Hello Copenhagen

This post took a little longer to put together because a.) there are a freaking lot of photos to add and b.) there are some similarities between Copenhagen and Stockholm and I wasn’t quite sure which pictures belonged to which city. Which is easily solved by checking the dates they were taken, right? But that’s wrong if your camera, at some point, without you knowing or realizing, had an issue and all photos now say they were taken Wednesday July 24. A day when, well, I wasn’t even in Sweden. #firstworldproblems right there guys. Fortunately, I am a super sleuth and figured out which pictures are from where and what day and voila! disaster diverted. 

I’m going to try something a little bit different with this post (also part of why it took a couple of extra days to put up), which is actually going to make it two posts because I know there’s only so much information and photos a person is willing to look at. However, I also want to include as much of the stuff that we saw/did/places we went to/etc., and give as much information as possible because I like it when other bloggers do that, so I figure it’s my turn to try and ~perfect that in my blog posts.

We* took an early morning train from Lund to Copenhagen, which is about a 40 minute ride.  It passes under the Øresund bridge that extends between Malmö and Copenhagen and we managed to snag seats, but it was a packed train. What I found nifty about the transport is that it all uses the same transport card. I had bought a transport card in Lund when I had arrived (a must if you’re visiting. They don’t accept cash on the buses.) and we loaded it up with enough money to purchase our ticket to/from Copenhagen. Then at the station we just selected what we wanted (we bought a family pack for the two of us as it was cheaper) and just used the card to pay for it. For me, at least, it just meant that we were using one thing to pay for our transport and it’s much easier to keep track of.  You can buy tickets online (here and here), but it ends up being cheaper to buy them in person. If you’re not as lucky as we were and you don’t have a super cool aunt who can help you out, they have an English specific help desk to sort you out!

I think my favourite thing about each of the cities that we visited was that they had tourist information so readily available. We stepped off the train in Copenhagen and there was a map right at the exist, a big information I showing us that we were a three minute walk away. Inside, they had information in about a dozen languages, free pamphlets on absolutely anything you wanted to know about, computers to look things up and find places that weren’t on their super handy tourist map, as well as an information desk where you could ask for information, book tours and just about anything else you needed.  I can’t find the map that we used, but this is their official website and it’s amazing.  What we decided to do instead of going on a guided tour was do our own three hour walking tour, which is outlined in little blue feet on the map. Because neither of us are good with directions, we actually ended up about two blocks off the indicated path for most of it, and then hit the going path coming back. Yet we still managed to see everything on it and extended it past the three hours and made a whole day out of it, with a thing or two extra tossed in. (The great thing about the map? It was sponsored by McDonald’s, so had every McD’s listed on it, which was actually really great when orientating ourselves, plus let us know where washrooms were available!)

(for some reason this map won’t load properly. Here it is directly at Google Maps.)

For the most part, that’s the path that we ended up walking, minus a few of the set backs, where we walked in the opposite direction a couple of times and got turned around and all those pesky, messy things. The extra places that we went that aren’t on the map I’ll link to under the photos. If there’s not a photo, I’ll probably say a few words about it and then link you to it. Basically my goal is to bury you in awesome things and links to those awesome things. Hope you don’t mind. Now, without further ado, I’ll stop talking, show you pictures and let you enjoy Copenhagen in silence. (More or less.)

(We did go in the museum, but they wanted us to leave our bags and we just did not have time for that whole sign in/sign out business.)

(I had about a billion pictures of this area. Because boats! brightly coloured buildings! restaurants everywhere! Which are basically my favourite things.)

(The fact that there is no one in this photo is actually kind of a miracle and speaks to my determination and elbowing people out of the way skills.)

And there ends Part I. Hopefully you guys found this vaguely interesting/informative/not too long. Part II will go up probably late tonight/early tomorrow so that we can keep moving on and not still be stuck on my summer at Christmas time. Let me know what you think in the comments!

*I was joined the day before by my friend. It ended up being a bit of a nothing day, so no blog post for you, Gretchen Weiner.

Things I’m Loving:

+ This news – (For the power of sport. #andstuff)
+ These jeans – (Don’t they look so perfect and comfy for fall?)
+ Today’s Google doodle! – (Because I know you sat there and listened to it for a good 20 minutes as well.)
+ Tips for bloggers – (Just because.)