Sunday May 21, 2023 Copenhagen

As I mentioned about our hotel, the CPH Hotel was only about a 10 min. walk from the train station, and an 8 min. walk to the church.  But these weren’t the only reasons that Sue selected this hotel.  It has a separate food hall that has a great breakfast buffet.  It also has several Pickle Ball courts, that people were using, but we didn’t, maybe next time.

The breakfast was fantastic, right up Sue’s alley, but as she pointed out, there weren’t any Danish in the breakfast buffet.  Sweet Danish would have been right up my alley.  After breakfast we were off to Central Station to take a train to get to the Sorø Art Museum to see another 1001 painting.  The train ride was about 50 min. and then we had about a 25 min. walk to the museum.  The weather was great, clear skies and temperature around 70 deg.  This is a small museum, and the painting we saw is “Nightmare” by Nicolai Abildgaard.  If you search for the “Nightmare” painting (and I don’t know why you would, but) you will probably find “The Nightmare” by Henry Fuseli, a 1001 that we saw at the Detroit Institute of Art in November of 2014. Fuseli’s painting was so popular that he painted at least three other versions.  Abildgaard knew Fuseli in Rome, and so he painted his own version.  Wikipedia will tell you more if you are interested.  Fuseli was Swiss and Abildgaard was Danish.  I found it very interesting that this second version of the “Nightmare” that is located at a very small museum in Sorø, itself a small town, would also be included in the “1001” book.  My,”too much time on my hands” theory is that someone had some pull with the editor of the “1001” book. Not important I know, but I’m writing this on a 3.5+ hour train ride to Gothenburg, Sweden. 

After our museum visit we walked the half hour back to the Sorø train station for our ride back to Copenhagen.  The train was packed so we had to stand for the 50+ minute ride back to Copenhagen.

Our next adventure was to visit the hippie commune, Christiania in Copenhagen.  It was founded over 50 years ago as an anarchist commune.  I took a few photos as we entered, but you are not supposed to take photos, so I stopped.  I don’t know how “anarchist” the commune is today, because there were many places selling marijuana along with bars, cafes and other types of “businesses”.  Marijuana is NOT legal in Denmark, but I guess it is tolerated.  We did have a bit of an adventure getting to the place.  We took a bus from Central station.  When we bought the tickets we were told to go out the north side of the station and take the #37 bus, and get off at the 6^th stop, it was a short walk from there.  When we exited the station and got to the bus stop a #37 showed up in no time, and we were off.  I was following our trip with Google Maps on my phone, and soon noticed that we were not stopping at the stops Google listed for the “right” bus.  So at a stop light I asked the bus driver, who was older than me, if we were on the right bus, and he said no.  So we got off, crossed the street and got on a #37 bus going the other way.  It did take us to the commune.  We got on the right bus going back to Central Station, and headed back to the hotel to rest until we went out for dinner.

For dinner tonight we were going to Tivoli Gardens.  This is the 2^nd oldest amusement park in the world, founded in 1843.  Sue had been scouting out restaurants in the park, and had made a selection.  The place is huge, and you can see some of the rides from outside the park.  You pay to enter the park, we chose the option w/o rides, we just wanted to walk around see the sights and get dinner.  And that is exactly what we did.  If you are into amusement park rides this would probably be the place for you.  The lines, if there were lines at the rides were not very long.  We found the restaurant we wanted and were seated outside.  Watching people is also fun to do in a place like this.  They didn’t have any strong (high alcohol) beer, but what we had was fine.  The restaurant’s dish that had six different selections wasn’t big enough to share, so we each got the same dish.  There are photos of what we had, and Sue may add a description after I finish writing.  After dinner we walked around a bit more and then went back to the hotel to turn in for the night. Monday we will be off to Stockholm.  Edit - One of the videos of the tower ride with rotating swings actually has audio, so see if you can turn on the sound to hear what I'm saying.

Sunday May 21, 2023 Copenhagen