SCANDINAVIAN TRIP-SEPT. 1-21, 2004
THURSDAY, SEPT. 2, LONDON TO STANSTEAD/GREAT DUMNOW
FRIDAY, SEPT. 3- STANSTEAD TO OSLO
SUNDAY SEPT.5, 2004-OSLO TO BERGEN
TUESDAY, SEPT.7, 2004- BERGEN TO AURLAND
WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 8, 2004-AURLAND TO OSLO
THURSDAY, SEPT. 9, 2004- OSLO TO GOTEBURG
FRIDAY, SEPT. 10, 2004- GOTEBURG TO STOCKHOLM ...
SATURDAY, SEPT. 11, 2004- STOCKHOLM
SUNDAY, SEPT. 12, 2004- STOCKHOLM TO KALMAR
MONDAY, SEPT. 13, 2004- KALMAR TO COPENHAGEN
TUESDAY, SEPT. 14, 2004- COPENHAGEN
WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 15, 2004- COPENHAGEN, ODENSE, ROSKILDE
THURSDAY, SEPT. 16, 2004- COPENHAGEN
FRIDAY, SEPT. 17, 2004-COPENHAGEN, HUMLEBAEK, HELSINGOR, HILLEROD
SATURDAY, SEPT. 18, 2004-COPENHAGEN TO STANSTEAD ..
SUNDAY, SEPT. 19, 2004-STANSTEAD TO LONDON
MONDAY, SEPT. 20, 2004- LONDON
TUESDAY, SEPT. 21, 2004-LONDON TO HOME
We spent the night before our flight at the Days Inn in Saugus , MA , where, for about $30 over the room price, we could leave our car for the whole trip. We took it easy, went to bed early and got up at 5:30 for their bus to the airport.
The flight went very smoothly. I watched Jessie which was an unhappy ending movie about a maid in England in the past century who befriended the mute young son of her employers. Also watched The Stepford Wives II which was very funny. We had to wait fifteen minutes to get to the gate, then took the Heathrow Express into Paddington Station in London- which was conveniently where our hotel was located. An American girl who'd only been in London for two weeks told us how to get to our hotel, The Royal Norfolk. In one of the pubs next to the hotel an entertainer was belly dancing for the patrons. We checked in then went up in a tiny elevator and through a maze of passages to get to our room. The hotel was one of those that consisted of a number of large houses put together. Our bathroom was a step above the rest of the room. We watched a BBC program on the Kennedy assassination and read, then went to sleep.
We had our breakfast in the hotel, then stashed our luggage in their storage room and were off by 9:30 into a nice sunny day. We bought day passes for the ‘Tube' then took it to the Tower stop. Took the Tower Bridge across the Thames , then walked down the other side some and back across by the Southwark Bridge . I went down to the river's edge and got some pieces of flint and a piece of glass. Then we walked over the Millennium Bridge and back by Blackfriars Bridge . We found the Bell , Book, and Candle Pub after going down some small streets toward where we thought it was. We both had the traditional fish and chips, Dick had a Guinness and I had a lager and lime.
We walked back to Trafalgar Square and went to the National Gallery. We started in the Impressionist Room and walked back in time a bit. They had a special exhibit on faces done by lots of artists from Picasso to Warhol which was interesting. We took the tube back to the hotel where the desk attendant told us we could save money by catching a bus for Stanstead Airport at the Marble Arch Tube stop, so we took the underground there. We got the bus quickly and bought a round trip ticket, but traffic was heavy and it made lots of stops, so it wasn't a quick trip.
We called the Bushel and Sack from the airport and they were there almost as soon as we got to the furthest short term parking lot because another couple had called them earlier. The driver dropped the other couple off at an unmarked hotel and saw them to their rooms, then took us to our room at The Angel and Harp- another place owned by the Bushel and Sack evidently. Our hotel room was in a very old pub with uneven floors and door more like barn doors. We went back downstairs and sat outside and had dinner at a picnic table and watched people playing with their children in the playground behind the pub. One little three year old boy was playing with a cricket bat and knew as little about the game as we did. I had lamb and Dick had scampi and it was a very nice end to a day if a little chilly sitting there.
After dinner we walked around the little town past playing fields and a skateboard park. We walked to the hotel the back way through the parks, then down to the old church with gravestones so deteriorated and covered with moss that you couldn't read the inscriptions. Then we went back to the hotel, showered and got ready for a very early morning ( 3:30 ) tomorrow.
We got up on schedule and the shuttle drove in at precisely 4 AM to take us to the airport. We checked in easily, watching out for the students in sleeping bags who were sacked out around the supporting poles for the roof and anywhere else they could get a few square feet of floor space away from the major traffic lanes. Security included being frisked then we went on to the gate area where we made like the student and lay down on benches to catch a little more sleep before our flight. I actually slept quite a bit on the plane- which made the 1 hour 40 minute flight very short. The economy flights from London don't include any food and have very strict luggage size and weight limits, but we came prepared to wash clothes as we went along and packed very light for three week's vacation. At the airport in Oslo Dick got Norwegian money then we caught the bus to Oslo- about an hour away from Torp Airport that we flew into- not the closest to the city center by a long shot.
The bus station was right next to the train station and we had printed maps from the computer that showed how to get to each of our hotels, so we set off in what we thought was the right direction. It was but roads came in at funny angles and we got confused and twice of three times asked wonderful, English speaking Norwegians to help fine tune our search. The last one we asked told us to keep going and look for an orange colored hotel next to a hostel- and we were home- at the Best Western Anker Hotel. We had a nice room and the television screen even welcomed us by name when we opened the door. When we were settled, we walked the fifteen minutes or so back to the station and checked out times for trains to Bergen the next day. But because they had no night trains, we opted to spend the next night at the hotel and go the following morning, Sunday. We got sandwiches at good old American Subway- more reasonable by far than the average Norwegian restaurant, if not as culturally correct.
Then we walked along the waterway which was more commercial than beautiful. We sat in a park with a fountain in the center. On one lamp pole was a trash bin for the disposal of hypodermic needles- a good idea for keeping things safe. We continued down the waterfront to the military fort, but it was too late to go to the Resistance Museum which I had wanted to see. We walked past the National Church , Lutheran, of course.
At the hotel again, we read travel material and dozed, then went out in search of food. The area the hotel was located in was the Middle Eastern section of the city, and many of the places had food we couldn't recognize. Oslo and Copenhagen were very multi-ethnic, with lots of women in traditional headcoverings, both Asian and African. Not feeling very adventurous after our long day, we ordered a ‘Miss Piggy' (she's everywhere) pizza, skink (ham) and annas (pineapple). It was far from the most prosperous section of Oslo , a bit seedy actually. We took our pizza and Pepsi back to the hotel room and geared down to go to bed early again.
We had our first nice long sleep in a while, showered, had a good Norwegian breakfast, everything from fish to cereal with yogurt, and caught the bus to Bygdoy just outside the hotel. It took us through Oslo and down the peninsula across from the city proper. First we went through the Viking Ship Museum and saw the restored burial ships and artifacts that were excavated at the sites. Then we walked back to the Norsk Folkemuseum, a display of 155 old buildings from around the country showing how Norwegians used to live. I went into the ‘museum' part and saw the regular displays as well as a special show of Norwegian-Russian shared history. I saw such things as Lapp Costumed mannequins with stuffed reindeer, a polar bear cub befriended on a polar expedition, then killed and stuffed when he got too wild to be kept on the ship, Anna Pavlova's dance costume and photos of various Soviet leaders on visits to Norway and the gifts they brought.
