Copenhagen Wrap Up! Rosenborg Castle and Grundtvig's Church

 

A steaming hot glass of glogg outside when the temperature's in the 30s -- a fitting image for my time in Copenhagen.  Warm and spicy feelings about my trip!  The glogg, which is correctly written with an umlaut over the o, was my end of the day treat after spending much of the day walking around in the cold.  At a little cafe near Grundvig's church, the server spooned a big helping of spices, raisins, almonds and citrus peel into a glass, then steamed red wine with the espresso machine wand to pour over them.  It was just what I needed to warm up,  aromatic and delicious.  Ahhh.

I started the day going to Rosenborg Castle.  As it's easy to get to (compared to Frederiksborg), there were a lot more people. It was also very very dark inside!  It was hard to see many of the paintings and even where there was lighting, it maybe would highlight a corner of a tapestry, but not the whole thing.  I am sure that a 400 year old castle with many old and fragile treasures deserves to be cared for this way, but it was a little hard to follow the guide on my phone and match what I was seeing to what I was reading about.   Still, there is so much art, furniture, tapestry, weaponry, ceiling paintings, carvings, royal stuff, even seeing a small-ish percentage was a feast.  

This tapestry was so detailed..  and completely in the dark except for this corner, lit by a very yellow bulb

A room for glass plates

The Danish Crown Jewels are kept in a basement space at Rosenborg Castle, very well guarded, and they recheck your ticket when you go into the space. Or in my case, as I fumbled about looking for the ticket I had stuffed in a pocket, you hear the docent say "I know about you.  You are the lady who lost her ticket on the second floor.  They called to tell me you were coming."  I'm that lady???  Yeah, apparently I am.  

The Crown Jewels were spectacular and I loved that they had photos of them being worn by Danish royals, even in modern times, for ceremonial events.  You wouldn't believe someone could wear these things but they do and they look great in them.   The jewels are huge.

I had lunch at Atelier September, a pretty restaurant known for simple but amazing food.  I had an omelet with Comte cheese and bread with butter, like the best versions of those foods.  I didn't try their pastries.

It was a long walk and bus ride to get out to Grundtvig's church, but well worth the trip.   The church was completed in 1940 after an extended effort create a memorial to priest who died in 1872.    The building is cathedral-sized and made entirely of yellow bricks, 6 million of them (just in case you are wondering, the National Building Museum in Washington DC is made of 15 million bricks, another hugely impressive brick building).  Architect Jensen Klint died before the structure was finished, and his son, Kaare Klint and grandson Ebsen Klint, finished the work, designing the altar, organ, chandeliers and pulpit.

The church and nearby buildings, designed to fit in with the architecture of the church 

The unique style of the building combines gothic elements with a minimalist vibe and it's both peaceful and awe-inspiring.  In addition to the very tall brick columns, there are very tall and clear windows, which let in a lot of light to reflect off of the yellow brick interior.  As with many Nordic churches, there's a model ship hanging in the cathedral and this one is the biggest in Denmark.   The ships are sometimes called "votive ships" and serve as an offering to ensure a safe journey by the seafaring community.  The organ pipes include the longest in Scandinavia.

A little side note -- when I got there, the door to the church was closed and a group of people was milling about wondering if the church was open.  Someone tried the door by pulling on the handle and it didn't budge.  People were starting to disperse when I, a two-day veteran of castle tours, tried to open the door by turning the handle.  And it opened.  Everyone came in.  I had been surprised in the castles I'd just toured that there were plenty of unassuming closed doors you just opened yourself and walked through to get from one splendid space to another.   It seemed worth a try here too.  Strange!  

And now it's packing time and I will be taking a taxi to the airport at 4 am tomorrow.  (The hotel assures me that it's perfectly safe at 4 am to walk the two blocks to the central train station and just take the train, but I just can't see myself clunking along the cobblestones and feeling good about that.  So I'm taking a cab.).  A mere 20 or so hours later, I should be in Seattle.  Fingers crossed.

Travel notes -- I totally got my kroner's worth out of my Copenhagen Card.  It cost a tiny fraction of what all the admissions and transportation rides would have cost without it.  I did not change any money into Danish kroner, I just used my "no foreign transaction fee" credit card everywhere I needed to pay for something.  Most places did charge a fee for using a "foreign credit card" but it was relatively small and nothing like the fees you'd pay for using an ATM or a credit card that charged fees on top of that fee.  While I encountered "cash preferred" a fair bit in Portugal, I didn't see that anywhere here.

