Churches and fountains and beer (oh my!)

Get lost once, shame on me. Get lost twice…

I left the hotel at 5.45am this morning to make the early train here, only to have to wait at the station for half an hour as they seem to be rather fond of last minute boarding here!

Anywho, I arrived just after 10am and headed to my couch surfing place – only to (wait for it) get incredibly lost. I was told it was 25 minutes walk, and yet after 90 minutes I was no closer. AND I HAD A MAP!

But I got confused by the address – it’s both a suburb and a street name, and there’s a metro station also with the same name… so I spent ages finding what I thought was an apartment complex but turned out to be a metro station. When I finally found it I saw that I had turned a giant circle. Oh well.

So anyway I’m here in Copenhagen now, settled in and everything.

I bought a two day pass to a sightseeing bus tour of the city – three different routes take you past most of the main attractions, which actually turns out to be really handy as I can get on and off as they drive by at half hourly intervals. I totally checked out the little mermaid today as well as a couple of other denmarky things! I’ve attached a photo of the mermaid to prove I was there, but I think I’ll go back tomorrow and spend some proper time there as it seems wrong to just sit there for three minutes while your tour bus sits and waits. It’s kind of like driving past the Eiffel tower I guess.

After all my walking today I decided that I would treat myself to a beer – a Carlsberg, Denmark’s pride and joy. So I ordered at a nice local Irish bar (of which there are about a dozen in the city centre) and paid 49kr ($18NZD) for a rather nice beer. I’m not sure it was $18 nice, but it was probably 49kr nice. So I have to learn to deal with the fact that the NZ dollar, despite its strength against the greenback at the moment, will never be enough to compare dollar for kroner, so I might as well accept it. The waitress, sensing my distress, distracted me with small talk, pleasantries, and prettiness, which helped make the beer last almost an hour, while still remaining cold. Thankfully that’s one area where the Swedes and the Danes differ – where the Swedes like their beer warm (and not in a fun ‘bring out the flavour way either’), the Danes like theirs to be frosty cool which, on a hot summer day, is all you really want.

I took photos of lots of fountains and churches – of which I suspect there will be many during my trip.

Tomorrow my plan is to spend some time at some of the main points of the tour – back to the mermaid, check out some of the palaces and maybe even a shopping centre or two.

My couch surfer guy is very cool indeed – he has a couch surfer plan on his fridge which shows just how many people he actually hosts! He’s always got people coming and going, and is ridiculously generous with his letting me stay and such. His last guests were here for three months! Australians, of course. Bloody bludgers.