Then we walked up to the Thirteenth Century Stave Church where the guide in native costume was from Wisconsin but of Norwegian heritage and had decided to go back to the old country. She was very knowledgeable and the church even had original paintings behind the altar. The house across from the church was an example guest house with rose painted serving pieces, a very long banquet table and a cozy bed in an alcove there, two in a room beyond and others upstairs. The early Norwegians knew how to treat their guests! We walked back down the hill to the farm area where many farmhouses and livestock sheds had gardens surrounding them- both flower and vegetable. There were a number of storehouses on stilts, much like the Maori's in New Zealand had. In one house a woman in traditional costume was making what looked like flatbread, baking it on a raised griddle that she pushed hot coals under.
We walked through the area that housed stored from a hundred or so years ago, then walked across the street from the old town and bought French bread at their farmer's market. We tore off hunks and ate it as we walked down to the ferry back to Oslo . We sat in the sun by the outdoor restaurant at the ferry's dock and enjoyed the day. The ferry docked by Oslo 's City Hall where an outdoor fair was going on. We wandered through the various food and educational booths and then went into the building. It was an amazing place with huge open rooms on both floors, great spaces with murals on the walls and beautiful mosaic floors. The murals depicted everything from myths to the Nazi Occupation. Outside the murals and statuary continued. Outside again, we watched young kids try to get a soccer ball past older players and a few did but it didn't seem like any prizes were given for making a goal, just the rush of success.
We walked by the National Theater and had ice cream at MacDonalds and listened to a very good band playing in the park- swing tunes but nobody got up to dance. We went down into the local underground and took a train to Central Station where we made our reservations for the 8:11 train to Bergen . We ate at Burger King in the train station, then checked out how to best enter the train station (a huge station/shopping center complex) and find the correct platform for our train. Then we walked the by now familiar route home, read and watched TV and went to bed early for an early start tomorrow.
We got up at 6:30 and were checked out of the hotel by 6:50 . We waited for breakfast to be served, ate, then walked to the train station. We caught the 8:11 to Bergen and found that we had been booked in seats well across the aisle from each other. We moved around a bit, taking unfilled seats that filled later, so we could sit together. A large group of Americans doing a guided Norway in a Nutshell tour left the train at Myrdal and it was pretty quiet after that.
We got to Bergen in the light rain. We set off in the general direction of the hotel, up a steep cobbled (with stones) street. We escaped into a café to eat, get out of the rain, and get directions to the hotel. We had pizza calzones and got directions, but ended up going back down the hill to the train station and following the map more accurately then. Later we found it would have saved a lot of time to go the way we were told, but because that road wasn't on the map we chickened out. The route took us past Bergen 's artificial lake with fountain in the middle, down Christie Street , and onto the right street. We stayed at the Scandic Hotel, about ten minutes from the harbor and heart of the city. They had no record of our having paid for the hotel, so we learned that different hotels had different policies even when booking all through Expedia.
We went back out into better weather. We walked past the city square with town hall, statues, and neat granite ‘rivers' on sloping blocks where kids could sail boats down a zigzag channel cut in the stones. Even the manhole covers were beautifully done with what looked like the city crest. We walked around the harbor and wandered through the maze of Bruggen- the old wooden, narrow-streeted section that had originally been German. I got a soft serve ice cream rolled in what seemed to be a mixture of cocoa and sugar- different and very good! We saw two men we had met on the train sitting at an outdoor café having a beer. We stopped at a bakery and got muffins, then went back to the hotel. We did our first major wash knowing we had a day and a half for it to dry before it would need packing again. We were ready for bed fairly early, so as to get a good early start tomorrow.
We got up about 8:30 and had the best breakfast we had on the whole trip. We took rolls, ham and cheese for a lunch. We walked downtown in the sun and Dick took pictures again with the sun on everything. We walked through the fish market where there were flowers and tourist stuff for sale as well. We each got a T –shirt with the Bruggen houses on it, then found the tourist bureau. From there we decided to take the Floibannen funicular up to the top of the Mount Floyen above Bergen . It was windy up there, but with the sun shining, we didn't care. We walked along the ridge and enjoyed the day and the views. We could pick out the lake, harbor and about where our hotel and the train station were by then. We sat in the front car coming down and watched regular Bergen people getting off at the stops as if this were just another way to commute to the city. We walked through Bruggen, coming down from behind where there were lovely gardens. Shops were open and I got two charms with native Norwegian stones.
We went back to the hotel and had lunch and rested a little then set off again. We walked to the lake where the art museums were, but found they were closed on Monday. We looked at the postcards to get an idea of the collection (the museum café was open, so we could get into the reception area) and got a museum brochure. Then we sat on benches and looked at the brochure and figured out what to do next. I had seen an area marked Gamla Bergen- another old neighborhood on the other side of the town, so we climbed the fairly steep streets and wandered through the University of Bergen area and passed two men sitting on a bench, one of whom was obviously American. He said something about meeting an American who hated Bush- and that immediately caught our attention. We stopped to argue politics and found he was an expatriate American who was trying to start up a computer software company and the guy with the red hair and beard next to him was one of his Norwegian employees. When we remarked that the Norwegians seemed a very happy people, the American guy said that was because they were sedated from their social assistance programs and government regulated press. The Norwegian guy just laughed. Our countryman informed us that Bush's economic plans had averted a global depression. We parted with him admonishing us to do the right thing when we voted, and I told him we would, but it wouldn't be the same right thing as he would do.
We found the Old Town which was charming, steep cobbled streets and more substantial buildings than Bruggen, full of flowers and benches and windows with great things on the sills- almost an art show in itself. We did a lot of extra walking to find the hotel again, and walked through streets where ordinary people shopped- much more economical than the tourist centers. We rested for a little while then set out for the center for dinner- the fish and chips wagon that the proprietress had told us would be open until five or six. Well maybe because of the beautiful day, she sold out early or decided to close up shop early. When we got there around 4:30, she was closed and the rest of the market was closing up, men hosing up where their fish stalls had been and flower heads scattered occasionally here and there. We crossed the street to a Chinese restaurant we had seen and had a good meal.
On the way home we bought postcards and stamps and stopped at an internet place where I sent off my first trip messages. Then we went to the hotel and packed up the clothes that had dried. Most things were in very good shape. Our bathroom had a heated floor, so was a great drying place. But my jeans were still far from dry, so I used the pant pressing thing on the wall by the bathroom to try to hurry them along which didn't seem to do much. And so to bed, knowing that the jeans still had overnight to do what they could.
We got up at seven and I used the hair dryer to finish off my jeans then wore them to dry them from inside. We hurried through breakfast and check out and made an earlier train toward Oslo than we had planned on. We didn't have reservations but only had to change seats once when the conductors told us the seats we were in had been reserved further on and showed us where we could sit in peace. The Scanrail Pass has worked out fine- even better when you don't pay the ten or so dollars each to reserve a seat on the train. We got off the train at Voss and waited about an hour for the bus that would take us to Gundvagen on the next leg of our do-it-yourself Norway in a Nutshell Tour. I mailed the postcards I had written on the train.