And my T-mobile service, which worked seamlessly in Portugal, as it's supposed to, did not work here unless I was on WIFI .... until midday today when suddenly the phone was able to access the internet and Google maps.  I do not know what was going on with that and I didn't want to spend any time on it after I checked every setting that I thought could affect it.  As it just decided to work midday today, I can't say I'll ever understand why it didn't work and why that changed.   It was a little inconvenient but I have a decent enough memory and there was a pre-GPS time when you just remembered how to get places after looking at a map and that's what I did.  It was awfully nice, though, when it started working again.

  

Dinner at Jatak & Frederiksborg Castle

 

Blue sky and bright sunshine today!  It was colder, but cheerier for it!  Mondays a lot of attractions are closed, and while I'd asked for "best castle" recommendations from friends, I went to Frederiksborg Castle because it was the only one open today!

It's a stunning, amazing castle built in the 1500s, and it hasn't been a residence since a fire in the 1800s forced major renovations.  In 1878, the restored building was reopened as a Danish history museum and portrait gallery.  Many of the rooms were restored to their most spectacular days, and there are enough rooms to boggle the mind.  

In the ornate rooms with walls and ceilings covered with the carvings and gilt and plaster and fabric of different historical periods, you can get lost in the surfaces.  In the less ornate rooms, the walls are covered in floor to ceiling paintings of Danish royals and nobility and military campaigns.  

This small study done to prepare for a larger painting was absolutely my favorite painting of the hundreds on the walls.  I had no idea if it was used to create a big group portrait with fine/invisible brush strokes, and fully resolved faces and fabrics,  but I loved seeing the study.  (note -- I've now looked up the painter Laurits Tuxen, and yes, there's fully realized versions of the work you can see online.) 

I had downloaded the castle's audio guide before going, so I had my headphones in and the guide's run through of Danish history and the development of different painting/decorating styles you see as you go through the castle.  The building and the moat are so impressive, it was a really lovely way to get into a Danish castle, a goal I'd had for the trip.  It's a bit of a shlep to get there, but I don't know if that deterred anyone else from going -- it was nicely uncrowded today.  

With the help of a few minutes on the castle's wifi, I was able to figure out how to stop on the way back to do a canal boat tour.  I'd done one in Amsterdam and I like getting the perspective from the water in a port city.  This tour was just fine but wow it got cold being on that boat, which was mostly, but not fully, covered.  The audio guide on the boat filled in more of the story of Danish history as Copenhagen grew from its earliest days.

From there, it was a short walk to the Georg Jensen store, which is like Danish Tiffany's (which had a store a few doors down).  I am done buying decorative items, but happy to swoon over them in the store.

Somehow it was suddenly 4 pm and I had missed lunch, so I headed to a nearby pizza restaurant to have great pizza with a sourdough crust.  The pizza place was next to Hart, a bakery opened by Tartine/bread cookbook author Richard Hart.  I'd tried their pasty loved it and I was glad not to do another train/bus/walk to get a warm & tasty dinner.

pastry at Hart - I had the black current fastelavnsbolle

Last night's dinner was at Jatak, a Michelin-starred restaurant opened by Noma alum Jonathan Tam. The restaurant has a set menu that they serve either at the 8-seat counter with kitchen prep happening in front of you, or at the 8 or so tables in the restaurant.  It's tiny and they have as many people working there as there are people eating there.  The price-fixe menu is just served to you and other than asking them to please make the portions a little smaller for me, I was totally game to try each of the 12 courses of the chef's invention.  It was all wonderful and really fun to talk to the chefs who were preparing the food about what they were doing.  

That's Jonathan Tam in the center of the photo

It was super indulgent to eat there and I loved it.  I had to make the reservation a month ago to get a seat and it was worth it.

 

Louisiana Museum & Designmuseum, Marble Church

 

Richard Serra sculpture

I took the train to the Louisiana Museum today -- it's got fabulous sculpture on gorgeous grounds and I was glad to walk around outside as the inside was warm and kind of crowded.  I loved the sculpture installations and the way they were situated with backdrops of lakes, trees and water.  They had many works by sculptors whose work is also exhibited at Glenstone in DC, so I liked seeing more of their works (the Roni Horn glass cylinder here was pink!  at Glenstone, the two they have are black and gray and seem much more earthy than the pink one.  It was shown here inside against a white brick wall, not very photogenic).

