Let us clink and drink one down
The final leg of my holiday write-up, in which we leave Oslo on a boat...
It was a longer walk than expected to the ferry terminal, so we arrived a little flustered. Then the auto-check-in machines required a sort of pass that we didn't have, so we had to join a non-moving queue, and it was all slightly panicky for a minute. But eventually we got on our DFDS ferry and started trying to follow signs to find our room. A chunk of one deck was closed for a conference, and the route was convoluted, but we eventually found a door with the right number.
And, um, wow. We had a giant cabin, with a proper kingsize double bed, and a lovely big round porthole facing straight forwards. I am not sure what bizarre confluence of upgrades caused this to happen, but it was marvellous (and contrarily felt far more like a cruise ought to than the actual cruise ship we'd been on previously). Plus we qualified for access to an exclusive lounge, where there was a constant supply of drinks and snacks. So we watched the departure from the deck, then sat in our posh lounge and watched islands slide by the windows enjoying some nice free wine, cheese and biscuits, and cake.
The rest of the ship wasn't really quite so glamorous, and we critically messed up our timing in trying to get a slot in the Italian eatery and ended up eating very late. The portions of spag bol and pizza they served us were all right but truly giant, the people near us were raucous, and the motion of the ship was really very noticable. It wasn't the most relaxed of meals, and we retreated to our lovely cabin. Interestingly, both our phones had detached themselves from regular phone networks and joined the ship's own network (with associated warnings about terrifying data costs). I had no idea ships had their own networks, though I concede it makes total sense.
We woke up reasonably early, to find Sweden and Denmark both visible from the (front-facing) window (and our phones gleefully switching between Swedish and Danish networks). After a pleasant buffet breakfast we docked, declined the shuttlebus, and walked into town.
Saturday 12th
Our hotel in Copenhagen was a bit of a bump after all the lovely experiences we'd had elsewhere. It was another big corporate affair, in this case a designer budget hotel. That is a thing, apparently. Anyway, it boiled down to someone being vaguely horrified that we had even shown up when we weren't due to check in till 3 and when we asked whether they had anywhere we could leave our cases until check-in were sent grudgingly to the coin-operated lockers in the basement. I guess that's the budget bit :) The designer bit appeared to mean brightly coloured chairs and rugs in the foyer, and in our room an en-suite bathroom with glass walls. Frosted glass, admittedly, but not very frosted.
The lockers had instructions in both Danish and English and - very helpfully - included a picture of the ten kroner coin needed. Oddly, even the Danish instructions included the picture, which did make me wonder how many people can read the Danish instructions but have no idea what Danish coinage looks like.
In fact, we didn't get a very good intro to Copenhagen. Walking up from the docks is rarely the best side to see of a city and, after the almost maniacal tidiness of the other three cities, Copenhagen seemed litter-strewn and grubby. I suspect it's more to do with it being much larger than the other three, but what with that and the grey and gloomy weather, it didn't seem nearly so welcoming. One of the many leaflets we'd acquired had a suggested walking route, so we set off.
Almost the first feature on our route was the main square, which is actually not a beautiful square but a giant building site at present. (My Danish is poor, but I think it's something to do with an extension to the underground system). On the plus side, it did seem to have a fish auction going on - some blokes on a trailer, mic'd up, auctioning whole fish to the crowds below. We dodged the enormous number of wedding parties coming and going at the city hall, and made it in to see Jens Olsen's World Clock. And wow, is that quite a thing. It's a clock that tells the time (natch), and the date (meh) in Julian and Gregorian calendars (why!?), plus lunar cycles, solar cycles, star charts, and frankly quite a lot more astrological things that (in Danish) I didn't follow. The exhibition around the clock is disappointingly sparse, but the gears of the clocks are just amazing. There is one cog that turns so slowly that they didn't bother making the entire cog - just a one-fifth pie-slice of it, which will be enough for the next five thousand years or so.
We deviated from the stipulated route - it was clearly wrong, and obviously we wanted to cross the park because there was an entire fairy-tale castle over there. We didn't go in, but even from outside the Rosenborgslott is very pretty. Sadly, we also realised we were bloody freezing, and started questing for a cafe that might serve us a nice hot chocolate. The park café had only windswept outdoor tables, the castle's café looked promising but pleaded a private function when we tried to go in. Everywhere else had some excuse, and we wound up in a cafe almost next to our hotel - which then turned out to be sold out of hot chocolate anyway. Bah.
