I was looking forward to Copenhagen as it was the only place I hadn’t been to, out of the places we were going to visit during our trip. The city is beautiful in many places, but the amount of graffiti there is disgraceful. I suppose every city has graffiti, but the thing about the graffiti in Copenhagen is that it is almost everywhere you look. Normally you see it in some alley, or out of the way area where people aren’t going to easily spot you doing the graffiti, but there is a lot of graffiti in very public areas. It’s inconceivable to think that there weren’t a lot of people witnessing this graffiti being done in such open areas.

See this: [Link]

Sirens, and emergency vehicles seemed almost constant. I have never seen the level of emergency vehicle activity as in Copenhagen. Most of the activity was speeding police cars. One police car screeched around a corner near the central railway station like in the movies, it was bizarre. There wasn’t even a car chase, surely going a little slower around the corner wouldn’t have made much difference to the police car’s arrival time at wherever it was going.

I got some examples of speeding police cars in my videos, but most I didn’t record. The amount of times we saw police cars racing around was really striking. You’d think Copenhagen was full of crime, but my own feeling is that there is some sort of police overreaction going on, things really can’t be that bad. If you watch my video clip you’ll see at one point, four large police vans driving in a convoy with their sirens going. I can’t think what that could be for. Riot? I didn’t see anything going on. Maybe they found some people doing graffiti.

I’m not sure if it was the graffiti, or the police cars, or something else, but Copenhagen, although beautiful, didn’t have a very friendly vibe. It felt very friendly in Sweden (I’ll write some stories of things that happened in Sweden in a future blog when I write comparisons between the places we visited). The people we spoke to in Copenhagen were not unfriendly, they were very much the same as if you spoke to people in Australia and England. The people were fine, but even though we were strangers in Sweden, we were treated more like family. Sweden had a really good vibe, and has had everytime I have been there, and being there feels very comfortable. This is something I’ll write more about later, not in my post about Copenhagen.

On Day One, we checked in to our hotel after our train journey from Ronneby. We were very tired, we got some room service dinner and went to sleep. I took some photos of our room, and views from our room window. We were lucky to get the 25th floor, the second highest floor, especially for New Year’s Eve. The photos of the room and views from the window are here: [Link]

On Day Two, the photos start from the front of our hotel, and we walked towards the bridge that goes to the main city area. I suppose it was a 10 minute walk to the bridge with photos. You’ll see photos taken from the bridge, before we continued over the bridge and got to Tivoli which is about a block past the bridge. Tivoli is an amusement park which is interestingly in the middle of the city. We didn’t go in there, as LittleB doesn’t really like amusement parks, and the things in there were difficult to photograph from outside the fence. The taller things, such as the ferris wheel, were easy to see there. We turned left and walked a block to where the central railway station is. This is where we arrived in Copenhagen. I didn’t get any photos of inside the main station terminal, but it looks a lot like inside Paddington railway station in London (if you know it) or something like central railway station in Sydney (though it looks better than central station in Sydney).

After we got to the railway station we turned around 180 degrees and walked back past Tivoli, and then kept walking straight until we found a hop on, hop off canal tour. A photo of where we got on the boat is below (mind the graffiti):

We got off the boat after a short time when we got to Nyhavn, a pretty area in Copenhagen’s “Gamla Stan”. It is where Hans Christian Andersen lived for a time, and we photographed his house. We also had lunch here and I got to try Danish glögg. It had more kick than the Swedish glögg, must have had a lot of alcohol (not that it created any effect when drinking it). It was a huge glass of glögg too, normally glögg is served in a tiny cup, it was like Christmas seeing this huge glass of glögg. I’m sure LittleB got a photo of it. It was not a nice flavour to begin with, it was like rocket fuel. The alcohol fumes were stinging the inside of my nose before I could sip it as I was bringing the glass to my lips, but once my taste buds adjusted it was fine. It seemed to indicate a high alcohol content, but as I said before, any alcohol in there had no effect. I prefer the sweeter glögg with rich spices that I had in Sweden. LittleB and I have already researched some glögg recipes and have got some ingredients to make our own glögg. I’ll publish the recipe when we get something to taste like the glögg in Sweden.

I just did a search on Nyhavn and found this: [Link] I needn’t have gone, they have the same photos I took. If only I looked earlier. There is good information about Nyhavn there though, more than what I knew, which was close to nothing. After lunch it was starting to get dark so we walked back to our hotel. The rest of the photos after the Nyhavn photos are of that walk back to the hotel.