We took the bus through beautiful country, stopping at a hotel high up in the mountains where we could take photos and wander through the gift area of the hotel and get snacks. There was a tunnel which led to an underground lookout, for defense purposes at one time, I suppose. From the hotel you got a great view of Mt. Jobdalsnutten , a dome shaped mountain. We continued on in the bus going downhill on a steep windy road toward the fiord. There was a little sun, a little rain through most of the day and it was windy on the ferry, but certainly a passable trip on the whole. We spent the bulk of our time on the top deck out in the open so we could get the best view of the fiord. We went down to the café area to eat our sandwiches. They had a bowl of bread to feed the seagulls by the door and I threw a handful of bread to them.
We had talked to one of the ferry people when we got on, and made a final decision to get off at Aurland as we went down the fiord. Aurland was a lovely little fiord-side town who supposedly supplied a large percentage of the electricity for the city of Oslo but we saw no trace of a generating plant. We were going to call a hotel that was fifteen or twenty minutes walk from the ferry dock, but saw a motel sign as we got off the boat and really liked the small suite they showed us- for a decent price too. So instead of wasting valuable time finding the other hotel, we booked into our place- a small sitting room with TV, bathroom and rustic single bedded bedroom with doors both to an inside corridor and to the outside. We ordered their ten dollar each breakfast when we booked.
We wandered through one of the town's two supermarkets, then headed up the hill past the school, where kids were just getting out and riding buses, bikes, or walking home. Then we took a road up the hill behind the town and worked our way back down to the sea, passing delightful houses with flowers and apple and pear trees all over. Thistles, sunflowers, roses, butter-an-eggs, and daisies were still blooming. I picked some seed heads as we walked and will have a little Norwegian area of our garden next year.
We walked down to a small artificial harbor that we figured was for swimming in warmer weather. We collected a few rocks including a narrow one for our patio at home. We walked back to the town and surveyed the two supermarkets looking for something easy to fix because the motel had a hostel-like large kitchen to use. But because it had nothing other than hot plates to cook on, we opted for buying a half already roasted chicken, some rolls, a bottle of local soda that seemed to have currant and lemon flavoring, and some nectarines (as well as peanuts, tissues, and gum) and went back to the little harbor area and ate on steps leading down to the fiord. We watched the fiord ferry come into the dock and leave again. I got dishes from a cupboard in the kitchen with our room number on it and washed them afterwards while Dick had a bottle of beer in the room.
We walked to the market next to the motel and had ice cream bars, then headed back to look at the day's pictures, read, shower, and get somewhat repacked for the next day.
We got up at 7:30 and Dick went out for a walk to take pictures of the morning sun on the town and fiord.
We went to breakfast at a little building in our complex which included a red storage shed with antlers on it. We were the only people planned on from the looks of the spread, but the room was worth the price- with its enameled stove with copper implements including a brush and pan around it. I had cereal with yogurt and strawberry preserves and bread and cheese. Dick tried the fish in tomato sauce for the first time and liked it. We bought rolls and cheese in the market for our lunches- less than $4- then waited for the bus with a young English couple who were taking a belated honeymoon but missed their two children at home with their grandparents. We rode from Aurland to Flam, then took the Flamsbana railway to Myrdal, a route so steep that the train had five different braking systems. It stopped so we could take pictures of waterfalls.
When we got to Myrdal we had about a two hour wait for the train to Oslo . We took turns watching the luggage and walked the narrow path from the train station past about five houses and down into the valley. A number of hikers were walking the trail which followed a small stream. I got a couple of rocks from the stream and asked Dick to take a picture of a pretty feathery purple wild flower along the trail. t was a sunny day- very pleasant for walking. We caught the 12:30 train to Oslo and finished reading our books on the ride. We ate our rolls and cheese and snoozed and got into Oslo around 5:45 .
We tried to book an overnight train to Stockholm for the next night, but there was no such thing and the two trains making the run during the day were fully booked. The agent advised us to go to Goteburg- which he liked better, so we booked places on the 1:30 train there. We ate Burger King food in the station, then found the #30 bus which would take us to our new hotel. By walking down Bygdoy Alee to its crossing with Fredrik Stangs Gate, we were able to find the hotel easily. Again they had no record of our payment, but we decided not to worry about it (and the rooms were charged to our account after we used them so all was ok). We showered and decided to go to Goteburg-Stockholm-Kalmar instead of doing the overnight ferries to Helsinki and back. We would have had very little time in Stockholm if we had gone with our original plan. Dick looked at the photos from the day, and so to bed.
We got up at 6:30 and I washed and dried my hair while Dick did his daily back exercises. We got a couple of pieces of bread and headed out for Frogner Park or Viegland (the sculptor) Statue Park , chomping as we went. It was a pretty straight shot and took us about fifteen minutes to reach the park. We passed people still sleeping on the grass in the outer part of the park, then walked across the bridge, Dick shooting pictures as we went. The Trees of Life section was next with a neat one of a young girl ‘swimming' through her tree. Then we climbed the steps toward the monolith, also taking pictures of the sculptures as we went. I remembered the one of a mother being the horsie for her two children, with her braids in her mouth as reins. It was interesting to see how my point of view had changed since I was last there over forty years ago. That was before children, and I now felt more appreciation for all the stages of life depicted- even the ones of the very old- which I probably avoided looking at when I was still far from that stage in my life. But now I saw the tenderness in the poses of some of the elderly and the sympathy with which they were created.
We bought pastries for the trip on the way back, then had a real breakfast in the hotel dining room. We checked out then got a bus to the area the Palace was in and rolled our suitcases behind us as we walked by the palace and took pictures of the guards. We continued lugging our suitcases to the National Gallery and got there before it opened at ten. It took us several trips to get everything stashed in a locker- water bottles weren't even allowed in in the aftermath of the robbery of the Munch paintings. The lockers were neat. They gave you a token for free that you had to use in order to lock the lockers, then you got it back and returned it to the attendants when you left.
We enjoyed the happy idyllic art that many of the Norwegian artists- with the exception of Munch created. But there was a great room of his art, including other versions of The Madonna and The Scream to replace the ones that had been stolen. They had a fair representation of Picasso and the Impressionists.
We left the museum around noon and rolled our suitcases to the train station- another fifteen minute or so walk. After checking to see that our train was actually one scheduled all the way to Copenhagen , we had Burger King ice creams. Mine had chocolate syrup in the cone and swirled over it- which was really good.
We found our reserved seats on the train and began talking to the woman who had the seat across from us (we were in the front seats where two sets of seats face each other). She was a Swede, but had just come back from a trip to Mallorca with her daughter and grandson who lived in Norway . She admitted to liking Norway better, but pointed out sights to us- typical farm land and red farmhouses and a castle we got a glimpse of as the train sped on. She told us about her trip to Philadelphia to meet an internet penpal and what a great time she'd had there and of a trip to Cuba with a friend. A few stops down the line a man came on who had been given a reservation for one of our seats, but the conductress sorted it out. Out seatmate asked her not to move us because we were so nice. I worked on a cross stitch Christmas ornament and got a fair amount done. We exchanged email addresses with our new friend, but hers got lost along the way.