We checked in, and headed out to catch the 4pm tour of Christiana, the frankly weird hippy-commune-cum-autonomous-region within Copenhagen. Sadly, the guide book was out of date and tours in English go at 3pm, so we had to guide ourselves. It is in some ways exactly what you'd expect from a community run by people who'd elect to live in that sort of community - and anyone who's ever visited Glastonbury Festival's South East corner would recognise the design aesthetic immediately. But it seems to work, and runs itself in what appears (at present) to be a reasonably stable manner. I was disappointed to miss the tour, as I'd hoped to hear the story of Christiania as told by a resident, but sadly my Danish was nowhere near up to the 4pm tour. My Danish, by the way, is basically non-existent except when written bits look slightly like German.
There were little stages dotted around, pumping out loud music, and bars and cafés, and galleries, and shops. Cannabis is illegal in Denmark, but the current authorities turn a blind eye to "Pusher Street" in Christiania. Stalls are shrouded in camo netting, with the transactions taking place through little glass chutes. Even though the dealers can't be seen, the residents pursue a pretty aggressive "no photos" policy. We weren't there to buy, but frankly I'm not sure we needed to - walking through the fog on Pusher Street is probably enough.
We escaped, and elected to climb the tower of Our Saviour. The wooden church spire is most notable for having a beautiful, gilded spiral staircase that winds up the outside of the spire. The climb to the base of the spire is up a much more normal inside-a-church wooden staircase, notable only for its lack of warning signs about low beams (this idiot smacked its head extremely hard on the way up)(so did the Russian-sounding tourist behind, who swore extremely loudly, in English).
If you are bad with heights, you might want to skip this paragraph. Go on. Hop on past it. Up at the base of the tower, the walkway is narrow and people were constantly pushing past one another. The floor also slopes sharply away from the tower, creating an unpleasant sensation of pitching away. The barrier is gilded, but thin and spindly and heavily graffiti'd. Now, I usually have no problem with heights. But in this case a combination of factors set me thinking: I am standing on an unsupported bit of wooden building. The people at the desk downstairs are not checking numbers. There are a lot of people on this balcony. Which doesn't look in great repair. Aargh. I don't like it. However, I am stubborn and I wanted to go up the tower, so eventually after duly looking at the view, we embarked on the staircase. The stairs were disconcertingly shallow, and sloped slightly, and I tripped on at least one. So I ended up staring fixedly at my feet and the handrail, not at the view at all. Although I wasn't going to fall off, breaking a limb would be at the very least extraordinarily inconvenient at the top of a tower. Then suddenly - I guess we must have just got above the height of neighbouring buildings - the wind started. Surprisingly strongly, in fact, enough to make balance quite an issue. And above us was quite a large group of people waiting to reach the top, and a few coming down, which meant I had to let go of the handrail to let them past... At which point I conceded I just wasn't having fun and came down again. (In Our Saviour's defence, by the time we reached the exit it was obvious they were limiting numbers, and I imagine that graffiti doesn't actually damage the bearing capacity of barriers. I'm sure it's perfectly safe :) And it is an incredibly pretty tower.)
Down from the tower, we sat by the canal and wrangled about our route. Eventually, we produced our respective maps and resolved the problem: one of us had a map with a bridge marked, the other didn't. We set off. We found two halves of said bridge which, sadly, didn't meet in the middle and thus rendered it useless. Some friends who visited Denmark two years ago tell me it's been like that since at least then. But, stranded as we were, we found the Copenhagen Street Food Market. This is basically a big hangar filled with a shanty town of tiny restaurants and bars made out of shipping containers and string. We parked ourselves on one of the long benches (by a comfortably toasty log-burning stove) and managed four different stalls to furnish us each with food and a drink. It's not posh dining, but it's a surprisingly fun place.
We retired to the hotel early. On leaving the ferry that morning, ChrisC had suddenly twigged that the minibar was complimentary. I felt it would be churlish to clear it out, but I snuck out a small bottle of fizzy wine which I drank while sitting on the bed in my pyjamas. I'm classy like that, sometimes.
Sunday 13th
Our designer hotel offered us a perfectly respectable breakfast, but no kinds of herring and nothing like the decadent breakfasts we'd been wallowing up to that point. It also offered a few pointers as to why accommodation might have been hard to find in Copenhagen that weekend. All over the place, people in running gear were motoring through eggs... it was, in fact, the Copenhagen half-marathon. ChrisC had spotted a sign the previous day warning about closed roads, but we hadn't realised quite what a major event it was.
