We had a fantastic day exploring Copenhagen on foot! We walked over 10 miles, half in the morning and half after lunch, and although that only gets us a very small chunk of this fabulous city, it was a really good time on a day with lovely sunny weather in the upper 60s, with blue skies and a light breeze.
We started out with our usual breakfast routine, although a bit later than usual, because we all needed to catch up a little on sleep after all the disruptions during the night. Then we began our morning walk by going back to Nyhavn (nice and quiet at 9:30 in the morning!) and, instead of taking a left toward the open harbor like we did yesterday, took a right turn, which leads along a quay across from Christianshavn to the area where the national library and the parliament (folketinge) are. We’ll go back to the library, the famous “Black Diamond” again tomorrow when it is open, but today, we just wandered around in the lovely library garden, a peaceful little space with a fountain and a sculpture of Søren Kierkegaard, around the parliament building on the King’s Island, and then on to the other “islands” that form Christianshavn and the Free State of Christiana. We found ourselves a canal-side cafe where we sat outside for a while with coffee, pancakes and apple cake and watched boats and people, and walked by the church with the interesting “stairway to heaven” tower (we gave it a pass to preserve Peter’s and Mark’s knees) and then explored Christiana. That was a little sad, because even as it started as a collection of squats in the 1970s and a wonderful independent community of artists and people seeking alternative ways to live, over time it has become fossilized, especially since it was recently declared a historic district after the people of Christiana needed some government help to deal with gang activities and hard drugs on “Pusher Street,” which has now been torn up and is getting redone. So now the building cannot be changed because they are historic, and it’s mostly tourists milling around (just like us). There was a large hands-on recycling center that is clearly run by the residents as a way to reuse and repurpose as much material as possible. Also many stands and booths selling things–some of the art looked very commercial–and a major hardware store operation has moved into a big barn (makes sense because so much construction is always going on for upkeep of the squats) and sells pretty but commercially produced wooden toys alongside used and recycled tools and building materials. But it was interesting to walk through the area. We took a series of new pedestrian bridges back to Nyhavn and on to the rental, now all starving, and Andrea and I ventured out for some takeout gyros with fries, which hit the spot for lunch.
We took a break (complete with naps, tiding us over the hottest part of the day) and then ventured back out mid-afternoon for the Botanical Gardens. They were a little disappointing because a lot there is under construction, but the Victorian Era Palm House is beautiful, and we also managed to find the statue of Tycho Brahe, Denmark’s most famous astronomer. Given that he worked before the invention of the telescope, he really was an amazingly productive pioneer of modern astronomy–not to mention having a very colorful life (and a brass nose). The nearby Museum of Natural History also had an enormous chunk of meteorite in its courtyard that was found in Greenland (it’s only part of an even larger chunk, but it weighs 16 metric tons and is iron with a little bit of ). Mark and Peter gave us impromptu science lectures on why meteorites are typically iron, but were not able to move the thing anyway.
Our last stop before we definitely had enough was a lake, Sortedam Lake, that we reached by going through a very pretty cemetery and that seem to be very much a border between touristy Copenhagen and residential Copenhagen–not that we saw a lot of tourists, but one of the royal residences borders the upper lake, and some of the architecture is quite fancy. At the same time, the lovely rows and rows of neatly preserved 19th-century middle-class town houses were also clearly lived in, and–unlike in almost all of Germany and much of the rest of Europe–almost uninterrupted for blocks and blocks, because this city was not bombed in World War II. We had a wonderful time walking through some of those streets and the parks and green spaces that make the entire town seem so livable.
We came home quite tired (again, more than 10 miles total today) but Andrea and I mustered just enough strength to walk around the corner to order some Thai takeout and stop at the grocery store to get some ice cream and some Danish beer for dinner, drinks, and dessert at home. We did not leave again that evening and just hung out at the apartment, windows open and nice cool air coming in, until we decided to go to sleep. It was marginally less noisy this second night (the restaurant either was not open or not open as long on Sunday), but eventually people were talking and smoking in the courtyard again, and none of us slept as well as we should have. But it was also nice to be in such a central location.