We all got off in Goteburg- she to catch a connecting train, and we made reservations for Stockholm the next afternoon and changed Norwegian kroner into Swedish, getting slightly more back than what was changed. The information lady was discouraging about the possibility of getting a hotel room, but when we told her we could get a discount on rooms at the Best Western through our Scanrail Pass , she told us one was very near the train station. We wandered around up, down, and across the canal trying to find it, and no one we asked knew where it was (it probably had another name that was more familiarly used). We finally gave up and went into the Opera Hotel where they had a reasonable room available, the least expensive thus far. We went back out to the modern indoor shopping center we had been in on our hotel search and had fish and chips at a pub in there. Then we went back to the hotel and called it a night.
We got up about 8:30 and had breakfast at the hotel. Dick got a complimentary copy of The Financial Times to read on the train. We walked down one canal to the sea and watched a ferry come in. We walked along the shore than up another canal into an area of classy old apartment buildings. From there we saw an old fort high on a hilltop and we walked up through paths and sidewalks to the top. On the way up we tried to photograph the big black and white birds with blue tails once more, but they were shy and it was tough. When we got to the top we found that the fort was now a military museum, named for the crown on top.
We walked back through a canal-side park, people watching as we went. We had lunch at an outdoor table- chicken with mushroom and small roasted potatoes. We bought ice cream bars in a store in the mall, then checked out of the hotel and walked the short way to the train station. We had plenty of time so I browsed the bookstore there. They had lots of American books- in English and Swedish- even a lot of Michael Moore's books. We made our way down to the platform for the train and found our seats. The three hour bullet train ride was mostly through farming country. I spent some of the time picking out a lot of yesterday's cross stitch that I'd done in the wrong color of red. We played a little cribbage and slept and got into Stockholm around 5:06 .
We took out our hotel map and, after trying unsuccessfully to get some motorcycle police to check up on a man who said he'd been hit off his bike by a car, crossed the bridge into Gammla Stan (the Old Town ). We walked over halfway down Stora Nygatan looking for the hotel, dragging our suitcases over cobblestones and sandy areas in the road where repairs were ongoing. I left Dick with the luggage and scouted the last part of the street. When I didn't find the hotel, I stopped in at the post office on the same street and asked them. One of the postal workers told me he had never heard of the hotel and took me back to a second man, who said the same thing. But he did call the phone number on our sheet and got no answer. So I went back to Dick with the bad news and we crossed the street to ask a shopkeeper who was locking up for the night. He didn't believe the place existed, but advised us to go over to the parallel street and ask at the Victory Hotel, feeling that hotel people should know if anyone did.
So we lugged our suitcases over there and the receptionist told us she had seen the hotel just recently, but that it had only a plaque on the wall of the building and was near a cross street as far as she could remember. So back we went and after a short search, Dick spotted the small sign. But when we went to the door it was locked- and only leading to a bleak cement floored hallway. A sign said that we had to check in between 2 and 5, and that if we were going to be after 6, we should call a day ahead to let the staff know, giving the same number we had and the post office man had tried before 6. We stood there trying to figure out what to do next and some people came out of the door. We told them of our plight and they told us it was a hostel and all the inside doors were locked, so it would do us no good to go inside. The place where we could check it out was two kilometers away and closed by now anyway. They advised us to try to hotel down the road- and we did.
We checked into the Lord Nelson- where for over $200 for the night we got a name painted on our door (Elisabeth Jones), a ship model in a shadow box above our bed, a foil covered chocolate coin with the hotel chain's name on it, some antique books on a shelf and a porthole in the bathroom door. We went out to walk through Gammla Stan- which was charming with narrow twisty cobblestone streets and lots of neat stores. We walked back to Stockholm proper over an island pretty much covered by an old building with arches to pass through on our way. On the other side we walked down a closed-to-traffic shopping street with bench like lions sculptures at the ends of each block.
We went to the train station and booked our ride to Kalmar for Sunday, then booked a room at the Best Western for the next night. Pathetically, once more we ate at Mac Donald's but we weren't up for adventure- or expense after what we'd been through.
But so far Stockholm had presented a number of eccentric people to us. As the train came into town, I saw a man taking off all his clothes next to the tracks. Then a middle aged woman stepped off a trolley in Stockholm singing lustily and dressed in a short pink mini skirt. Then there was a man on skates with earphones on talking to himself as he glided along. Not to mention the man who said he'd been hit by the car and was taken care of by passers-by, but ignored by the police. Interesting place so far!
We got up at 7:15 and had breakfast in the hotel lobby- the most limited breakfast so far despite the cost of the hotel room.
We walked around Gamla Stan trying to find the highest point and a tower that the guide book said would offer great views of the area. While we found a lot of quaint, twisty, cobbled streets and some neat fountain/wells with arms to pump water, we never found the look out point and had to head toward the harbor for a ferry trip.
Then we walked to the area where the tour boats were and tried to book a tour, which wasn't running now despite what the tour book said. So we opted for taking the ferry that visited islands in the archipelago (24,000 islands!), going with many Swedes who were going back to their home islands. We cruised for an hour to Vaxholm, passing some racing trimarans with advertising on their sails, a town with a waterspout fountain, windmills of the old style, and many big beautiful houses. Vaxholm was a charming seaside town with fruit stands, tourist shops, and regular stores for the residents. We walked around enjoying the vacation-holiday feeling that such towns exude, then sat on the pier and ate ice cream while we waited for the return ferry. The dock had digital signs on its various docking spots that told you when the boat you wanted would arrive.
The boat we took back to Stockholm was older than the first, but certainly fine for a journey back for people who would rather hang over the rails and watch the passing scenery and didn't care if there were wooden benches instead of padded ones. When we got back we heard the sounds of a band and wandered along the waterfront to listen to the music, from what seemed to be a high school band and a military band. After listening to them playing marches for a while, we walked on, but heard them at various points as they crossed over to Gamla Stan and the palace there, to assist in the changing of the guard.
We walked back to the Lord Nelson and got our suitcases and took them back across the bridge to The Hotel Terminus, the Best Western Hotel across the street from the train station. Then we walked to the City Hall where the Nobel Prize Banquet is held, but found that the last tour had just gone out and people weren't permitted in unless they were with an organized tour. So we walked around the waterfront enjoying the pretty day and the people who were lounging around, including just married couples and their parties. They had Dr. Seuss like ‘artworks' like long trumpets that went down under the water. You were supposed to whisper your wish or question into it, then put your ear to the horn and wait for the answer. We saw a father and daughter doing that. On the side of the building was a gilt covered knight on his tomb, probably the founder of Stockholm is we remembered rightly.
And in the continuing episodes of strangeness, an old grubby man was there at the side with his younger ‘friend,' a young woman who kept changing her slacks, pulling pairs out of a bag and changing, then changing back. He looked a little scary, so we were a little intimidated watching the spectacle even though they seemed to have no problems about putting it on.
We walked back over to Gamla Stan with the intention of climbing a church tower, but since they were getting ready for a concert, the tower was closed. We did pass the former Parliament Building , and continued enjoying the sights of the old town. We decided to eat pizza at an outdoor café and talked a lot to two Swedish couples who took the table behind us. They were very pleasant and added to the ambiance!
I bought a few Christmas ornaments at a gift store and we went back to the hotel and called it a night. It was September 11 th , three years later and we did see a man wearing a NYPD T-shirt.
We got up around 8:30 and had a better breakfast at the hotel. Then we walked around the Klara Church area, then down the pedestrian only shopping street. When we entered it, two little blond girls were sitting on the lions. When Dick asked if he could take their picture, they got up and stood, posing on the backs of the lions. Then Dick indulged me by taking pictures of shop windows, souvenirs and glasswork mostly. We went back to the hotel and watched some of the Swedish Idol show while we waited to catch our train.
