Four days after arrival, I think we’re relatively settled. We have a lovely apartment on a quiet street in the Christianshavn neighborhood:
Copenhagen is lovely and feels very comfortable. Everyone seems a bit more relaxed here, and takes advantage of the long daylight hours and warm weather: walking and biking, swimming, picnicking by the canals. The city is pretty and compact. We’re continually surprised by how easy it is to walk around.
And did I say long daylight hours? The sun rises earlier than I care to track, and it’s not fully dark until at least 11pm. We find ourselves forgetting how late it is. By the time we went to dinner Wednesday all the restaurants had stopped serving food. (The local sushi place was kind enough to assemble some of their leftovers for us, and we ended up with a great deal on the Miscellaneous Maki Meal.)
Speaking of food:
- Bacon features heavily. Bacon grease in the soup, bacon in the chicken salad, bacon wrapped around the sausages. Yum. We were also served some sort of spread with our herring that appeared to be bacon grease. Further investigation is needed.
- Plenty of preserved fish too: pickled herring, curried herring, smoked eel…and to those of you saying “eew,” well, your loss.
- Plenty of beer. And nothing so quaint as open container laws. People just carry it around with them, drink it by the canals, keep it in their bike baskets. We’ve really had no choice but to imbibe as much of it as possible.
Recently Copenhagen cleaned up some of its waterways enough to be safe for swimming. We checked out one area last night and found the water to be much warmer than expected. Hundreds of recent swimmers sat by the canal, drying off and hanging out in bathing suits or underwear (the distinction seems unimportant here, which makes sense as far as I’m concerned).
So all in all, a good first few days. We haven’t done much in the way of sightseeing yet, but that’s a real advantage to a longer trip: we can spend a few days just getting our bearings without worrying about what we might be missing. I had my first conference call yesterday, a successful proof of concept for the whole VoIP thing – having email access abroad is cool enough, but the fact that anyone in Cambridge can pick up the phone and call me on a local number is something else.
Today’s the beginning of the Copenhagen Jazz Festival, so we’re off to check that out in a little while. It’s a rough life.
Looks like a lot of hops being consumed there…better get permission from the Lord High Commissioner of Hops (me)
Love,
Nosey (and Elana, Bob, and Sue)