They had a collection of drawings and sculptures by Giacometti, juxtaposed with work by Louise Bourgeois.  The curation pointed out that in spite of a mere 10 year age difference, Giacometti's work seems to fall into a different time period than the perceived contemporary work by Bourgeois.  There was a 2-spider sculpture, which was gorgeous and of course evocative of the mother and child relationship that Bourgeois's work explores.

The museum's interior displays had a lot of video installations, which I'm not terribly into.  There wasn't a lot of seating and you are in a darkened space, standing and hot... it was, for me, a good reason to go back outside.  They also have a really nice shop and I am at the point in this trip where I could just donate all my clothes and never see them again and I'd be happy.  I didn't succumb to any of their very fun clothes and home decor or even the things for kids.   It was too early in the day to be stuck carrying a shopping bag, anyway.

On the way back, I detoured to the Designmuseum.  Oddly, although it's a fun and well-curated museum,  the story Danish design is one of commercially successful products and a lot of colorful plastic ... so the familiarity of the designs (you've seen it all, especially if you are old like me and your first furniture came from Scan, a Nordic design store in DC back in 1980) and all the years of knock-offs took some of the luster off for me.    They do have an excellent cafe, where I once again had great-tasting food slathered in mayonnaise.  This was smoky grilled sourdough bread, pickled celeriac and apples and it was really delicious.  A lighter hand on the mayo would have been welcome.

I also made it to the Marble Church, or Frederick's Church, which is a very beautiful, huge, domed building ... not made of marble.  Apparently early plans presumed the use of marble and  the name stuck.  It took over a hundred years to complete (145 actually, much of the time it sat as a ruin, unfinished and it was finally finished in 1899), it's nonetheless a gorgeous and majestic space.  

do not be fooled by that little bit of blue sky -- it was short-lived

I have a fancy dinner tonight, a reservation I made a month ago, so I'll report on that tomorrow.

Legos, Ai Wei Wei, Flora Yukhnovich, Ordrupgaard ... and pastry

 

as much as I could fit into one photo

up close

Chinese dissident artist Ai Wei Wei created an interpretation of Monet's water lilies using over 650,000 small Lego bricks, entitled Water Lilies #1.  The work is on display at Ordrupgaard for just one more day and I was so happy I got there in time to see it.  The artist's patterning of the bricks is an homage to Monet's painting but he also included elements of his life, so it's both gorgeous and expressive -- the inclusion of a black hole in the work recalls his incarceration by the Chinese government in 2011, where he was in solitary darkness for 81 days.

a section closer up

another section closer up

Lego sculptures (and Lego stores) are all over Copenhagen, but this work has amazingly powerful impact.  The museum has a video of the construction, with 10 people working on assembling it according to a very detailed pattern, as well as information about Ai Wei Wei and his life and work.  Just fabulous.

And if that wasn't enough!  It was also the last weekend of an exhibit of paintings by artist Flora Yukhnovich, "Into the Woods."  These paintings are gorgeous, lush, emotional and I found myself tearing up just looking at them and being struck by their power.  Her work combines abstract elements of landscape, figures hidden and revealed in parts and erotic imagery.   All in beautiful color.

I bought the exhibit catalog so I can spend more time with her work.  The exhibit was pretty crowded, so it was hard to see the large scale pieces as a whole.

I had a very elegant pumpkin soup and rhubarb soda in the cafe at Ordrupgaard and then went to see Finn Juhl's house, next to Ordrupgaard, which is preserved with its furniture and art in place from when he lived there.  Very beautiful and you see there the original pieces that have been reproduced for the furniture now sold under his name.

I did all this today using my Copenhagen Card and public transportation.  Mostly easy and I successfully displayed my valid QR code twice on the trains, where they do random spot checks to see if you've paid train or metro fare.