The morning was drizzly and forecast to get worse, so we took our chance to go up the Rundtaarn, a round tower built originally as an observatory (for none other than Tycho de Brahe). The observatory part was disappointingly closed (I believe when it's open you can play with the telescope) but the tower itself is nice, and had a few rooms of exhibitions on the way up. Including a most unexpected retrospective of a slightly avant garde Parisian fashion house. Coming out, we found ourselves a little cut off by torrents of runners pouring along the roads. By dint of careful watching and a bit of dashing we managed to cross over (twice) to visit the harbour, and then to Christiansborg, the seat of Danish government.
We arrived at Christiansborg just in time to have an English tour of the government buildings proffered to us, but declined in favour of our original plan of going into the ruins of the medieval palace on which various different palaces (up until the present day - the intervening ones seem to have had a habit of burning down) were built. The ruins were, well, a bit like ruins and although the exhibitions around them were OK I fear we've been forever spoilt for ruins after chance-finding a truly amazing exhibition on our holipoms last year. When we came out the weather was still cacky, and we were hungry, so we flopped into a nice café for lunch. Fortunately we were not in a hurry, because they were having staffing issues and were quite unbelievably slow. However, after three cities at full tilt we were slowing up a bit and were content to sit in the nice warm place and waffle vaguely at each other.
By the time we came out it was merely grey but not drizzly, so we ambled gently past the Amalienborg Palace and up the harbourside, looking at the model ships on display outside the Maersk HQ and eventually the Little Mermaid. Which is surely one of Europe's most overrated works of art - I far preferred the rather weird Monument to Mariners, or the majestic statue of Gefjun driving a chariot pulled by hugely snorty oxen. ChrisC's habit of spotting unusual-shaped pieces of water on maps then sent us to Kastellet, a sort of star-shaped fortress. Despite the cannon and the occasional patrolling chap in fatigues, it's an unusually peaceful place.
I had demanded that, while in Copenhagen, we go to Tivoli Gardens. I'm not a big amusement park person (a history of neck trouble puts you off rollercoasters) but I have always been half in love with the idea of pleasure gardens. And the guidebook said that, despite the state-of-the-art rides, Tivoli maintains its pleasure garden ambience. So we paid our money and trotted in.
Now, I'm not going to claim that Tivoli isn't tacky. But seeing it all lit up in the dusk, it is absolutely beautiful. There is a painted theatre with a mechanical peacock's tail for a curtain (sadly, no performance the day we were there) and over-the-top illuminated pavilions containing restaurants, and a lake, and a pirate ship! And tiny, quiet gardens with little fireflies of light everywhere. We had dinner at a brewery overlooking the lake - sadly, in easy hearing range of the screams from some of the more terrifying rides, but otherwise nice. It was nearing the end of Tivoli's season, and it was fairly quiet - the children's play area was deserted, so we felt quite justified in playing. I had a single go on the donkey races (I do love a donkey race) and won it - I was mostly in it for the honour and glory, but also acquired a pirate-themed hackysack as a result. The evening closes with the "summer illuminations" over the lake and yes, I know it's just lights, fountains and a bit of smoke but it was incredibly pretty. I wonder that Tivoli in blazing sunshine, stuffed with screaming kids, would be quite a different experience but I feel I got what I wanted from it and enjoyed it very much.
Monday 14th
Acting on a suggestion of something ChrisC read somewhere, we headed out after breakfast (a deserted affair after the previous day's Lycra crowd) to Nørrebro. It's an interesting area that kind of reminds me of Cowley Road in Oxford, and we peered in lots of shop windows as we went by. Eventually we walked out to Superkilen, an odd park furnished entirely by things donated from other countries - lampposts, benches, hot dog signs, and litter bins from Blackpool. We didn't really have a plan, and headed through more parks (and more skate parks - Scandinavia really likes its skate parks). We dropped into a very nice cafe to have proper open-faced sandwiches. Mine (pickled herring, of course) came rather alarmingly deconstructed and with a raw egg yolk. And no instructions. Possibly I should have asked, I just made it up.
Afterwards we carried on our slightly formless amble past some artificial lakes, though a bit of the Kastellet we'd missed previously, and onto the harbourside to see an unusual group of modern statues including the "Genetically Modified Little Mermaid". At which point it was time to collect our bags, and take the metro to the airport.
