There are a series of large parks that our bus drove by on the way to the city, and we decided to investigate. The one John and I ended up in was a botanical garden. Different sections of the park had different geographic themes from Asia to America. It was a misty and chilly day, but it was a nice enough park that it was bearable (well, more than bearable). In the centre of the park, unknown to us when we went into it, was a huge complex of greenhouses. Most looked to be used by the nearby Copenhagen University and locked to the public on Sundays (including a long room of peculiar cacti), except the main greenhouse. It was a fairly old building, almost Victorian-esque. Inside was a rainforest! It was like Rainforest Cafe without the stuffed animals and thunderstorms. Seriously though, the rooms were overrun by palms and fruit trees. One of the rooms had a plant alluded to in the Bible (or so says Catholic-high-school John), but it's sign was separated from its trunk and we couldn't find the plant. The whole experience was made better by the fact that it was nice and warm in there.
Past the next big road, in the next big park, we went to the National Art Museum. In my previous post, I may have said we went to this but I really meant the National Museum. In keeping with the theme of oil=bad, there were a number of exhibits that highlighted the earth around us and all its natural splendor. There was a huge exhibit made of hanging pouches of air with water plants floating in them that I think was a progression from the earth's birth to death. Strangely enough, there was a Danish Jazz concert (for charity? - maybe against climate change?) catered towards families with young children. Besides viewing some drawings from the Netherlands and some Danish art, I got a coffee at the cafe (I felt a headache coming because of my hour and a half awake without it). The best part of the cafe was the fun mug the coffee came in and the table decor - vases with paintbrushes instead of flowers.
Central Copenhagen isn't really that big, so it may be a logical truth to say this, but we were pretty close to the Amalienborg Palace that we had seen only in the dark the night before, so we went back. We took some pictures, watched the guards march back and forth, and admired the large equestrian statue of King Fredrick V. As I could more clearly see in the light, there were 4 large houses that formed the palaces in an octagon around the roundabout. From there, it was just a hop, skip, and jump up to the Kastellet and the Little Mermaid Statue.
Yes, Hans Christian Anderson was Danish and he created the Little Mermaid. So those crazy Danes put up a statue on the banks of the canal of the Little Mermaid so that thousands of tourists would walk and take pictures by it. Apparently November 22 is not a big tourist day, because there were about a dozen people there. I was handed a camera and asked to "make a picture" of a Dutch couple - isn't it funny when people try to speak English well? Maybe they were in Denmark to learn. The statue was nice, but kind of unimpressive. We knew that going in though. Next door was what we really wanted to see - the Kastellet. It was a fortification built in the 1660s. It it a huge pentagram made of earth surrounded by a moat. The edges of the pentagram are really steep - more than 45 degrees. Nowadays, it is just a park, although there are some military officers who still live there. There are statues of Greek gods and former kings along with war memorials and a windmill from the 1850s (a self-sufficient military installation needed to grind flour, too you know!). This place was massive. Being a late Sunday afternoon, there were not many people there. That made this former barracks kind of spooky, but not too bad.
We made it back to the top-heavy church just before 5 PM. It closed at 5. We had a chance to go in though. It (my research tells me that it's Frederik's Church, or the Marble Church) was lit by candlelight and nearly empty. There were lots of church-like murals on the walls and they were fantastic. They can't match the other world's best churches I saw on my trip, but they were really good.
We went back to the pedestrian street to find the friend we were staying with (who was at school working) and found a relatively cheap dinner. We walked around Chistianhavn, the canal district modeled after Amsterdam, afterwards. This was mostly just seeing a few pretty churches, fancy office buildings, and houses that young professionals live in. We ended up walking past Christiania again and seeing a large wall of murals its inhabitants painted. We hopped on the punctual bus, went back to the apartment, and got ready to leave in the morning. We woke up far to early to be mentioned and went to the airport, where John and I said, "Goodbye Scandinavia!" I made it back just in time for class! How exciting...
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