Travel
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Copenhagen, 2019

It’s been a while since I wrote on this blog. I’m currently writing more often for Plants and Pipettes, a blog about molecular plant biology that my dear friend Joram and I began at the start of the year.

Plus I needed to slow down things on the ‘life’ blog side of things for a bit. And with the slowing, came things that were missed, which caused a jam in my desire/ability to write. But here we are.

Copenhagen, 2019. A weekend away.

Two weekends ago, to be precise. See? I am very current!

We decided to head out to Copenhagen for a weekend away. After the semi-disaster of Christmas (cancelled flight, sleepless grumpiness) and the extra disaster of this Easter (we bought flights to Iceland less than a week before Wow! airlines went bankrupt and stole all our monies), we were pretty shocked when everything ran smoothly.

We flew out of Berlin on Friday at 8 pm, arrived in Copenhagen before 11, and woke up the next morning to the most perfect spring day that has ever existed. 

Look.

At.

Those.

Blues!

Saturday was all about walking, eating (duh!) and seeing the things.

I first set us out on a course that involved a highly reputable bakery sort-of-close to our hotel. Yes, in the opposite direction to everything else we planned to see that day, but what is walking if not a way to grow an appetite.

I was a bit disappointed when we got there, to see a distinctive lack of actual Danish Danishes. So instead we went with the blueberry museli creature (good!) and, E., always a sucker for ‘Pie de Limon’ hit an extremely tasty lemon meringue.

Of course, the second we ordered our foods, they brought out a new batch of sweet croissants and the like… but I think we managed ok.

Sufficiently filled (for the moment), we headed down Vesterbrogade, the main shopping street of the central district. 

.. passing some cool creatures on the way.

To be honest, I tried to get a nose-to-nose picture of these two guys.. but it just looked like Enrique was being a weirdo who likes to smell stone.

Go Home Little Pony. You Drunk.

At one point we made a pit stop for ‘Women Reasons’, which also happened to involved buying dolphins. Sometimes women just need themselves a dolphin.

This one is called a Skumdelfin! I’m assuming that Skum stands foam (schaum is foam in German and it was a horribly fluffy). But also, SKUM!

   

At a certain point, we had walked ourselves to the place where there was no more Vesterbrogade to walk down.

So we stopped, and had a bit of a squiz at the City Hall.  

… and its pigeons.

The city hall is situated on H.C. Andersens Blvd (with the H.C. I guess being necessary because of the number of Andersens in the country?), so we stopped to pay our respects to the gentleman himself.  

I can acknowledge that I did not quite get the look right. But there was a lot of sun.

Inside the hall is Jens Olsen’s World Clock, which I had specifically steered us towards because E loves a good clock.

Of course, he also has terrible luck with clocks, and this one, like the famous Astrological clock in Prague when he visited, was not active. 

But at least it managed to be fairly pretty while being still…

.. as did E.

The kid looks good with clocks.

 

The inner part of the hall had some sort of art exhibition that I guess was based on high school students’ works.

In any case, we were mostly there to use the facilities. But we managed to pose with some flags and pose with some flags before getting kicked out for closing time. 

Onwards into the blue!

Or at least, onwards, via a coffee-shop-that-was-next-door-to-a-famous-bakery-that-was-sadly-closed.  

We hit up Torvehallerne, a food and plants market, but quickly realised that the majority of wares were not of the ready-to-eat kind.

So instead, after a quick burger, and… ok.. another coffee… 

.. we headed to Nyhaven, the beautiful and iconic colourful harbour (which also happens to have several of H.C. Andersen’s old houses).        

(I guess the second is more realistic).

And then it was time for more walking. This time along the bay, and towards the little mermaid!

^Queen Mary, who is supposed to represent many bodies, nations and narratives.

And finally, the mermaid:

Fairly easy to find, because there were visitors swarming around her. We tried to use our giant heads to block her out:

By the time we reached the mermaid we’d already walked over 25k steps, and our feet were pretty ready to fall off, but we had one more stop…

The genetically modified mermaid:

Who basically just looks messed up. Which… bleh!

‘Messed up’ is a terrible way to represent genetic modification to the public, because it’s super propaganda-y (genetic modification is BAAAD). And also both ignorant (GM is used as a scientific tool to understand the world), and privileged (it’s easy to be anti GM when you and your loved ones have plenty of food and plenty of nutrients in those foods).

But anyway.

The plus side is that the GM mermaid is not famous at all, meaning that we didn’t have to compete for her attention:

   

Ok Folks. That’s all for day 1. Afterwards we just went home and ate hotel-picnic (we were too tired to go back out).

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