I mentioned yesterday that Copenhagen seems to wake up on the later side.  Ordrupgaard opened at 11 am today, so I had plenty of time this morning to find Juno the Bakery and try their cardamom bun and fastelavns bun (kind of a brioche with marzipan, slivered almonds and cream this morning, but it can have different flavor combinations.  It's a January treat, apparently).  I ate my breakfast in the cold dark at 8 am this morning.  Seattle has a lot of Nordic bakeries, and many cardamom buns, so I have had similar things at home, but I have to say these pastries were really delicious. 

Copenhagen, Nyhaven

I started out my day in Copenhagen by going to Nyhaven, the scenic blocks of colorful houses and ships along a canal.  I decided to walk there and get a sense of the city.   The day here doesn't leap into action -- first of all, the sunrise was at 8:25 am (and sunset will be at 4:13 pm) and many attractions and businesses open at 10 or even 11 am.

It was good I had morning planning time, as T-mobile and I are not in agreement on what cell service means right now.  They say I have cellular data, but in actual fact, I have a fully operational smart phone on WIFI or I have a camera.  When I'm out, Google maps will show me where I am, but will not provide directions.   Fortunately, I was reading up and planning my walking route before heading out so I managed to find my way from memory (there is a lot of English spoken here but not a lot of directional signs with a translation).  I did take a midday WIFI stop to load up some maps I wanted to have just in case.

The walk to Nyhaven went through mostly pedestrian streets with the shops going from souvenir/fast fashion to designer/high end as I walked along.  Just a few short blocks from mugs with names on them to Swatch to Rolex!  At the higher end of the shops, and closer to Nyhaven, there were a few shops I had on my stop-in list -- the Finn Juhl furniture store (which features "one collection") of fabulously gorgeous furniture and a Birkenstock store (The George Jensen store was on the list too but I didn't stop in .. today).  The Birkenstock store was on my list because I always need more comfortable shoes and even though the shoes I bought from their new collection are made in Portugal, they were few and far between in the Algarve.  What I guess struck me as so great was that there were stores and they were fully stocked with things!  I know I'm not alone in how I am frustrated by how brick-and-mortar stores have little inventory and are struggling to compete with online shopping.  I was very happy to be able to try on shoes in different sizes & styles to get the right ones without having to go through the shipping-returning-shipping I have to do at home in Seattle.  

the Finn Juhl dining room of my dreams

Nyhaven was beautiful!  The bright colors were very welcome in this gray city and the ships are cool and there weren't all that many people around at 10:30 am.   The street is lined 100% with restaurants and so picture taking goes on across the canal where everyone who was there (including me) took a selfie.

I walked from there to the Round Tower, which is attached to an old and pretty church where an organist was either playing atonal music (painful!)  or warming up.    The climb up the Round Tower was enticing, but the rooms off the tower were closed for renovations and it was not a great day for a view from the top.  So I continued on my way to the Torvenhallerme -- a food hall with glass buildings and open space filled with butchers and cheese shops and prepared foods and flowers.  After looking at all the options, I decided to go to Fisk, where I saw several people having what looked like great cod cakes.

I got a cod cake with dill & spinach and potato salad.  The fish was great, just what I wanted.  The potato salad was 60% potato and 40% mayonnaise.  I think between the lunch I had 2 weeks ago in Silves and this lunch, I have been served the equivalent of a jar of mayonnaise.  Strange.  Not that it's not tasty, it's just unexpected and I was, in this case, unsure if it would be worse to try to scrape away some mayo or just leave a lot of the potato salad uneaten ... so I did both. I don't think the guys at Fisk paid any attention to it anyway. 

There was a metro right next to the food hall, but I decided to take the long walk to a further out metro which I then hopped on to head back to the hotel.  

I have only used the Copenhagen card I bought for the metro so far, but tomorrow I'm planning to go to the Louisiana Museum and to Ordrupgard, which will involve train and museum admissions included with the card.  There are a lot of things closed on Mondays, so I will also probably try a canal boat tour that day with the card.

Loving it here in Copenhagen!  It's interesting to me that I was in Amsterdam 2 years ago around the same time and so I had to look up the relative sizes of the cities.  Amsterdam is nearly twice the geographic size of Copenhagen.  With a not dissimilar population size, Copenhagen is more densely populated.  Amsterdam airport has far more flight options than Copenhagen.  Whether any of that is relevant to my feeling today that Copenhagen was less busy and buzzy than Amsterdam, who knows!?

 

Copenhagen

 I’ve arrived!  The sun was just coming up when I left for the Faro airport and it was dark when I got to Copenhagen.