Don't like verbosity? Try the Flickr version
It was a longer walk than expected to the ferry terminal, so we arrived a little flustered. Then the auto-check-in machines required a sort of pass that we didn't have, so we had to join a non-moving queue, and it was all slightly panicky for a minute. But eventually we got on our DFDS ferry and started trying to follow signs to find our room. A chunk of one deck was closed for a conference, and the route was convoluted, but we eventually found a door with the right number.
And, um, wow. We had a giant cabin, with a proper kingsize double bed, and a lovely big round porthole facing straight forwards. I am not sure what bizarre confluence of upgrades caused this to happen, but it was marvellous (and contrarily felt far more like a cruise ought to than the actual cruise ship we'd been on previously). Plus we qualified for access to an exclusive lounge, where there was a constant supply of drinks and snacks. So we watched the departure from the deck, then sat in our posh lounge and watched islands slide by the windows enjoying some nice free wine, cheese and biscuits, and cake.
The rest of the ship wasn't really quite so glamorous, and we critically messed up our timing in trying to get a slot in the Italian eatery and ended up eating very late. The portions of spag bol and pizza they served us were all right but truly giant, the people near us were raucous, and the motion of the ship was really very noticable. It wasn't the most relaxed of meals, and we retreated to our lovely cabin. Interestingly, both our phones had detached themselves from regular phone networks and joined the ship's own network (with associated warnings about terrifying data costs). I had no idea ships had their own networks, though I concede it makes total sense.
We woke up reasonably early, to find Sweden and Denmark both visible from the (front-facing) window (and our phones gleefully switching between Swedish and Danish networks). After a pleasant buffet breakfast we docked, declined the shuttlebus, and walked into town.
Saturday 12th
Our hotel in Copenhagen was a bit of a bump after all the lovely experiences we'd had elsewhere. It was another big corporate affair, in this case a designer budget hotel. That is a thing, apparently. Anyway, it boiled down to someone being vaguely horrified that we had even shown up when we weren't due to check in till 3 and when we asked whether they had anywhere we could leave our cases until check-in were sent grudgingly to the coin-operated lockers in the basement. I guess that's the budget bit :) The designer bit appeared to mean brightly coloured chairs and rugs in the foyer, and in our room an en-suite bathroom with glass walls. Frosted glass, admittedly, but not very frosted.
The lockers had instructions in both Danish and English and - very helpfully - included a picture of the ten kroner coin needed. Oddly, even the Danish instructions included the picture, which did make me wonder how many people can read the Danish instructions but have no idea what Danish coinage looks like.
In fact, we didn't get a very good intro to Copenhagen. Walking up from the docks is rarely the best side to see of a city and, after the almost maniacal tidiness of the other three cities, Copenhagen seemed litter-strewn and grubby. I suspect it's more to do with it being much larger than the other three, but what with that and the grey and gloomy weather, it didn't seem nearly so welcoming. One of the many leaflets we'd acquired had a suggested walking route, so we set off.
Almost the first feature on our route was the main square, which is actually not a beautiful square but a giant building site at present. (My Danish is poor, but I think it's something to do with an extension to the underground system). On the plus side, it did seem to have a fish auction going on - some blokes on a trailer, mic'd up, auctioning whole fish to the crowds below. We dodged the enormous number of wedding parties coming and going at the city hall, and made it in to see Jens Olsen's World Clock. And wow, is that quite a thing. It's a clock that tells the time (natch), and the date (meh) in Julian and Gregorian calendars (why!?), plus lunar cycles, solar cycles, star charts, and frankly quite a lot more astrological things that (in Danish) I didn't follow. The exhibition around the clock is disappointingly sparse, but the gears of the clocks are just amazing. There is one cog that turns so slowly that they didn't bother making the entire cog - just a one-fifth pie-slice of it, which will be enough for the next five thousand years or so.
We deviated from the stipulated route - it was clearly wrong, and obviously we wanted to cross the park because there was an entire fairy-tale castle over there. We didn't go in, but even from outside the Rosenborgslott is very pretty. Sadly, we also realised we were bloody freezing, and started questing for a cafe that might serve us a nice hot chocolate. The park café had only windswept outdoor tables, the castle's café looked promising but pleaded a private function when we tried to go in. Everywhere else had some excuse, and we wound up in a cafe almost next to our hotel - which then turned out to be sold out of hot chocolate anyway. Bah.
