Part One: Copenhagen
(Author's note: I took a bunch of Boomerang videos on the trip, and I had to embed them in the blog as videos. They won't auto-start, so click them to view; they're all about 4 seconds long, so they shouldn't take too long to load.)
Tom described Denmark as the "land of made-up vowels," and other than the title of this entry, it will not be alphabetically correct. I hope that this doesn't detract too much from your reading experience.
Sunday, October 8
We flew out of MSP in the direction of Amsterdam at 7:45 p.m. All went well, and we even slept for a few hours on the overnight flight.
Monday, October 9
We arrived at Copenhagen airport in early afternoon, and took the train to Copenhagen Central Station and a bus to our lodging, the Little Guesthouse, in the Vesterbro neighborhood about a mile west of central Copenhagen. It was a great place to stay; we had a second-floor bedroom in a three-story house, and shared a bathroom and kitchen with the other guestroom.
We dropped off our bags, and based on a recommendation from half of the husband and wife innkeeper team, Jens, we walked to dinner at the WestMarket, a collection of street food-type booths in a common space. We had some ramen and a beer, and then had another pint at Fermentoren on our way back to the hotel.
Fermentoren had Big Lebowski stencil quotes covering the walls in their men's room:
We were pretty wiped out by that point (spoiler alert: this will be a recurring theme), so we crashed.
Tuesday, October 10
Our first stop was Christiansborg Palace, which had a free elevator to a tower which offered a panoramic view of the city.
From there, we walked to Nyhavn, which is an old merchants' neighborhood with brightly colored row houses.
We paid through the nose for lunch, so we tried to make up for it by taking advantage of free admission on Tuesdays at Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, a classical art museum, where we viewed their collection of Roman sculpture, which included this bust of Jimmy Carter, I'm pretty sure.
We hit up the Netto supermarket down the street for dinner fixings and called it a night.
Wednesday, October 11
We took a day trip to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, located in Humlebaek, a picturesque northern suburb of Copenhagen right along the Oresund, which separates Denmark from Sweden. The train took 30-40 minutes from Central Station.
Molly was most excited about the Marina Abramovich exhibition, which did not disappoint. We both got the opportunity to uncomfortably walk between two completely nude models, which was a first for me. In all seriousness, though, it was great.
There was also a permanent exhibition by Yayoi Kusama of mirrors and lights, which was super trippy.
The museum's setting was almost as awesome as the art within:
Molly even found a place to get her senior picture taken:
On the trip back, we stopped at the Klampenborg station to check out Dyrehaven, a nature preserve featuring huge herds of deer.
We found a large group just steps from the entrance, including an immense buck and an albino doe.
A quick aside: I traveled to rural Mexico this summer for work, and it was a real bummer of a trip for multiple reasons which I won't bore you with here if I haven't already. A slightly redeeming quality that I was able to purchase Havana Club Rum, which isn't available in the U.S., and I got to feel like Cool Exotic Traveler Guy Who Can Acquire Obscure Items. You can imagine my elation, then, when every 7-Eleven in Denmark carried it, and every train station was covered in ads for it:
At least their mezcal selection was for shit.
Also, it's good to be a 12-year-old boy when traveling:
After the train ride back to the city, we stopped for dinner at War Pigs, a beer and BBQ joint which is a collaboration between Munster, Indiana's own Three Floyds and the Mikkeller Bar of Copenhagen. It was wonderful, and they had plenty of sauces.
Thursday, October 12
Since I'm an early riser, I headed out for solo walks from the hotel most mornings. The guesthouse was just east of the Ny Carlsberg Brewery (Ny is Danish for New, but this brewery is over 100 years old). Based on what Jens told us, Carlsberg has moved their brewing to Eastern Europe, so this facility is just for tours and offices now. The area around and within the brewery appears to be in the process of being converted into condos. /shrug emoji
This is the Elephant Gate, which has some, um, interesting iconography:
We took a stroll to the Norrebro neighborhood, with our first stop at Assistens Cemetery, the final resting place of Soren Kierkegaard and Hans Christian Andersen, among others.
We walked pasted Rosenborg Castle on the way back.
And then we stumbled upon the rarest of creatures, a reasonably priced place to have a beer in Copenhagen! I present to you, The Log Lady, where you can drink a bottle of $5 Danish beer in the presence of extremely laid-back hipsters and look at centerfolds posted on the bathroom wall:
Friday, October 13
We rented a couple of beat-up Dutch-style three-speeds from the hotel and explored Copenhagen by bike. First stop was Freetown Christiania, a part-hippie, part-punk settlement south of central Copenhagen where your square rules don't apply, maaannnn.
We followed that up with dinner at Paperoen, a former paper warehouse on the harbor which had been converted into another large room filled with street-food stalls. We enjoyed some fish and chips and checked out an outdoor crowdsourced Yoko Ono art exhibit at the adjacent Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center.
Saturday, October 14
With a half-day left in Copenhagen before our departure for Germany, we took a canal boat tour, which was lovely and informative.
