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!?