We checked in, and headed out to catch the 4pm tour of Christiana, the frankly weird hippy-commune-cum-autonomous-region within Copenhagen. Sadly, the guide book was out of date and tours in English go at 3pm, so we had to guide ourselves. It is in some ways exactly what you'd expect from a community run by people who'd elect to live in that sort of community - and anyone who's ever visited Glastonbury Festival's South East corner would recognise the design aesthetic immediately. But it seems to work, and runs itself in what appears (at present) to be a reasonably stable manner. I was disappointed to miss the tour, as I'd hoped to hear the story of Christiania as told by a resident, but sadly my Danish was nowhere near up to the 4pm tour. My Danish, by the way, is basically non-existent except when written bits look slightly like German.
There were little stages dotted around, pumping out loud music, and bars and cafés, and galleries, and shops. Cannabis is illegal in Denmark, but the current authorities turn a blind eye to "Pusher Street" in Christiania. Stalls are shrouded in camo netting, with the transactions taking place through little glass chutes. Even though the dealers can't be seen, the residents pursue a pretty aggressive "no photos" policy. We weren't there to buy, but frankly I'm not sure we needed to - walking through the fog on Pusher Street is probably enough.
We escaped, and elected to climb the tower of Our Saviour. The wooden church spire is most notable for having a beautiful, gilded spiral staircase that winds up the outside of the spire. The climb to the base of the spire is up a much more normal inside-a-church wooden staircase, notable only for its lack of warning signs about low beams (this idiot smacked its head extremely hard on the way up)(so did the Russian-sounding tourist behind, who swore extremely loudly, in English).
If you are bad with heights, you might want to skip this paragraph. Go on. Hop on past it. Up at the base of the tower, the walkway is narrow and people were constantly pushing past one another. The floor also slopes sharply away from the tower, creating an unpleasant sensation of pitching away. The barrier is gilded, but thin and spindly and heavily graffiti'd. Now, I usually have no problem with heights. But in this case a combination of factors set me thinking: I am standing on an unsupported bit of wooden building. The people at the desk downstairs are not checking numbers. There are a lot of people on this balcony. Which doesn't look in great repair. Aargh. I don't like it. However, I am stubborn and I wanted to go up the tower, so eventually after duly looking at the view, we embarked on the staircase. The stairs were disconcertingly shallow, and sloped slightly, and I tripped on at least one. So I ended up staring fixedly at my feet and the handrail, not at the view at all. Although I wasn't going to fall off, breaking a limb would be at the very least extraordinarily inconvenient at the top of a tower. Then suddenly - I guess we must have just got above the height of neighbouring buildings - the wind started. Surprisingly strongly, in fact, enough to make balance quite an issue. And above us was quite a large group of people waiting to reach the top, and a few coming down, which meant I had to let go of the handrail to let them past... At which point I conceded I just wasn't having fun and came down again. (In Our Saviour's defence, by the time we reached the exit it was obvious they were limiting numbers, and I imagine that graffiti doesn't actually damage the bearing capacity of barriers. I'm sure it's perfectly safe :) And it is an incredibly pretty tower.)
Down from the tower, we sat by the canal and wrangled about our route. Eventually, we produced our respective maps and resolved the problem: one of us had a map with a bridge marked, the other didn't. We set off. We found two halves of said bridge which, sadly, didn't meet in the middle and thus rendered it useless. Some friends who visited Denmark two years ago tell me it's been like that since at least then. But, stranded as we were, we found the Copenhagen Street Food Market. This is basically a big hangar filled with a shanty town of tiny restaurants and bars made out of shipping containers and string. We parked ourselves on one of the long benches (by a comfortably toasty log-burning stove) and managed four different stalls to furnish us each with food and a drink. It's not posh dining, but it's a surprisingly fun place.
We retired to the hotel early. On leaving the ferry that morning, ChrisC had suddenly twigged that the minibar was complimentary. I felt it would be churlish to clear it out, but I snuck out a small bottle of fizzy wine which I drank while sitting on the bed in my pyjamas. I'm classy like that, sometimes.
Sunday 13th
Our designer hotel offered us a perfectly respectable breakfast, but no kinds of herring and nothing like the decadent breakfasts we'd been wallowing up to that point. It also offered a few pointers as to why accommodation might have been hard to find in Copenhagen that weekend. All over the place, people in running gear were motoring through eggs... it was, in fact, the Copenhagen half-marathon. ChrisC had spotted a sign the previous day warning about closed roads, but we hadn't realised quite what a major event it was.