On the train we sat in a section with tables in the center and talked to a young student who was returning to Kalmar to her college. She had had a bad night the night before dreaming of September 11, and seemed a little homesick, having only been away from home for two weeks at that point. She had spent two months in Australia with an uncle, helping babysit for their baby and was anxious to get in some kind of foreign service job where she could travel. She said she was very different from most Swedish people who she characterized as somewhat scared to be away from home for long and frightened of ‘foreign' things.
We had to change trains and got into a car that wasn't going to go to Kalmar , but the conductor straightened us out and we changed cars before the others were detached to go somewhere else. We played cribbage and I redid the cross stitch I had pulled out yesterday and made some progress.
We saw a hotel sign (the Frimurare Hotellet) from the station and walked over there, finding it a bit more expensive that we had planned on. We went out to talk it over/find another place and decided to go with it rather than wasting a lot of time looking for somewhere else. The girl at reception commiserated with our tale of woe about the Gamla Stan hostel fiasco and told us she would give us their best room. And it was a beaut, with a sitting area with sofa, chairs, coffee table, two end tables, an oval mirror, crystal light fixtures (small chandeliers) and hardwood floors with carpets as well as a big comfortable bed. In looking in at some of the other rooms when they were being cleaned the next day, they were all individual and charming, but a good deal smaller than ours. In addition to the great room, the hotel also had a sitting room with TV where there was always coffee, tea or cocoa , cookies and fruit. And there was another room with a large floor to ceiling bookcase of books to be borrowed. We exchanged books we had read for a couple of others in English. All-in-all it was a charming place to stay and really added to our enjoyment of Kalmar .
We went to a Chinese restaurant in the train station building and had their very good buffet around 3:15 . Then we walked around the harbor area, finding the Tourist Information building closed (it supposedly had free internet, but didn't in reality the next day when we did find it open). We saw the ships used by the marine college there and walked on past a supermarket/shopping center complex that had a neat glass silo-like entrance. I got a bit of neat beach glass and we enjoyed people and building watching along the shore. We had intended to go as far as the bridge to an island we had considered exploring, but it kept seeming future away with nothing much to lure us there. We walked past the cathedral and the county museum. At the supermarket we bought rolls, a roll of cookies, peanuts, and a bottle of coke, then checked out train times at the station and decided to take the 13:03 train to Copenhagen .
We went back to the hotel, took pictures of the interesting medieval people statues behind it and got a town map and brochures and sat in the lounge drinking cocoa and planning our next day's excursions. Dick checked the day's pictures and we began reading the new books we had gotten. It had been a very windy day, but a very good one on the whole.
We got up at 6:30 and had a typical breakfast of muesli with yogurt, Danish pastries and melon. We walked down to a tower, which we had hoped to climb for views, but it was an apartment building. Then we went through an arch and crossed a bridge. In the water beside it was a cute fountain with funnels on springs, so that the funnels tipped when they filled and spilled the water into the river. We walked through Kalmar 's Gamla Stan (old town) but it was a small district with only a few cobbled streets and lots of flowers around the houses. I took seeds from hollyhocks, poppies and daisies that had gone past.
We walked to the water by the castle and waited for it to open, walking in the park and on the shore- which was mucky and didn't encourage even me to pick up stones. Dick rested and I walked by the gardens and along, determined to find more of Gamla Stan- but with no luck. I did see a rabbit in the park, but that was as exciting as it got.
When the castle opened we went in. I bought Jews Harps for stockings and we toured the castle. The Women's Prison was interesting, if bizarre. They had posters of some of the punishments for everything from gossiping, to infidelity, to witchcraft, to stealing geese, to fighting. One showed two women who had fought with their heads and arms in stocks facing each other but unable to move. Another showed a woman bare breasted with large rocks on a chain hanging around her neck. She had to carry them around the town and then to the gate where she was banished for infidelity. Another showed a woman buried up to her neck and left to die for being a witch. Witches were also thrown into the water and if they floated it proved they were witches, but if they sank, they weren't. Some original cots were still in the final cell.
In other rooms they had ornate beds, a banquet table with stuffed swan and peacock for decorations.
From there we walked back to the Information Center but couldn't use the computers because they were broken. I stopped at a second hand store while Dick walked back to the hotel. It was very big once you got inside and had lots of clothes. But with our small suitcases, I opted for a small crystal heart-shaped candleholder made in Sweden . At the hotel we packed our bags and then sat in the square, watching kids play around the fountain. I walked up the street and bought us pastries and we ate on the benches. Mine was chocolate dipped in and filled with marzipan. We walked to the train station and had only a short wait for the 13:03 train to Copenhagen .
We arrived in Copenhagen at 5 and found the hotel fairly quickly. We saw the signs on Tivoli as we went. The receptionist told us we had been given an upgrade in our room since we were staying five nights, and we got a neat room with three windows in the corner of the building, sort of like living in a turret on the fourth floor. After we settled in, we went out and walked along Vesterbrogade- in the opposite direction from the city center, but we didn't know better then. We ate in a Chinese restaurant that had an eel in it's lobster tank- which seemed to enjoy bugging the lobsters every so often.
We went back to the hotel and in looking through its guide, we found it offered free internet, so we went down and checked our mail and wrote to people. And so another day ended.
We got up around 7, had breakfast at the hotel and were off by 9 to ‘see' Copenhagen . First we walked (in the right direction this time) to the City Hall (Rad Has) and sat in the sun until the first tour to go up at 10. There were a really cute group of nursery school kids, lots of blondes and one red head, going up with us and they gamely climbed all three hundred steps up to the viewing places at the top. All the stairs were winding once you entered the tower, some wooden and some stone. The wind was whipping around on top and the kids, and us, had to spend some time hiding from it before venturing out again. When we went down we lost track of how we'd come in and made our way out a side door. Unlike the Oslo City Hall , this one had no large empty spaces and was filled with offices as far as we could see.
When we got outside we took pictures of the Hans Christian Andersen statue and the lizard statues on the front railing. Then we walked though Stroget, the pedestrian shopping area, to Christianborg Palace where the Parliament meets and other government offices and the Stock Exchange are clustered by the canal. Then we went to Rosenborg Castle , the showplace of King Christian the Fourth, a really jaunty guy with a long braid and an earring, who was responsible for many of the classy buildings in Denmark . Surrounding the castle were lovely gardens with sculptures scattered around from classic to abstract. The castle had floor to ceiling arrays of paintings in almost every room, ornate ceilings, inlaid stone tables and chests, and a throne of narwhal tusks for him and silver for her with silver lions standing guard.
The lower floor of the castle housed the treasury including the crown jewels and many extravagant pieces of jewelry including a great necklace and earrings set of emeralds. When we left the castle we heard the guards practicing their music, then went on, passing the Marble Church and going on to Amelienborg Palace where the Queen lives in one of the four mansions and the Crown Prince and his new wife live in the opposite one. We saw a small changing of the guard ceremony where it looked more like one guard was telling jokes to the other than reading the day's orders.
We went on to the Resistance Museum which I had seen many years ago. We walked through exhibits showing the Nazi Occupation from 1940-1945. The Danes manages to get a huge proportion of their Jewish citizens safely to Sweden and managed to do enough sabotaging things to get a number of them killed by the Nazis. It was a celebration of the best in man, while also showing the worst of a very bleak period in history.
