Copenhagen trip: The first few days

Finally time to start writing about the trip to Europe!  All my photos are together, I’m over my jetlag, and I have some free time.

The trip started with a long flight and few days in Copenhagen…

My first salt and pepper on the trip!  Lufthansa was so great (and not just their condiment packaging).  I got to fly Virgin Upper Class for business a few weeks prior and was really worried my ability to adjust to life back to coach.  But the flight was great.  We were on an A340-600 and thanks to booking early and seatguru.com, we got a 2 person row all to ourselves.  The best thing about this plane is that the bathrooms are on the lower level and they are actually quite large. The decent food, free booze, nice bathrooms, free snacks throughout the flight, and good movies on my own screen made for a very nice flight.  I highly recommend the airline, especially if you get one of these newer planes.  The SAS flight from Munich to Copenhagen wasn’t nearly as nice.

These are two shots from our layover in Munich.  What an amazing airport.  The top shot is the McDonalds.  When have you ever seen Eames chairs in an McDonalds?  The food is the same, but it is clear that Germans really care about design.

The whole airport is amazing.  Giant panes of glass, soaring ceilings, and a mall with its own brewery with some of the best beer I’ve ever had.  There was an Audi flagship showroom  which was very cool and a nice little mall.  It was a great place to spend a 3 hour layover.  Any more time would have allowed us to take the train into Munich – something to consider next time.

Finally – Copenhagen!  The shot above is the view from our hotel room.  That’s the Arne Jacobsen designed SAS Royal Hotel on the right (now owned by Raddison) and it was really cool in the morning to get up and see it out our window. More on that later.

We stayed at The Square hotel which is right on the main Radhuis square, around the corner from the train station and right across from Tivoli – the famous amusement park.  I highly recommend The Square for anyone visiting Copenhagen.  It’s a very cool modern hotel with very comfortable contemporary Danish design.  It felt very classy but was not expensive.  In fact, it was the most reasonably priced thing in the whole country!

OK – now you got me started.  I think the fine people of Denmark found the guy that decides how much things should cost at the airport and movie theater and hired him to set the price of EVERYTHING IN THE WHOLE COUNTRY.  Don’t get me wrong, I loved being there, but $5 for a small bottle of water, and the $5 for a bag of chips?  And in a strange twist, things were no more expensive in the movie theater or airport (which might be what threw me off in the first place).  It was a bit stressful, but you did get what you paid for, and the Danes seem to get by OK.  All I can say is that my wallet was so glad to get to Pairs – where things are cheap by comparison!

This is some sort of IKEA electric car.  No idea what this is about, but I do know that Denmark is really moving ahead with their green initiatives and this must have been something to do with that.  There was also a Tesla dealership on a swank street on the other side of town.

OK – now we’re talking!  Our first morning we headed straight for the flea markets, which only take place on Saturday morning.  Since the big one was closed due to construction, we found a different one along an old canal.  There were a lot of good pieces there, but except for this stand, not much teak.  There were a lot of great pieces for collectors of vintage Holmegaard glass, Krenit bowls, and Jacobsen – some reasonably priced.  It seemed that stuff that was readily available in Denmark had pretty good prices and most everything else was quite expensive.  Most of the teak pieces available were Digsmed, some Nissen, and very few from Dansk (remember – Dansk is an American company).  Dansk was mostly very expensive.

Those heavy, round Digsmed trays that guy is carrying in the photo were very nice but they were somewhat expensive (and the price got higher each time I asked).  You can see a few mills on his table, and I ended up buying a salt grinder and pepper mill from him.  They were not expensive, but they were of the sort commonly seen here in the $10 range.  I would have loved to get some glass, Jacobsen stainless, or some other stuff but I was saving my money for JHQ finds and was careful to load up too soon on breakable stuff.  I’ll post about all my finds at some point.

At the heart of the Stroget – the beautiful pedestrian shopping street in Copenhagen – are the three grand palaces of Danish shopping. The classic design store Illums Bolighus, Royal Copenhagen porcelain, and Georg Jensen silver. Right next to each other. Standing there ready for the well heeled to buy amazing things for their homes.

The old port area of Nyhavn is a beautiful part of Copenhagen.  There’s an old canal lined with classic old wooden boats. One side (pictured above) is a row of colorful buildings housing bar/restaurants of every kind you could imagine.  The other side are fine homes and businesses. Quistgaard’s design studio was among these harbor-side businesses at one point, and he was born just around the corner. On the beautiful late summer day we visited it was full of Danes enjoying food, drink, street musicians, and the fresh air.

We were able to find a restaurant serving traditional Danish Smørrebrød – open faced sandwiches with all sorts of different toppings.  I splurged for the mega awesome platter (that is not at all what it was called) and got shrimp, beef, smoked salmon, bacon, cheese, and other toppings for two different kinds of delicious bread.  It was well complimented by some nice Danish beer. It was both my late lunch and dinner.

There’s Mae with her pink bike.  It was a blast joining the rest of the Danes in a bike ride around Copenhagen. Although not quite the bike culture of Amsterdam, it was close.

I’ll end this posting with a funny story about the bike.  We stopped off to shop for shoes and parked the bikes.  All you had to do was engage this little lock that went around the back tire so someone couldn’t drive it away – no chains. We got back from the store and some idiot had locked their bike with a super strong chain to Mae’s shifter cable. There was no way for her to get the bike! There was a small music festival going on around the corner in the street, so there was no way to know when they would be back to unlock their bike. I found a cop nearby and he said to find a bike shop to cut the lock for us. He politely turned down my request of him to shoot the lock off with his Glock. I tried a few things to extricate the pink bike but I didn’t want to break it as the bike rental place had our credit card. I was not as worried about breaking the other bike, as you can imagine.

The nearby bike shop told us it was illegal to cut the lock, even though we explained a cop had told us to!  Eventually they let us borrow a few tools to try to take apart the cable on Mae’s bike and get it loose from the chain. Good thing I used to do bike repair in grade school, because I was able to take that part of her bike apart and kind-of put it back together. Back to the bike shop to borrow some more tools and we got the bike 100% working again. Bike shop: thanks. Bike rental place: we hope the bike still works. Dude who locked your bike to ours: really?