Denmark 2015, Heathrow to Copenhagen to Middelfart

Saturday, Heathrow  to Copenhagen

Waiting at Gate A6 for our departure for Copenhagen. I go to the water fountain to fill my bottle. I fill it once, drain it, and step back up to the fountain to fill it again. A young Indian-looking man, bespectacled - walks up to the lower fountain, the child sized one next to me. 

"Excuse me sir, how do you work this?"

 I show him the button in the front, which produces a trickle of water, and he thanks me as he uses his hand to lap the water into his mouth. I finish refilling my bottle and replace the lid. The young man, also finished, turns to me.

"You are from the U.K.?"

"U.S." 

He smiles. "You  know Golden State Warriors?"

"Um, no," I respond. I don't really follow basketball and I'm not following him. But he smiles and persists. 

"You know Boston Red Sox?"

"Sure," I smile.

"Baseball," he nods enthusiastically. "You know New York Yankees? Also baseball." I nod some more, smile some more. He does too.

"Wayne Gretzky," he persists," Canadian hockey player."

"The best," I respond.

"I love the hockey," he enthuses.

"You're a big sports fan, huh?" I ask.

"Yes. Thank you sir." And with that, having apparently exhausted potential conversation, he walks back to his seat.

Heathrow is otherwise uneventful. We get sandwiches and caffeine. I've never appreciated a cup of tea as much as I do the one I get from Starbucks after three hours of fitful, up-right near-sleep. Griffin is listening to music on his ipad headphones; Berit is playing Jetpack Johnny or some such game; Rowan is drawing in her journal; and Pam is playing Words With Friends.

Eventually, we will land at the Copenhagen airport. The train will take us to the Christianshavn station, 12 minutes away, from which we will walk 10 minutes to our AirBNB apartment at Bodenhoffs Plads 8. There we will find the key hidden in the Christiana bicycle (it's a riddle) and we will enter our abode for the next two days.

This goes down exactly as described except it takes us a while to realize that the Christiana bikes are the ones with the big box cart in front, this one outfitted with a seat for children. We find the key box inside of that and, upon entering the code, we retrieve the key and are in our apartment.

And it's fantastic and spaceous, a vast expanse of wood floor underscoring its sparse, Scandanavian design sensibilities.

And we're out. We head around the corner to Christiana, a hippie haven since early 1970 squatters took the land there. In addition to the head shops, hemp wear, and hash heads, we encounter a couple of middle-aged men just hanging out near their abodes, and by hanging out I mean totally naked. This is, of course, great amusement to the five of us, but we decide to head for parts of Copenhagen that, while still free spirited, are perhaps not so single minded in their free spirits.

We're tired and hungry after our travels and trying to find food upon which we can all agree at a price that we can afford in a locale we don't know proves a challenge. Eventually, we land in a Schwarma shop on "the walking street," which we later come to know as the Stroget. The kids have been troopers through all the post-flight walking. After dinner we grab some ice creams, and we head home. It's midnight when I finally go to sleep.

Sunday, Copenhagen All Day

"Danish words don't even look like anything. They look like a child bashed their skull against the keyboard and these are the letters that came up." - Berit

Pam awoke us all at 7:30 this morning claiming that we needed to get up to get on our new schedule, but the truth is that Pam requires coffee immediately upon awakening, and she wasn't venturing into Copenhagen without us.

Rowan uses FourSquare to find the open coffee shops nearest us, and we head out for Kaffebaren, a 20 minute walk. Once there, barista Stefan fills us full of lattes. Everyone but me that is, since I'm appalled at the price we're paying. It was short-sighted. I was eventually going to need coffee (the Danes aren't much for tea). We congregated with our beverages in the downstairs seating to plan our next attack... food.

Overhearing a woman speaking about street food nearby, I asked Stefan, and he gave us directions. We quickly arrived at what was a great big flea market allon the canal, one that I would have greatly enjoyed had I not been starving and caffeine deprived.