From there it was a very short walk to the Geffion Fountain, showing the mythical story of Geffion being told she could take all the land she could plow around in a day. So she changed her sons to oxen and plowed out the island that Copenhagen is on today, from Sweden . And there is a lake in Sweden that has about the same shape as the island of Zealand . From there it was another short walk to the Little Mermaid statue, where lots of tourists were snapping their pictures with her.
We asked a tour bus driver where we could get the commercial bus back to town and he pointed out where we should go. We walked down to the wharf where cruise ships come in and I browsed a couple of shops while trying with no luck to find someone to tell us what number bus to take. So we asked some girls who came in on bikes and they gave us a lesson in figuring out bike routes from the info at the bus stops. We took the bus all the way to Tivoli and decided to just keep going and ‘do it' too instead of going to the hotel and resting, then coming back out.
We paid about ten dollars each to enter, then wandered around watching the corkscrewing roller coasters, and the merry-go-round. We stopped and shared a pizza in one of the little restaurants, then wandered some more, seeing the gardens, fountains, children's playground, bubble columns, goldfish, Peacock Theater, and many and varied rides. We stopped at another outdoor restaurant and had chicken and a tiny banana split. A man there had a horrendous coughing spell but eventually was well enough to walk off. We sat and watched a show with an orchestra, woman singer, juggler who threw up to six ropes with balls on either end, and two acrobats who did amazing holds and tosses. When that was finished, a nearby theater has an orchestra playing songs from Kiss Me Kate. We listened for two or three songs, then walked to the nearest exit to the hotel, enjoying the many lights that had just begun to show up well as the night darkened.
We got back to the hotel around 8:30 after a very busy day. Dick figured we had walked around 8 miles and climbed many more than the 300 steps in the City Hall. He took a bath and rinsed off the shorts he had washed at the same time.
We spent the last part of the evening planning out a train route for our trip the next day, then called it a night.
We got up about 6:30 and Dick checked his email and wrote to Heather. We had breakfast, talked to the woman cleaning the elevator about where we were going, and hurried to the train station. We decided to catch a later train than planned so we could get off at Roskilde . But when we got off there, we saw the train was continuing on to Odense , so got back on and rode to Odense . In Odense we walked in the direction where we expected to find the older center of the town, and were right. We found the Hans Christian Andersen Museum and waited in their pretty courtyard, but then decided to walk around and let all the schoolchildren get in and on their way before we went in.
So we walked around the old section of Odense and found an open air market and browsed that. It had mostly produce but a table of hand spun yarn and one of ceramics as well. We went through the museum- much bigger and newer then when I was there 40 odd years ago. They had chronologically ordered cases of photos, writings, and other artifacts depicting his travels in life. He was born to a very poor family, with a mother who was alcoholic, but his intelligence attracted the attention of wealthy mentors who paid for his education and helped him increase his self-esteem, because he was surely the Ugly Duckling in his own mind. And although he was in love several times- with Jenny Lind the famous Swedish singer (and possibly the nightingale he wrote about) for one- no woman ever returned his affections and he seems even to have reached out to men at times with similar negative results. But he adopted certain families, entertaining them and their children with stories while he cut his intricate paper cuttings which sometimes illustrated the story. That seemed to fill the gap in his life and he traveled extensively which also added interest to his life, sketching scenes from his travels as he went.
The museum had an extensive collection of his paper cuttings and drawings, as well as a library with volumes of his stories in every language they had been printed in. We sat in a small lounge and read some of his stories from books there.
When we left the museum, we walked back to the market and bought plums (great ones!) and nectarines, but it began to rain heavily just then and after hanging out under the umbrella at the fruit stand, we dashed back to the museum. We went in to see the movie on his life which was playing with an English soundtrack this time and enjoyed that. When we got out again, the rain had stopped and we sat in the garden and ate fruit- and I gathered a few seeds from dead plant heads there. Then I bought paper ornaments in a gift shop in the old town section.
On the way back to the train, we bought cheese at a cheese store and made sandwiches to eat on a bench in the train station (very modern with the town's library showing through large windows at one end of the building. The train trip took about an hour, taking us from the island of Funen where Odense is located, back to Zealand where Roskilde and Copenhagen are located.
In Roskilde we walked down their pedestrian shopping street to the cathedral. We walked down the hill through the park, but couldn't find a good vantage point to take a photo of the massive cathedral. But the weather was nice at that point and we wandered on following the signs to the Viking Ship Museum . The path wandered through a park like area and we stopped to watch schoolgirls playing soccer. It started raining again when we got down to the museum on the fiord and we stood under the arch of a large building across from it. When it stopped again, we walked along the waterfront and found ourselves in the area where men were using old tools to build new ‘Viking ships' using old tools and methods. Roskilde became famous for Viking ships after finding several well preserved ships sunk to block the mouth of the fiord, so they were not as well preserved as the Oslo ships, but the people undertook to learn about ship construction from them. Now there's a pier with many different kinds of reconstructed ‘Viking ships' and they have plans to sail on to Iceland in the next two years. It was interesting to walk along the pier and see them many different types of Viking ships, but we didn't feel much like seeing the indoor museum afterwards.
So we walked back to the train station and took a picture of the double decker bike parking garage near the station. A cute young Danish girl saw Dick getting ready to take the picture and put one arm behind her head and posed as she walked, but she was too fast for the picture. We took a double decker train back to Copenhagen and sat on the top. It was raining hard when we got back to Copenhagen so we waited at the station's lower door toward our street (where classical museum plays day and night and has been very effective in keeping drunks, etc. away from there). Finally we gave up and made a dash for the hotel. After we rested a bit and I dried my hair, we headed back out for dinner and settled on a buffet at an Indian restaurant (The Kooh-i-noor), which was very good, except for the owner standing and smoking as he surveyed his kingdom. We had very good lamb and beef, among other things. I checked my email and called it a night.
We got up about 7:30 and took things slowly after yesterday's bustle. I wrote email and after breakfast we took the bus to the National Gallery. We walked through their sculpture ‘road,' a long corridor between old and new buildings. There were a lot of Danish artists as well as paintings by Rubens, Picasso, Braque, and Rembrandt and others and we spent about two and a half hours there.
From there we crossed the bridge onto the island of Christianshavn and walked to Christiania , the hippie- like commune that began with a takeover of an unused military base in 1971 and has been going strong even since- with less hassles from the government since it began paying taxes to Denmark . The gate about the entrance says ‘ Christiania ' on one side and ‘You are now entering the EU (European Union)' on the other. Its main street is called Pusher Street and has planters with huge marijuana plants along the way- though oblivious little me didn't even see them. There were a few junkie looking people but the most disturbing sight to us was the five Polizi in a tight group marching along what was otherwise a very peaceful looking place. We walked past the open market and used a bathroom in the back of a bar that had men and women clearly indicated in full panel paintings on the door and a large aquarium overhead so that you could look up and watch the goldfish swimming overhead as you used the facilities.