All the photos from Day 2 are here: [Link]

There are more than 200 photos, so make sure you use the slideshow. Set the image size to “No Limit” and the speed to 3 seconds.

On Day 3 we walked to the area in front of our hotel. This was a park area that you might have already seen from the photo of the views from the hotel window. There is a bridge that goes, well, across to the other side. We walked on the path on the other side of the bridge, and went through to the streets that can be seen on the other side of the park from our hotel window, as you look directly ahead from our hotel window. Remember on Day 2 we went to the left of our hotel window towards Tivoli, but Day 3 we started heading to the area in front of our hotel. Just after the park we came to a street with a canal going down the centre of it. There were people in kayaks and ducks were doing their thing there. A lot of the buildings in this area looked very interesting, but again there was a lot of graffiti too. We made our way to a supermarket to get a few snacks for New Year’s Eve celebrations in our room. Unfortunately everyone else in Copenhagen was in this same supermarket doing the same thing, and it was packed full of people with lines for the cash register going back halfway to the end of the store. You think I am joking!

After the supermarket, we made our way in the direction of the city and crossed a bridge to the main city area where the Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior was parked. We headed for a shopping area that we had passed by on Day 2, close to where we got on the Hop On, Hop Off canal tour boat. There were a lot of people there. We found a tower that we could climb up, not with millions of stairs, but a spiral walkway. The view from the top was not great. I mean you could see for miles, but there was nothing of much note to see. Just rooftops. The photos are there anyway. All the views are there, but they are just views of rooftops. We tried to keep away from the other Australian couple that was there.

After that we found some lunch in a place called Sari’s, I thought I had a photo of it, but I don’t. LittleB has a photo of it though. The restaurant is just to the left of the view in my last photo. We waited an eternity for our food. It was nothing personal though, everyone else waited an eternity for their food too.

Here the video of our Copenhagen walks. It is 33 minutes long and weighs a whopping 358mb, so only watch it if you can afford to!

We walked back to the hotel after lunch because it was getting dark. Already the fireworks were going off. Even during the day people were letting off the occasional firework. Copenhagen, like Sweden, allows everyone to buy their own fireworks to let off, like Australians were allowed to do in the good old days before some authority got tired of people blowing their limbs off and getting burnt. As a result, when it is dark, fireworks are continuously exploding in the air, people don’t necessarily wait until midnight, though after midnight the sky is the busiest with fireworks. Without stopping, fireworks are set off for a good hour after midnight, even after 1am there were plenty of fireworks. LittleB watched from our hotel window as these tiny fireworks were being set off all over the city. It just became too funny, we burst out laughing. We are used to the huge things on Sydney Harbour I guess, not these little things that explode and in a second disappear. However, it was not all as pathetic as we thought it was going to be, it really did get impressive in some places. For a time, the fireworks at Tivoli looked very impressive. I have it on video. There were a few fireworks that exploded in front of our hotel window, it was like being IN the fireworks. That was the most amazing fireworks experience I have had. Of course, LittleB was in the toilet when that happened so she completely missed it. I have it on video, but the effect is not the same as in real life where they looked enormous. They’d look great on a big screen TV, which I don’t have, in fact I don’t have ANY TV since our TV died the day before we went away on holidays. Time for a big screen TV me thinks.

I took about 45 minutes of video of the fireworks, most of which you’d find boring, so I made a highlights package that goes for 4 and a half minutes. The clip starts with the fireworks to the left of our hotel room, at Tivoli, then a view of fireworks in front of the hotel that people were setting off in their backyards, then the fireworks that exploded in front of our hotel window.

Here is the highlights package (4mins 30sec / 59mb):

In the extended (45 minute) version, which I won’t post here, there are scenes of fires in the street, firetrucks going in different directions, a police car booking a taxi driver in front of the hotel (how embarrassing), police cars with more flashing lights and sirens, but also of course, lots and lots of fireworks. It’s so long and drawn out though that it is boring. Just view the highlights package and you have the gist of the better bits. After seeing the highlights, it is mostly the same scene for about and hour or so. Before midnight though, for several hours, fireworks were set off all over, but just one or two at a time from any one spot. After midnight everyone let fly, as I said, for more than an hour.

There was a big party down in the lobby of the hotel, everyone was dressed very formally, and they all seemed to be Copenhagen locals. It seems they do what we do in Sydney, book hotel rooms at hotels with great views of the fireworks and have a big party.

That’ll be all.