On the other side of the flea market was where the Rebel Street Food trucks gathered where there was something for everyone. Rowan and Berit each got a variation on grilled cheese with ham. Griffin got a large sausage dog, and Pam and I devoured Leif and Anna's rye bread sandwiches. Pam's was a vegetarian version, while mine had pork with beets and Dijonaise. The bread, which the couple bakes themselves, is a hearty rye that is simply amazing. If there's one thing the Danes do right, beside smalll, plastic, primary-colored toys, it's rye bread.

From the street food, we headed back up to Hans Christian Anderson Avenue, crossing over the water and walking into the central part of town with the Tivoli and the Ny Carlsburg Glyptotek Museum on our left. The museum had a Man Ray exhibit, and though Sunday was free day, we didn't end up getting there for it.

We turned right instead, down the Stroget and the Straedet, the touristic shopping streets that Pam and Berit throught they wanted to visit. I shall refer to this period as the dark times, times that later prompted Berit to tell us that we were going to have to figure out how not to argue so much the next day ("You guys are going to have to get your shizz together."). 

Things got better when we found our way out of the shopping district to Nyhavn, those colorful rows of canal houses that grace all the Copenhagen guidebooks and postcards. We disagreed on our next move and decided to split up. Pam and the girls headed for Norrebro, an edgier cafe and shop-ridden part of town, while Griffin and I stayed at the harbor, where we saw a couple of people paddling a two-person kayak in the canal.

We asked for and got sketchy directions to the kayak rental place that kept us walking around a bit. And then we did a bit more walking, once we decided we needed to eat something before paddling around for an hour.

Griffin spoke to me of how we would recall this moment. "Remember when we went kayaking the canals of Copenhagen together? And then afterwards you gave me 1000 kroner? That was epic."

Toke (to-kah) showed us the route, out into the main canal and then through some channels that took us through beautiful cobblesone streets, colorful houses and plentiful boats. Griffin persisted in devising new challenges for us 

"Let's park between the boats!"

"Let's pull over so I can climb up this ladder!"

"Let's get in behind the tourist ferry and row like crazy to stay inside its wake!"

I tired of the games and Griffin's relentless energy, but Griffin was an energetic and hilarious rowing partner the whole time. 

After kayaking we got crepes (Nutella and banana) at our neighborhood crepe stand, happening upon Pam and Rowan there. The kids went back to the apartment, and Pam and I wandered through Christiana, looking for a salad for her, before calling it a night.

Monday, Copenhagen before heading out for Middelfart and Borkop

We awoke later this morning, packed and booked it for Norrebro, out destination the Coffee Collective cafe, a great little coffee bar situated in a glass covered food court not unlike Haymarket Square in Boston. We all also got food and enjoyed our lunch before heading back to Bodenhoffs Plads to get our luggage before our 1 pm checkout.

Back in Norrebro, I took the family on an unfortunately long walk to the Staten Museum for Kunst, before we gave up, ate the snegls we'd purchased earlier, and rerouted to the Kobenhavn Botanisk Have (gardens). This was the park that Rowan, Pam and Berit had discovered the previous day, complete with a palatial greenhouse. Martha and Mom and Dad would be smitten with this place.

Sometime after 3 pm, we started to make our way towards the location of our bus departure. We're not exactly speedy when we're dragging our rolling luggage around Copenhagen's cobblestone streets, and it took us a while - first to get to Central Station (which Pam likes to call "Grand Central Station") and then to find the D.G.I. Byens bus station. 

The bus is a very comfortable cross-country affair.. We've been on it for two hours now, during which time I've eaten the salami and cheese sandwiches that Pam made for me, drank a half cup of the complementary coffee ("Please only get a half cup as people have been known to burn their fingers and spill coffee down the fronts of their shirts.") and typed up this historical account of our travels on a small keyboard bluetoothed to my phone.

Pam and the kids are in the rows in front of me. They've been enjoying the free wifi and playing various games, though now it appears that Rowan and Pam are both napping. It's 7:12 pm, and I think we'll be in Middelfart by 7:30, where we will get the car from Karsten's Dad, Gunner, and drive home, to Borkop.

It's been pretty cool hee, 50s and 60s with a little rain. We hope the Danes are enjoying their stay in our house. I think it's been in the 90s in Colorado.