The morning was drizzly and forecast to get worse, so we took our chance to go up the Rundtaarn, a round tower built originally as an observatory (for none other than Tycho de Brahe). The observatory part was disappointingly closed (I believe when it's open you can play with the telescope) but the tower itself is nice, and had a few rooms of exhibitions on the way up. Including a most unexpected retrospective of a slightly avant garde Parisian fashion house. Coming out, we found ourselves a little cut off by torrents of runners pouring along the roads. By dint of careful watching and a bit of dashing we managed to cross over (twice) to visit the harbour, and then to Christiansborg, the seat of Danish government.
We arrived at Christiansborg just in time to have an English tour of the government buildings proffered to us, but declined in favour of our original plan of going into the ruins of the medieval palace on which various different palaces (up until the present day - the intervening ones seem to have had a habit of burning down) were built. The ruins were, well, a bit like ruins and although the exhibitions around them were OK I fear we've been forever spoilt for ruins after chance-finding a truly amazing exhibition on our holipoms last year. When we came out the weather was still cacky, and we were hungry, so we flopped into a nice café for lunch. Fortunately we were not in a hurry, because they were having staffing issues and were quite unbelievably slow. However, after three cities at full tilt we were slowing up a bit and were content to sit in the nice warm place and waffle vaguely at each other.
By the time we came out it was merely grey but not drizzly, so we ambled gently past the Amalienborg Palace and up the harbourside, looking at the model ships on display outside the Maersk HQ and eventually the Little Mermaid. Which is surely one of Europe's most overrated works of art - I far preferred the rather weird Monument to Mariners, or the majestic statue of Gefjun driving a chariot pulled by hugely snorty oxen. ChrisC's habit of spotting unusual-shaped pieces of water on maps then sent us to Kastellet, a sort of star-shaped fortress. Despite the cannon and the occasional patrolling chap in fatigues, it's an unusually peaceful place.
I had demanded that, while in Copenhagen, we go to Tivoli Gardens. I'm not a big amusement park person (a history of neck trouble puts you off rollercoasters) but I have always been half in love with the idea of pleasure gardens. And the guidebook said that, despite the state-of-the-art rides, Tivoli maintains its pleasure garden ambience. So we paid our money and trotted in.
Now, I'm not going to claim that Tivoli isn't tacky. But seeing it all lit up in the dusk, it is absolutely beautiful. There is a painted theatre with a mechanical peacock's tail for a curtain (sadly, no performance the day we were there) and over-the-top illuminated pavilions containing restaurants, and a lake, and a pirate ship! And tiny, quiet gardens with little fireflies of light everywhere. We had dinner at a brewery overlooking the lake - sadly, in easy hearing range of the screams from some of the more terrifying rides, but otherwise nice. It was nearing the end of Tivoli's season, and it was fairly quiet - the children's play area was deserted, so we felt quite justified in playing. I had a single go on the donkey races (I do love a donkey race) and won it - I was mostly in it for the honour and glory, but also acquired a pirate-themed hackysack as a result. The evening closes with the "summer illuminations" over the lake and yes, I know it's just lights, fountains and a bit of smoke but it was incredibly pretty. I wonder that Tivoli in blazing sunshine, stuffed with screaming kids, would be quite a different experience but I feel I got what I wanted from it and enjoyed it very much.
Monday 14th
Acting on a suggestion of something ChrisC read somewhere, we headed out after breakfast (a deserted affair after the previous day's Lycra crowd) to Nørrebro. It's an interesting area that kind of reminds me of Cowley Road in Oxford, and we peered in lots of shop windows as we went by. Eventually we walked out to Superkilen, an odd park furnished entirely by things donated from other countries - lampposts, benches, hot dog signs, and litter bins from Blackpool. We didn't really have a plan, and headed through more parks (and more skate parks - Scandinavia really likes its skate parks). We dropped into a very nice cafe to have proper open-faced sandwiches. Mine (pickled herring, of course) came rather alarmingly deconstructed and with a raw egg yolk. And no instructions. Possibly I should have asked, I just made it up.
Afterwards we carried on our slightly formless amble past some artificial lakes, though a bit of the Kastellet we'd missed previously, and onto the harbourside to see an unusual group of modern statues including the "Genetically Modified Little Mermaid". At which point it was time to collect our bags, and take the metro to the airport.
Don't like verbosity? Try the Flickr version