We walked through the outdoor food court, where umbrellas remind people of one of Christiania 's rules- No Hard Drugs. We read the menu at one food stand and I liked the sound of their red curry (chicken and pineapple in coconut milk sauce with rice) and Dick had a veggie lasagna. That became my favorite meal of the trip. Dick got a beer from another stand. We sat in the sun, me feeding kernels of rice to the sparrows, and watched the locals- and their dogs- there are as many dogs as children (350 of each) in Christiania . One man rolled a joint but otherwise we watched a man take countless watering cans full of water out to watering countless pots of flowers growing in the area and just enjoyed the peace and ambience of the area.
After eating we walked around the town taking a few pictures, though Dick was a bit inhibited because of the ‘no photos on Pusher Street ' rule. But we took pictures of a couple of sheds, one a bathroom, with neat comic murals on them and walked down a residential street past houses that were barracks but were now overwhelmed with beautiful gardens outside, so that they no longer looked at all military. We sat on a bench by a playground and watched a man help his four year old son to go down the overhead trolley that was strung from one end to the other. We went through a Free Tibet exhibit and Dick bought a Christiania button to help support the Tibetian cause. We walked back and took a picture of a sculptor welding a construction and wandered through the warehouse where recycled building materials (such as bins of red ceramic roofing tiles) were sold cheaply to residents (only) who wanted to build houses. The woman in charge was very nice and told us a bit about the warehouse. There was an area of children's toys and tools were available there or in a regular store attached to the warehouse.
We went back past the market and I bought a Christiania T-shirt with its distinctive red color with three yellow dots (when they took over the base they found tons of red and yellow paint and the three dots stand for the dots above the ‘I's in Christiania) and Dick got tie-died pants for Heather's Christmas. There were a lot of other smoking related items, but we had no interest in those. Then we reentered the EU and walked to the Church of Our Savior which had a spiral staircase around its tower. Dick pled tiredness and we had walked a lot, but encouraged me to go up the tower and take pictures from up there. Shortly after he sat down he was joined by a Norwegian guy who told him among other historical tidbits, that it was a very windy day to go up the tower.
And I found that was true. After going up very sturdy wooden circular staircases, you stepped outside into the full blast of the wind. That is you did if you dared as one American woman told me as she hovered by the doorway, not listening to her husbands cajoling her to go outside. But I took a deep breath and went out and continued up about 2/3 or so of the tower. I took a picture of the city/Copenhagen side sticking the camera out through the railing and hoping that I wouldn't drop it in my nervousness, then kept going up and around hoping to see something that was definitively Christiania below. When I finally saw a treed area that I could convince myself was it, I went back down, amazed that I had forced myself to go up that high. The woman at the desk told me there were 400 steps and I figured I had done about 350 of them. I told Dick I had only taken two pictures, but good or not, they would not be erased after what I'd been through!
The Norwegian man had recommended walking through an old section of the island, so we set off in the direction he recommended and some neat old buildings. We walked across a bridge and I thought I had found it on the map, but we ended up a bit turned around until we got directions from a friendly man we asked. We walked back to the hotel from the other end of the street to see new sights- just a roundabout and some shops, actually.
We got ice from the machine in the basement and had soda and cooled a beer Dick had bought. We had sandwiches with the cheese we bought in Odense , then I went down to email again. We watched TV, looked at the day's pictures, did more laundry, and planned tomorrow's trains, then collapsed for the night.
We did breakfast at the hotel, then took the train to Humlebaek before 8 and walked down the road to the Louisiana Modern Art Museum- once again getting there before it opened at 10. There was a very tall iris sculpture outside to announce the special exhibit on flowers, and a Henry Moore sculpture that school kids kept banging to hear its hollow sound. They were fun to watch, the kids from one group seeming much more quiet and restrained than the other. A couple of little boys and girls even seemed quite taken with the sculpture.
We walked through the Flower exhibit and saw paintings of flowers by Picasso, Monet, Warhol, and O'Keeffe as well as a lot of interesting paintings and sculpture by people we hadn't heard of. Then we walked around outside and looked at the sculpture on the grounds. I tried to find a way to get down to the water, but only found a high turnstile that would let you out but not back in again. So I wandered around the grounds by the water, seeing a lot of old buildings that looked like primitive summer homes. We went back in and explore more of the permanent exhibit. The buildings had so many wings that I was never sure we had seen it all, but after backtracking a good bit we decided that we had indeed seen it all. I was there many, many years ago with Karen Farley and got my first appreciation of modern art from her there- and I kept feeling I hadn't seen paintings by the artists she's told me about. But finally I had to agree that we seemed to have seen everything that was on exhibit then. So we left, walked back to the train station and caught the train to Helsingor.
At Helsingor we had to get out to switch to another line that would take us to Hillerod, so we only stopped long enough to see Hamlet's Castle- not really in existence when the ‘real' Hamlet lived, but reputed to be the one Shakespeare wrote about. We took pictures of the castle across the water, watched a ferry come in, then caught the train to Hillerod. We stopped to eat at a small restaurant in Hillerod and got fish and chips that were pretty much like our frozen kinds, then walked along the water to Fredricksborg Castle .
We walked through part of the city's shopping street and past a square where there were elephant and hippo statues by the benches. The park area was lovely, with swans on the pond and people enjoying the nice day. We walked a fair distance through the park, working our way toward the castle. A very cute playground on the way had a block of wood which was carved into monkeys at the top and several wooden elephants for kids to climb on. The entrance to the Castle was impressive, cobbled and open with a great fountain where even the snail's antenna sprayed water- which was blowing spray all over.
We went through the chapel which was beautiful and used for royal weddings even today. Just as we left, someone began playing the organ so we went back to listen. After that we walked through countless rooms with ornately carved inlaid chests, silk embroidered tablecloths from the 1600. The paintings were three high on the walls and the plaster frieze deer had real antlers on them. When we left we walked past the classical gardens laid out in intricate patterns made by low hedges. We returned to the town square with its elephant statues, but I had wanted to take pictures on our original route that Dick had been in too much of a hurry to stop for. So I left him sitting on a bench and walked back to the playground with the monkeys. I got pictures of birds we hadn't seen before on the river as well. I walked back up along the shopping street and spotted a good ice cream place, so we went back there and ate our cones, mine chocolate dipped and very good, on the way to the train station. We walked right on to the train to Copenhagen and were there quite quickly.
On the way to the hotel, Dick bought a hot dog from a sidewalk vendor- something he had wanted to do for a while. The internet computer was down, so I went back up to the room and we had our cheese sandwiches. Then I walked down to the store we had seen the preceding night but only bought some candy to take home. We watched a TV show about chimps and planned the next day, our last day in Copenhagen .
I got up at 7:15 and had breakfast while Dick slept in. I made up my outdoor market route and walked to the market by Christianborg Palace . They were just setting up then so I walked around taking pictures of the Fishwife statue and the Stork Fountain- where even the frogs on the base sprayed out water. I saw a sign on the canal telling boats to be careful because of underwater statues and looked under the water and saw a group of statues called ‘The Merman and His Seven Sons' which was neat, but I think I saw only four sons- so maybe a few had succumbed to low dragging boats that didn't see the sign. I walked through the market even though it was early still, but saw most Royal Copenhagen Porcelain at fairly high prices for my judgment, so I decided to set out for another market at Israel Square- near the Rosenborg Palace . On the way I passed the Round Tower , so took a photo.
