København

From Varberg, it is as simple as catching a commuter train across the sea to Denmark. Which is pretty crazy, and Johan mentioned how sometimes he pops over to Copenhagen to do some shopping!

We ended up booking a boat to stay on through airBnB for something different. It was kind of cool, Rachael wasn’t a fan as it had a pump toilet and the shower was apparently terrible. But it was a cool novel place to stay for one night.

We had planned to do a walking tour that day, but were my card stopped working so we couldn’t get any cash out until I got it unfrozen and Danish Kroner are different to the Swedish Kroner and Icelandic Kroner. The changing exchange rate was also annoying, I’m glad the Euro now exists for some countries at least.

So we ended up doing all the free things we could find in Copenhagen, and paying for things we had to (like food) on the credit card. We got a metro driverless train to the city, which were really regular and pretty fast. We stopped to have a look at the Church of our Saviour, which had a really cool tower. Unfortunately there was a huge line to go up and it cost money, so we decided to keep exploring.

There are lots of cool canals, this one had some sort of statue under the water.

It was stunningly good weather, and we walked through The King’s Garden which was nice, but would have been even nicer about a week later as everything was just starting to bloom but not quite. From here we walked across to the botanic gardens, which had a greenhouse which was steaming hot.

There were some great little walks and the lake, with heaps of people out enjoying the sunshine (although it was still cold). There were heaps of cyclists on the streets, we saw 2 heavily pregnant women riding which made Rachael concede that she probably can manage the short ride to work in the morning in Toowoomba where it’s not really that cold.

Then more walking to dockside (we had a day ticket for the metro but walking wasn’t much slower), although we ended up doing ~18km each day so was pretty tiring. They had lots of pretty shops along the canal, but all a bit fancy for me.

We then walked up to Kastellet Fortress, stopping at the Little Mermaid statue along the way (pretty unexciting). The fortress was really cool, the rampart is in the shape of a star so we walked along the rim of it, there were lots of people out for a jog, which would be a cool little daily circuit.

Finally, we stopped in at a big dome church on the way back to the boat.

For dinner we went to a cafe in a shopping centre, which was very average for the price and we got table water and they charged us like $5 for it.

The next day Rachael found out there was a museum that was free on Tuesdays. But it didn’t open until 11, so first we went to see the Tivoli Gardens (which were basically closed for winter) and City Hall. City Hall was a beautiful building, and had a thing called the Jens Olsen’s World Clock which I thought was really fascinating (Rachael not so much). It had things such as the time in all the different time zones, as well as positions of the planets, and adjusts the date for leap years, which is incredible for a mechanical clock but probably taken for granted now that it’s done automatically by software on our phones.

The Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek (the free museum Rachael found) would have absolutely been worth the price of admission and was huge. Some of the art was a bit plain, but the statues were amazing. There was a nice garden in the middle as well. They also had some side exhibits like some egyptian mummies and roman sculptures.

Afterwards we went to see another garden in the city and then caught the metro back to grab our bags and catch our flight. We made one more detour to Kastrupfort Fortress which was way less impressive then the other one, but had a good view of some wind farms out at sea. It was an exhausting two days, but we saw a lot and were really glad that we made the stop on the way to Berlin instead of flying directly.