We stumbled upon a cafe for lunch, and walked around a little more before arriving at Central Station again to catch our train out of town.
The train was pretty crazy in that, midway through the five-hour journey, it drove onto a ferry and floated from Denmark to Germany for 45 minutes. We had to get off the train during its time on the ferry, and the interior of the boat was like an airport food court, with a full-sized duty-free store and everything. We did, however, get to spend some time on the top deck. Overall, the experience was well worth the price of admission.
Tom picked us up at the Hamburg Central Station and treated us to the finest beers available:
Mr. Clou, that's my name, that name again is Mr. Clou:
Part Two: Hamburg
Sunday, October 15
Tom, his wife Sonja, and their two kids, Fiona and Anton, had been living in an apartment near the center of Hamburg, but they just bought a house and moved (only days before our visit) to a tiny village just outside of Ahrensburg, which is just outside the Hamburg city limits.
I was expecting something akin to a standard U.S. inner-ring suburb, with strip malls and car-centric design, but this place was pretty gosh-darn idyllic. There were sidewalks and cycle-tracks everywhere, and lovely older brick homes. Tom is now a car owner again after a 15-odd year break, but their diesel Toyota Corolla wagon is extremely practical, with a third row of seats that avoided a reappearance of Truncle Joel when hauling four adults and two kids in car seats.
I accompanied Tom and Fiona to the village bakery first thing in the morning to get some bread for breakfast. One thing Molly and I were struck by on the trip is how weak our bread game is.
We spent a good part of the day at a playground about a mile from their house, which was on the grounds of the elementary school that Tom and Sonja's kids will eventually attend. There was an extremely awesome zipline:
There was also a spider-web-type jungle gym, a long slide, a climbing wall, some other climbing equipment, and a couple of outdoor ping-pong tables. It was a playground built with a lot less fear of being sued than most I've seen in the U.S.
We checked out some horses in a pasture on the walk back to the house.
While the kids took a nap, Tom and I biked to Ahrensburg to check out the Ahrensburg Castle, and old manor house with a double moat surrounding it. It was a nice ride, but we didn't feel the need to pay the entry fee to check out the interior.
In the evening, Sonja's parents biked over from their home just inside the Hamburg city limits and we had a barbecue.
Monday, October 16
This was our city tourism day. Our group of six drove to the parking garage under the brand-new Elbphilharmonie.
For you Twin Cities readers, the building was similar to the Guthrie Theater, in that it offers a huge performing-arts venue, but also a free escalator to a viewing platform for the general public.
From there, we stopped for lunch along the HafenCity harbor at a perfectly pleasant restaurant, and then Tom and family went to a playground before heading back home. Here's Fiona with her apfelschorle, and Molly with her spritz:
Molly and I continued to the St. Pauli Elbtunnel, which passes underground from one side of the Elbe River to the other. It has car elevators in it so that it can be used for vehicular traffic, but mostly it's a pedestrian and bike tunnel.
From there, we strolled to the St. Nikolai Memorial, which has to be in the running for most metal church in the world. It was mostly destroyed in the Gomorrah firebombing by Allied planes during WWII, but was not re-built as a memorial to the dead. It's a very powerful reminder of the awfulness of war.
Our next stop was Hamburg's City Hall, the Rathaus, which we strolled past on our way to have a drink at ALEX on the shores of the smaller Alster lake. It's a strong testament to Hamburg's affordability that drinks at the absolutely most touristy place in town, on a picture-perfect day, were extremely reasonable: I had a Ehrdinger weissbier pint and Molly had an Aperol spritz, and the bill came to around 10 euros (~$12). Pictured: Molly in her happy place.
Our main goal for Hamburg tourism was to experience a Bavarian-style meal with ridiculous quantities of pork products, huge pints of beer, and tacky taxidermy covering the walls with an oompah band playing in the background. We were able to cover most, if not all, of those bases at Hofbrau Wirsthaus.
Since we arrived at about 5 p.m. on a Monday, the number of fellow revelers was somewhat limited, but we still had a great time.
We had a couple of entrees and a couple of gigantic beers, and the bill was 37 euros (~$45). A good time was had by all, and there was even some sort of Super Mario level in the park next door:
We hoofed it over to the Central Station, where we ran into a protest for Kurdish Independence outside before catching a train to a description of my condition: Bad, Old, and Slow:
Tom picked us up at the train station in Ahrensburg, and we experienced a German supermarket on the way back to the house.
Tuesday, October 17
We spent our last day in Germany hanging out around the house, raking leaves and helping with swingset construction.
We flew back to Copenhagen in the early evening, and crashed at a hotel near the airport before catching our flight out of town Wednesday morning.
A hearty thank you to Tom and Sonja for putting up with houseguests while their house was still full of unpacked boxes, and for being such excellent hosts. We love you both, and your children are a pleasure to spend time with.
I'll leave you with a few random items that didn't seem to fit into the narrative, but I would feel bad if I didn't include:
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