It was a better market with more tables, but I still only got a set of four papercut style red Christmas ornaments for 40 kroner. On my walk back I stopped at MacDonald's to use the bathroom and got a sundae. There were public bathrooms under a nearby square but they cost money and I didn't have the proper coins. I walked back down Hans Christian Andersen Avenue and found the Design Center, but decided it wasn't worth paying the entry to see whatever they had in addition to a special show on fashion. When I had been in Copenhagen many years back, there had been a building called Den Permanente that showed the best in Danish design- with things like Christmas ornaments for sale, but this didn't seem to be the same kind of place. Then the second hand store I had spotted didn't open on Saturday, so I arrived back at the hotel earlier than planned to find Dick in the lobby with the luggage already stashed in a storage room.
We took one of the leftover pastries the hotel had put in the lobby and left to get a bus to Fredricksberg- an independent town within the city limits of Copenhagen . We walked through the park and saw the castle there and the zoo. Then we crossed into an adjacent park and walked to the above ground entrance to The Cistern Modern Glass Museum. We went downstairs into the cistern which was clammy cool with wet floors and stalactites hanging from the ceilings. Made from two old water cisterns, the museum had exhibits of standing and hanging glass constructions- some too modern to interest us, others with nice shapes and colors. It was a hollow echoey place and it seemed loud when we talked to each other. Dick took a number of pictures.
Then we walked back through the park, looking in at monkeys and other zoo animals as we went, and made our way to the City Hall, where I had read there would be an outdoor market too. It was huge with people doing yard-type sales outside the lots and probably about seventy sellers inside. I got a children's handknit sweater, a metal picture frame and a felt mitten clip for 5 kroner and a book in English for 2 (about thirty-five cents). My expensive buy was a Royal Copenhagen round tile with a bird on it for 35 kroner. It was fun just to look, because we couldn't fit much extra in the small suitcases we brought anyway.
We found a neat Italian restaurant which was beamed and half timbered and had pizza. Then we took the bus backto the hotel. It started to rain so we gave up the idea of a canal boat tour and went back to the hotel and read and played cribbage in the lobby. We walked to the train station and got a train to Kastrup Airport . We had a two hour wait to check in, so Dick found 2 chairs on a business floor overlooking the check-ins and we had it almost to ourselves- including a nearby bathroom. We sat and read in peace there until it was time to check in, then we went to the Burger King and ate, knowing that there would be no food on our no-frills flight. We went through security but no gate had been assigned to our flight yet, so I wandered around looking for a T-shirt to buy. I roamed the entire shopping mall and finally settled on a white shirt with Copenhagen in blues and grays on it. We tried to find a cap for Dick to use up the Danish money but couldn't find anything that fit and he liked. By that time they were checking in our 9:35 flight but it still took quite a while before we boarded.
We read during the less-than-2-hour flight and got our luggage quickly when we arrived. We phoned the Bushel and Sack, then messed up a little getting to the far parking lot where they would pick us up. But we waited for fifteen or more minutes before the woman driver arrived to get us. She took us to a house across from the Angel and Harp where we had stayed before and let us choose which of the three bedrooms we wanted to sleep in. We finally decided on the twin bedded room on the first floor by the bathroom- more practical than romantic at this point. There was also a sitting room with a huge TV/DVD combo and all the necessities for making a nice cup of tea. We got to bed around midnight .
We were up before 7- wakened by the TV next door. I showered, repacked and made a cup of tea. Then we went out to wait for the car to take us for breakfast, but realized after a while we were out (and locked out of our room) about a half hour early. So we walked back up to the old church in Great Dunmow and walked around- me collecting more seeds from gardens by the road. The van took us to the actual Bushel and Sack for breakfast. We had cereal and juice and took a piece of fruit to go. The van took a group of us to Stanstead Airport and we changed Danish money, asked where to get the bus, then walked right on to it and were off. The bus driver did quite a few stops and advised us to get off at Hyde Park Corner which would be closer to Piccadilly than Marble Arch.
About an hour into the ride we got off. But when we got off we didn't know how to find the underground and asked a few people and fumbled around a little then found the tube stop and rode to Piccadilly Circus . Our room wasn't available, so we sat in the lobby with our luggage for a while, taking turns walking around to find tourist maps and info. After about an hour I asked the receptionist whether we could get a room then, and she said we could if we were willing to take a smoking room. So we did and there was no way to tell it was a designated smoking room- no smell at all. We changed into our ‘theatre clothes' and went out. We stopped at a fish and chips place with an outdoor table and ended up paying twice what the sign said it would have cost to take the meal out and eat it in a park or somewhere. We walked to the theater for The Lion King- which was spectacularly presented (elephants walking down the aisle next to us and up onto the stage), with ingenious costuming. The dialog wa taken verbatim from the movie as far as we could tell.
When we left after the show we walked the wrong way down the street for a while past neat old buildings. Then we figured out our mistake and stopped at a Pizza Hut and ate, walked past Trafalgar Square and back to the hotel where we watched Lord of the Glen.
We stayed in bed until after 8, then I called for a shower (in the hotel room we had a sink but had to go down to communal bathrooms to use the toilet and shower- which is why it's so reasonable though in a great location). We were off about 9:30 . I bought an almond croissant at the donut shop and Dick got some bagels and an oj for me further along. We spent a couple of hours at the National Gallery, looking at old favorites and others.
Then we walked down past the Houses of Parliament and along the Thames . We saw the London Eye, the huge ferris wheel constructed for the Jubilee Celebration for Queen Elizabeth. It moves so slowly that it keeps on going while people get on and off, and everyone stays on for one slow rotation then gets off. We saw the Cenotaph, an Egyptian Obelisk and park benches near it have Egyptian ends with Sphinx-like moldings. It rained very heavily for a while then and we took refuge under trees and archways. When it quieted a bit, we went looking for the Bell , Book, and Candle again. This time we had chicken curry in coconut sauce with mango chutney. We walked back to Trafalgar Square and went into the National Gallery yet again and saw the older artists there- Rembrandt, Da Vinci, etc. Then we went down to basement rooms where people seldom seemed to go and saw the paintings there- some of which were done by famous artists too.
We walked back to the hotel to rest before the theater, goofed off for a couple of hours then headed for the theater which was quite close to the hotel. We got dinner at the Piccadilly Circus Burger King for convenience. We had good seats three rows back in the first balcony. Before the play began, the woman next to me who was there with her young daughter, offered me her program to look at. The play, Phantom of the Opera, was very well staged, beginning with an auction of old things from the Paris Opera House- including a chandelier, which, when uncovered, rose to the top of the stage while the dramatic crashing chords of Phantom of the Opera ran through you. The performers had great voices. I had a sherry at intermission for old times' sake, though most people seemed to be having wine nowadays.
We were back in our hotel room by about 10:30 , marveling as we walked at all the people swarming the streets at that hour.
We were up before 7 but it took a very long time for the maid to come for my shower. We got the tube to Heathrow almost immediately and had breakfast at the airport- a chocolate croissant for me and a sandwich for Dick. Then we went through the security checks. Unfortunately Dick had to go back out for the bathroom and was really caught by the security guards, so we were a little late getting on the plane- well after our section was called for boarding. But there was plenty of room for storing all our suitcases and carry-ons. I did the Mensa puzzles in the airline magazine and watched Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, then a movie about golfer Bobby Jones. It was an easy flight with decent meals. We got through Customs easily and the shuttle to the hotel arrived in about ten minutes. From there it was to the car, buy a few groceries and go home- a little jet lagged but none the worse for it. Great trip!