Worth sharing - Guerin car rental return was easy.  Faro airport departure on TAP on time, not at all busy.  Transfer in Lisbon, for which I had 45 minutes connection time, was a breeze & my luggage made the transfer too.  Arrival in Copenhagen, taking the train to the central station and walking the short distance to the hotel was super easy.  Many things I thought would be hard or stressful just weren’t.  So - fingers crossed I haven’t jinxed the next 5 days! 

Lagos, St. Anthony and Pizza

The Igreja de Santo Antonio is a mind-boggling, gorgeous, gilded & tiled church.  It's part of the Museu de Lagos.   St. Anthony, born in Lisbon,  is best known for his patronage of seekers of lost articles.  The church, which was built in the 1700s and rebuilt after the 1755 earthquake, has paintings of the miraculous works that led to his canonization in 1232.

The museum, which was reopened after renovations in 2021, contains a collection of religious relics and various historical objects of the region; it also has a Cabinet of Curiosities, with some very exotic and weird items!    (The reglious items include painted tiles which quote Jesus as saying "I am ready for your whip."  More on that in a moment.) The museum was named for donor Dr Joseph Formosinho, who donated some, but not all of the objects within.  All of which is great, but the church, which you can only see by going through the museum, is just spectacular.

While it ended up being the highlight of the trip into Lagos, it wasn't the reason I wanted to go.  Lagos has a museum about the Portuguese role in enslaving Africans and transporting enslaved people to their colonies.  Since that is the ugly underside of the legacy of Henry the Navigator, whose single-minded pursuit of exploration resulted in Portugal leading the world for a time in trade, I was interested in learning more about it.

The Mercado de Escravos is on a site that is believed, in the 1400s, to be the first Western world market for the trade of enslaved Africans.   The curators have put together an exhibit of documents, objects, photos and artifacts that tell the story of how this history came about.  The museum is part of the UNESCO Slave Route program, which is aimed at making sure this story is told.  Yet...  to me it seems oddly truncated, as if this was a discreet moment in history and not something that informs Portuguese culture today.   And it doesn't address the contradiction between a religious culture and the enslavement of people (Portugal is not unique in this regard -- it's all very painful to contemplate).  That said, the establishment of the museum some 8 years ago was an important step in shedding light.

Lagos was very uncrowded (I hear it's very full of tourists, as the whole country is, in summer months) and the old town area was completely charming.   The streets are all tiled and many are closed to cars and full of cafes and shops.  I had a very nice walk around town.   It was easy enough to put a Lagos parking garage as my destination for the drive in, and the whole day made me feel very silly thinking it was going to be somehow hard.  

I headed to Sagres in the afternoon to try the pizza at Arte Bianca, #33 on the Time Out Best Pizzas in Europe list.  The pizza had sourdough crust, a cracker-thin bottom (they also have a more focaccia-like option) and was topped with anchovies and burrata made from the milk of cows nearby in Aljezur.  It was excellent!!  I would have liked to try more of their pizzas.  Now I have to try the 49 other pizzas to really know what to make of this list!  Two others on the list are in Copenhagen, so I may just knock that number down to 47 if I get to those pizzerias in the next week.

Museum of Sea and Land Carrapateira

There is an actual museum inside a building in Carrapateira, but even more amazing is the outdoor "museum" that's been created along the coast. Large, rusty metal letters mark each stop from A to J and there's online interpretation (at pontaldacarrapateira.com) of what you are seeing at each stop, where you can walk out on a boardwalk (and if you dare, out onto the cliffs) and learn about the history of the area.

I'm staying at a guest house a short distance from Bordiera beach, in a very quiet (I think that's because it's winter) spot.  It's lovely here.

Bordiera beach, 3 km of sand, huge sand dunes and huge waves

I spent close to 3 hours walking along the cliffs and learning about shipwrecks, fishing, geology and fossils, plant life, an ancient Islamic fishing village ruin, and surfing.  Not long ago, I'd read Barbarian Days by William Finnegan, a Pulitzer-prize winning book about his love of surfing, and honestly, most of the people I saw today were congregated at sites where the camper van could be parked and guys were heading into the surf carrying their surfboards.   I loved seeing that too.  I watched a lot of surfers attempt to ride the huge waves at Bordiera and Amado beaches and not many stayed up for long.  

there's a surfer there, just about to fall back into the water

It was truly spectacularly beautiful.  Also windy.  Spectacularly windy, so no painting on the cliffs (yet).

