Last Days in Copenhagen

My last few days in Copenhagen flew by far too quickly. I wish I could have had more time to spend with Svetlana, Nina, a friend from yoga training, visiting a couple more museums, and visiting Christiania and Hamlet's castle.

But there's always next time.

A few things about Copenhagen:

The city itself is built on extraordinarily flat terrain. Because of this, biking to and fro is quite easy and all the environmentally friendly Copenhageners take advantage of this unique layout. Bike lanes are everywhere, and come fully equipped with bike stoplights and pedestrian crosswalks. Not that the bikers pay too much attention to lowly pedestrians. In Madrid, the pedestrian is king. In Italy, the motorist is king. In Ireland, the motorist is king (followed closely by the horse and rider). In Copenhagen, the bicyclist reigns supreme. On my Sandeman walking tour the second or third day of my visit, my Irish guide told me not to be too worried about the vehicles -- they were used to looking out for bikes, so they drove carefully and respectfully. No, he said to keep an eye out for the "kamikaze cyclists."

People do jaywalk in Copenhagen, but reckless pedestrian crossing is quite a bit more rare than in cities like Madrid and Dublin. In Dublin, I'd sometimes wait three or four minutes before the walking man would change from red to green. I think that people in Copenhagen figured out that there would be less illegal crossing if the wait times were more reasonable. I walked back from Nina's to Svetlana's past 12:00 pm on several occasions, and saw people waiting for the green man to show his face even though there wasn't a car in sight.

Anyway.

Portions are very small.

Everyone speaks excellent english. The hypothesis for this phenomenon is that television/films aren't dubbed in Scandinavian countries the way they are in many other European countries.

People are generally very clean and stylishly dressed. As are places. Clean and stylishly dressed.

The Danish alphabet has three extra letters:

Æ

Ø

Å

 All of which are terribly difficult for me to pronounce.

Danish people like to curse in American English. This is probably because they watch so many American films. So when a foreigner is listening to Danish conversation, it can sound like this: danishdanishdanishdanishdanishF*CKdanishdanishdanishdanishGODDAMNITdanishdanishdanishdanishSHITdanishdanishdanish....

I generally pick up the "tak" somewhere in there, but that's what the rest of it sounds like to me. But I have a despicably bad ear for Danish, so a moderately gifted linguist might be lucky enough to discern more.

People drink a lot of coffee. Not as much coffee as in Ireland, but still a lot. Travelling Europe is teaching me what a handicap a caffeine allergy would be to a flourishing social life.

The first part of New Years dinner. Fish is very popular to eat for New Years in Copenhagen. It used to be traditional to eat cod, but people have recently realized that cod is nasty. We had smoked salmon and shrimp instead. It was delicious. 

The Museum of Modern Art. Another art museum I didn't get inside, because even though the website said that it was free on Wednesday, the museum guards seemed to disagree. 

Svetlana took Nina and me out to a sushi dinner Wednesday night. I haven't had much sushi in my life, but this was definitely the best I've ever had. 

I found the botanical gardens when I was on my fruitless museum hunt. It started hailing on me about ten minutes in, so I took refuge under a naked tree with this guy. We had good times. 

The botanical gardens

By the lakes.