Copenhagen

June 29-travel and Copenhagen.
Overnight air travel is unpleasant.  Particularly rough when you just spent the last week prepping and conducting a ridiculous out of state theme wedding and give yourself 1 day to reset and pack for a six week trip.  Left Home at 4 in the morning but everything went smoothly.   Iceland Air is fine.  Better movies than most, no free wine. You should see "What We Do in the Shadows."  Hilarious.  There was no night.  Sun kissed the horizon and went right back up.  We ate pizza and slammed a Carlsberg in Iceland.  Should have slept.  Should have eaten more.  These are the facts.


June 30- Copenhagen.
Weather: mid-60s and overcast.
Arrived in Copenhagen airport around 6 am local time.  Found to my relief all bikes and gear arrived intact and on time.  There was room and quiet enough to simply crack open the boxes and assemble the bikes now baggage claim.  No one batted an eye.  This is bike heaven, I was to discover.  Loaded up bikes and rode about 8 miles to hostel.  Turns out most streets have bike lanes and it's bike friendly to the degree that that term has almost no meaning.  The city is fundamentally engineered for bikes as much as it is for cars.  50 percent of people here ride to work every day.  It's awesome.  Interestingly, nobody wears a helmet, and nearly every bike is a throwback cruiser type with a basket on the front.  But also lots of hipster electric bikes and those strange ones with the large cargo box in between the handlebars and the front wheel.  Zero fixies.

Checked in at the DanHostel,  which is much cleaner, better-organized, efficient, expensive, and altogether less fun version of most European hostels I have stayed at.  But it will do.  Showed up at 9 and told check-in was "completely impossible" (Scandinavian are terse at times),  but we could store bags... for a fee.  So we ditched the bags, and having not slept for 2 days, gamely made an attempt at Copenhagen.  We saw Tivoli, which is like an amusement park but designed by sophisticated Europeans concerned with good nutrition, elegant architecture, cleanliness, safety, profit, and (exhaling cigrarette smoke and gazing wistfully out the window) ah yes, fun, I suppose.  Had a truly excellent and very expensive pastry and coffee there, and moved on to the National Museum across the street.  This is really great history museum, with elegantly curated and fascinating artifacts from the Stone Age to the Viking Age, though by this time both Jen and I had lapsed into a kind of fugue state which just maybe came from not sleeping for 2 days and eating some crackers and a slice of pizza during that time.   Literally in danger of collapsing, we decided to go back to the hostel and do just that.  We did so,  in fact, and I lost consciousness the second I lay down, which gave Jen a chance to take amusing photos of me and post them on social media #icelandpizzaisnotenoughfood .  Woke up around 10, bought us some $6 cup  of noodles (listen, you try figuring out what to by at a Danish hostel front desk while semi sleepwalking!  Ketchup-flavored digestive biscuits?  Matadox mix?  Handful of Museli? Is that top still spinning?). Passed out again.  All was blackness.  Precious blackness.

Weather: mid-60s and rain.
Woke up after about 10 hours of sleep/ light coma, feeling much better but famished. Among other errors made yesterday was not eating much of anything.   We had purchased the hostel's rather spendy continental breakfast  when we checked in yesterday afternoon, and based on the rest of the offerings of the place, I had my doubts.  But DanHostel, I am big enough to offer my sincere apologies.  The buffet was ample, and the food fantastic, if distinctly European.  (Example: muesli.  Like super bland, un-crunchy granola that becomes instantly soggy in milk.  Me no understand.)  Fresh bread of all sorts, local cheeses, eggs, weird sausages (but since pretty much all sausage is good, no complaints), juices, and so on.  Delighted to discover Denmark was a breakfast- eating country (unlike Spain, for example)Jen and I stuffed our faces and rapidly felt rejuvenated.

Jumping back on the bikes and retracing our rapid and excellent path from the day before, we soon found ourselves back downtown in no time.  We decided to do the walking tour suggested in the travel book, stopping at various historical sites in the charming downtown area including the "Radhus" town hall (which also had an exhibit of an amazing analog clock made by a famous Olsen), the "Christenburg Slot" parliament building , and the ultra-photogenic Nyhaven (that street on the canal with the colorful buildings and antique boats that pretty much defines the city).  None of this was any kind of secret to anybody, but I have to hand it to the Danes, they know how to keep things clean and classy.  We sat down for lunch at an outdoor cafe in Nyhaven,  which again like everything was expensive but high quality.  Best of all was I got a plate of various types of pickled herring and for the first time in my life didn't have people looking at it and going "what IS that?! ". Turns out everybody here agrees slimy fish snacks are delicious, which is of course correct and right and just common sense.  It was also nice because it was pouring rain at that point and they have advanced heated tent technology here.

Anyway, we headed out to see a couple museums after lunch, but of course they are all huge and amazing, so we really only got to see one-the Thorvaldsen Museum- which is all really a massive mausoleum for the famous Danish sculptor of that name.  He was quite keen on Roman sculpture, and spent a good part of his life in Italy chiseling saucy marble godesses and satyrs which mid 19th century robber barons and aristocrats apparently couldn't get enough of.  (Apparently they often also got busts of themselves made while they were at it, as there were also many muttonchopped muckity-mucks glaring out from alcoves at the this museum too.)   Wiseacre remarks aside, a huge creepy  empty Victorian mansion full of massive mable statuary was pretty cool, if nothing else than feeling like you are walking through a Poe short story waiting to happen.   Oh, did I mention the artist is buried in the courtyard, and his self-portrait statue (in which the 5'6" artist is depicted as a muscular 6'2" Adonis) positively glowers at the viewer, menacingly gripping a mallet and chisel.   No way that thing comes to life at night and drinks the blood of first born children or anything.

After this, we went to the train station and hammered out the travel of the next few days, which seems to be pretty organized and affordable.  Don't have any snide remarks about this, and now you are caught up- oh, other than in a cost saving measure we bought dinner at a gas station, and instead of the awful garbage we have in such places, there were lots of healthy and tasty options.