Today, we had to say goodbye to Copenhagen and return to Hamburg. Copenhagen tried to make this a little easier because we started out with gray skies and later had some serious downpours (but we were nice and snug while this happened).
We started our day by obtaining some coffee and pastries for breakfast (the rental did not have a normal coffeemaker and expected us to get Nestle coffee pads through them, but we were stubborn about this particular kind of tourist exploitation and instead opted for outrageously priced bakery coffee and the best and freshest pastries we have had in Denmark). After breakfast, we finished packing and made ourselves sandwiches for the road, using up all of our remaining supplies. We also tidied up the apartment more than would have been expected so that we could capture the impressive and “cool” aspect of this rental (even though it required stowing a huge pile of luggage and ourselves behind the kitchen island). But we can’t really recommend it–it was a very expensive rental, given how noisy it was, that there was no internet, that we had to risk life and limb to climb the stairs and open the windows (see below) and that the bathroom door stuck so that we could not close it fully without risk of one of us getting locked in!
But that didn’t keep us from enjoying the heck out of Copenhagen, and continuing to do so after we left the rental, as we said goodbye to Nyhavn (including gawking at a store with BEAUTIFUL mid-century vintage “Danish design” furniture and discovering little nooks and crannies that were way older than the rest of the shopping district with its Chanel and Leica and Louis Voitton stores). Then we walked our four little suitcases and four little backpacks the mile back to the Black Diamond, this time to explore the inside. We parked ourselves in the library café area and sat for a while as it was starting to rain and later pour, and took turns looking at this incredible library, both the gorgeous modern part (25 years old this year) and the beautiful older reading room with its card catalog and its old-library vibes. Predictably, Andrea and Peter were as wowed by the old AND the new portion (and how they meshed) as we were in 2014 when Kai insisted we go check it out. Peter in particular was ready to move in!
We whiled away a several hours waiting for the rain to lighten up and then left for the train station (another mile with suitcases–thank goodness for the flat concrete “rails” between cobblestones for the wheelchair-bound and the visually impaired that are ubiquitous on Copenhagen’s sidewalks). We found ourselves a table and had sandwiches in the main hall, which turned out to be a gorgeous piece of architecture from 1911 that revealed many beautiful features once Andrea and I took the time to explore it, with an enormous wooden (not cast-iron!) roof, stained glass insets in the windows, and beautiful brick and stone archways.
Our train came in with a bit of delay at about 3:30 pm, and added more as we made our way through Denmark and the very northern part of Germany, so we did not get into Hamburg until after 9 pm, 90 minutes later than expected. (This means that Peter will get some money back on our already cheap train tickets–even as we did not get to use our €49 ticket for this trip, we still traveled for $50 a person, with reserved seats on a–normally faster–ICE train). But we had good connections home from the station even this late, and we were very glad to be home and glad to have missed some very hot days in Hamburg while we were on the island. We even managed the stuffy, toasty apartment (no AC in private homes in Germany) to cool down quickly by opening up all the windows everywhere, and Andrea’s herbs survived in the tubs of water she put them in 9 days ago. What a great Danish vacation it was!