I had lunch in the center of town and then went into the actual museum, which had limited English interpretation, but a lot of fabulous photos and objects on display.

houses next to the museum

Tomorrow is my last full day in Portugal! I'm going to enjoy the next couple of sunsets, and I have only one item on my agenda tomorrow, a pizza place in Sagres that Time Out ranked #33 on its list of the "best pizza in Europe."  

Monchique

 I left Carvoiero today and am happy to report I have arrived in Carrapateira for my new spot for the next couple of days.  It was a day with clear skies forever, so it was a perfect time to go up a mountain for a view.  

That bright light is the sun's reflection on the Atlantic Ocean, as you can see a great length of the Algarve from Monchique

Monchique has been recommended to me more than once, but this was the first time that my desire to go actually fell on a day when the sky was clear.  The town is up at one of the highest elevations in the Algarve, and is an old and artsy town.  The ceramic Studio Bongard is there -- and I was familiar with a bit of their work as restaurant Bon Bon uses some of their scuptures as plates.  The studio wasn't open today, but the town center has a "lake" with several spectacular ceramic fish, sea creatures and seascapes done by the studio.  

fish in the "lake"

a tiny bite of cod on a plate from studio Bongard at restaurant Bon Bon

There are a lot of knitter, weavers and ceramic artists with shops selling their handmade items in Monchique.  A sculpture project has placed figures at many points in town, by that lake, by the viewpoints and town center and then just here and there.  It's fun to see them all.  There's also a historic ruin of a convent over the town, but it's apparently best experienced from afar, as it's hard to get to and isn't really "open" for tourists.  I ended up sitting at an outdoor cafe where I  read and painted for a very long time today!  And then I had lunch at Grumpy Mama's, a very pretty vegan restaurant with a fine carrot & orange soup.

Google maps took me from the mountain top along some very twisty, narrow, alarming cliff-edge roads so I could make my way to the Western coast of Portugal.  I think I traversed every level of every terraced hillside on my way down!  The view was spectacular in all directions.

I'm exhausted from the drive -- you will get to see/hear about Carrapateira and surfing and Western coast cliffs... tomorrow.

Bon Bon restaurant

 

For my last afternoon on my patio, the weather could not have been more spectacular.  Warm, brilliant sun, and I will miss being here as I head West to Carrapateira tomorrow for a last few days in Portugal.

I had lunch today that I've been dreaming about for 3 years.  I went to Bon Bon in 2022 and I think it was the best meal I'd ever had.  Until today.  Now I have eaten there again and it's just amazing.  It's a Michelin-starred restaurant and it's very much a special occasion kind of meal (the special occasion for me was eating out -- this is only the 2nd fine dining meal I've had on this trip).  At the end of lunch, I had a very nice conversation with the fabulous chef, Jose Lopes, about the beautiful and delicious food. 

Here's the thing -- I used to have a lot of things I'd say I didn't eat or didn't like.  Five years ago, I decided I was not going to be a person who refused to try new things.  I didn't want to reject things that I was sure (from when I was a little kid?) I didn't like.  It's been a great adventure since then to try almost everything (including -- ahem! -- pig's ear, which I was challenged to eat after sharing my new resolve with someone who immediately wanted to put it to the test.  One bite was enough, thanks!) and to try things prepared in ways I used to reject outright.

Anyway, when I was talking to the chef, I shared that I put my trust 100% in him.  His inventive preparations were full of flavor, texture and some mystery.  There wasn't anything I had today that I wouldn't eat again in a heartbeat, as long as it was at Bon Bon.  I won't put you through the whole meal (although I did take pictures of everything) but I took a full 2 1/2 hours to savor, slowly, all of the different bites and courses.  Here's two dishes! 

Amberjack, with its skin, which the chef had crisped separately, served with shrimp and a corn and vegetable sauce.

This jewel box filled with shells was the "plate" for a bite of the chef's version of bacalhau a bras, which in this case was thinly sliced potatoes encasing a salt cod and potato puree.  It was a small, 2-bite portion.

The restaurant website is bonbon.pt and should you find yourself in the Algarve, I recommend it!