to a spot near the end of the Pride Parade route. As is the way with all large parades, it was more than half an hour late in arriving, but the marchers (who had been on the go by about three hours by that point) were still very enthusiastic.
There was a special Kyivpride group, marching “for those who cannot march” and in protest of the war in Ukraine.
Most of the groups were just marchers, often with loudspeakers, but there were a few with actual dance choreography.
We stayed at the parade for about an hour and a half, but then fatigue got the better of us and we decided to head back to the apartment. Because the parade’s route made a large ‘U’ in the city centre, we ended up crossing it twice on the way back, which was nice but only convinced us we’d made the right choice leaving before the end.
We had mentioned our plan to visit Copenhagen on FaceBook. Unbeknownst to us, Greg’s friend and RMC classmate Gaston Lamontagne had moved to Copenhagen back in March, mainly so his Danish wife could be closer to her aging mother. Gaston is a retired Canadian naval officer, and is maintaining his right of residence in Denmark by doing some engineering work for the Danish Navy. In any case, Gaston noticed our post and reached out to Greg with the suggestion we connect. This ultimately turned into an offer to drive us out to the Frederiksborg Slot, a palace about forty kilometres outside Copenhagen.
After a drive of close to an hour, which we used to catch up on each others’ families and careers, we arrived at the palace grounds. The palace itself is quite striking, and is set at the end of a series of gardens designed to make it a focal point. Gaston asked us to point out that this is not his house.
The upper gardens are more in the English style, while the gardens closest to the palace are French.
The clock tower is quite striking, with its golden ball ornaments.
The fountain is also quite impressive…
… as is the entrance…
… with its beautifully-executed statuary and bas-reliefs.
The inside of the palace is beautifully preserved and houses a large collection of portraits, historic paintings, furniture and applied art. It has been a museum since 1878. This very ornate bed seemed a little on the small side.
This bed would let you stretch out a bit. I think I’d like one for our bedroom, but we’ll need to raise the ceiling by a metre or two. And become independently wealthy. And have our taste in furniture surgically removed.
One of the highlights of the tour was the (incredibly) baroque Great Hall. This was completely destroyed by a fire in 1859 and subsequently reconstructed based on a series of sketches that had been made just the year before by two Dutch artists. Thanks to Gaston for the photo.
Yes, the ceiling really is that intricate.
The rear windows of the palace offer a lovely view of the gardens we walked through on the way down.
A gallery on the main floor of the palace hosts temporary art exhibitions. During our visit, it was showing the finalists from a country-wide portrait competition. This piece, by Josefine Amalie Christensen, was the first prize winner. In the words of the curator: “The double portrait The human body - Bryn is a compelling exploration of gender fluidity and the body. Drawing on the age-old format of the diptych (artwork with two parts), Christensen’s photographs show two sensitively captured and intimate views of Bryn, a trans woman who happens to be a popular drag queen in Copenhagen. The double portrait encapsulates a sense of anxiety and tension: the myriad complexities of queer lived experience, of being misunderstood by a society obsessed by reductive and untenable ideas of binary gender norms. But the power of these images also comes in the challenge they pose to those norms. Bryn’s defiant gaze in the one, and the difficult pose she masters in the other, show artist and sitter confronting the assumption that a fat, bearded transwoman cannot be skilled, successful, elegant or, indeed, the subject of a portrait.” As parents and in-laws of two trans people, Jared and Alex, the portrait particularly resonated with us.
This portrait, by Nelli Lassen of her son, is oil and embroidery on canvas, a medium our daughter Shona has worked in.
After visiting the palace we walked into the town of Hillerød, which is immediately adjacent, for a well-deserved lunch.
This sandwich is called a Stjerneskud or “shooting star”, and was pretty enough to warrant its own picture. Gaston tells us the traditional version has a layer of baked fish, rather than two layers of fried, and also includes caviar. Karen reported that this version was just fine.
On the way back to the car, we walked up through the gardens once again. Then it was back to Copenhagen, where Gaston dropped us off at our apartment. Thanks again for a lovely afternoon!
And the next morning, we were on our way to Hannover.
