February 1, 2019 – Copenhagen Means Cozy Time and Home-Cooked Meals

Hej! God morgen! God aften! Not sure what time you’ll be reading this, but *insert appropriate Danish salutation here*!

I’m currently writing from about 35,000 feet, to a secret destination. And I am very sleepy because this is a very long flight (my longest ever, in fact), but I have yet to sleep a wink. I’ve instead watched two movies and read a good chunk of my current book, The Joy Luck Club. (Mid-book review: a great read, but I’m struggling to keep up with the eight central characters. Thank goodness it’s a paperback, so I can flip around for reference when needed.) On another note, I really have to pee.

But instead of sleeping, I am blogging, because if not now, I’m not sure when. And instead of peeing, I am wishing I could levitate over the boy on the aisle seat so I don’t have to ask him if I can exit for a fourth time. Curse my tiny bladder.

Anywayyyysss… 

If you hadn’t gathered from the greetings, my last visit was to Copenhagen! My third home. (Home one is home, obviously. Home two is Seattle. Home three, Birkerød, and home four is Vancouver with my HPeeps. Tehehe. So hard to keep them sorted.)

When booking this big flight I’m on, I found a perfect combo that left from Copenhagen and landed back in another city I wanted to visit in Europe. (No spoilers!) And it was pretty reasonably priced for being only a month out, especially since I’m visiting a city a lot of other people are visiting this time of year! But more on that later. This is suppose to be all about Denmark, and I keep getting sidetracked. 

Landing in the Copenhagen airport was homey enough. By faaaaar my favorite airport, and my second-most frequented! Everything is so clean, easy to navigate, and cozy. Love it. And security has never taken me more than fifteen minutes.

Host sister Sara met me at the airport, and I was surprised to see nobody was waving Danish flags at the arrival gate! These Danes are getting lazy, I see. Haha. It was a fun surprise for her to meet me though. We went straight to her apartment, and I was tickled to learn that she is now living in a DIS kollegium. DIS is the school I studied at in Copenhagen in 2015, and its host family program is the reason I met the Jensens! A kollegium is a student apartment, and since this one is DIS owned, its residence are half Danes and half American DIS students. So fun that she’s doing that, and so weird to see the DIS logo on everything here! The apartment was super hyggeligt. Impressive.

It was a pretty late flight and another late night to sleep after showering and catching up. One of these days, I’ll get back to my Finnish early-bed-early-rise schedule. I miss it already.

Soon enough, we hit the town. I honestly can’t remember what our original goal was, but we did a lot of lovely wandering along the water.

We hit up the Black Diamond (national library). This was nice because 1) gotta keep up with my library trend, and 2) last time I visited with Mama and The Boy, it was closed for the new year.

While wandering the library, I was shocked to learn that one of my favorite hidden Copenhagen gems is located right behind the library! I’d never known because the library is split between an old, vine-covered brick building and the new, monolithic glass structure that gives the library its name. I’d never connected the two dots, so I thought this fountain was basically on the other side of town this whole time.

Then we hit up our first tower of the day: Christiansborg. I like this one because it’s free. Muahahahaha.

And then some more water and canal-side trampliiiiiines. I think the world needs more trampolines.

Next up was Nyhavn. We really covered a lot of ground that day. Quite the sight-seers and thing-doers we are.

We meant to just walk along the harbor, but when Sara casually mentioned the waffle and ice cream shop, I had to go in for one of my favorite Danish treats – nougat ice cream with whipped cream and jam on top. Yum! Sara called me crazy for wanting ice cream when it was so cold outside. I call myself weather-blind.

There was a cute little Nyhavn sign that had rock climbing handholds on it, so I tried my best to pose with them. This spurred Jonathan to ask if I was somehow standing on something or if I was just “the most stable jumper ever.” Take your pick.

We also did a little shopping and gallery viewing.

And some walk, walk, walking.

We even walked all the way through the King’s Garden surrounding Rosenborg Castle.

Oh! I remember now! Our original goal was to visit Statens Museum for Kunst – the Danish National Gallery. This is my favorite museum in all of Zealand (the island of Denmark where the greater Copenhagen area is located). When I studied here, it was free, and I would come in all the time just to read or eat or work on my blog because it was so pretty and had such a lovely atmosphere. But by 2017, something changed, so now its entrance fee is about $15. I have yet to convince myself to visit since, but Sara and I were determined, and she wanted to check out the new cafe.

We were a bit (a lot) disappointed to see that the cafe was rather expensive and fairly lackluster. It just wasn’t what we were looking for in terms of food. We decided to head out for food and come back for the museum, but we never did make it in. Oh well. One of these days I’ll get over my cheapness! (Highly unlikely, though.)

We quenched our hunger with hotdogs and special pastries only offered this time of year (fastelavnsboller).

The cashier tried to deny us eating-in-restaurant rights because we had 7-11 hot chocolates, but we convinced her otherwise.

And then the danger began: we visited Søstrene Grøne, by second favorite store in Denmark, and the place I wish I could purchase all of my home goods.

At one point, looking at the goods in my hands, Sara asked, “Why do you need so many spoons?” Silly question, Sara. Silly question.
And then my favorite place in the whole world (lots of favorites today): Rundetårn!

I just can’t ever get tired of this place. And it’s cheap, and every time I visit, I feel like I’m seeing the city in a different light. The small museum exhibits have also been different every time I’ve visited. This one featured pieces from a local fashion school.

Pretty pretty pretty pretty.

Sara was trying to be studious, so that meant I got to visit my favorite library in the city, Hovedsbibliotek. You may recognize the views from several older blog posts.

As the sun started to set, we walked around a bit more and made the mistake of stopping by yet another, larger Søstrene Grøne so Sara could grab some larger items she’d wanted to avoid carrying around all day. This would have been fine if not for my weakness for cute things and spoons. I even bought a (second) cutting board. I have a problem.

Then a quick nap, some more walking, and a trip home to Birkerød for the night! Yay!

It was so lovely to see Maria and Jesper, as always. Dinner was a deeeeelicious salmon, salad, and potatoes with a dill-yogurt dip. Too good. I also purchased a bunch of Somersby flavors I’d never tried, but I only managed to drink two of them, and I forgot the rest in the fridge.

I also did some laundry (Maria’s and my own – ha!), and Sara and I watched the new documentary RBG about Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Highly recommend.

I made the unfortunate mistake of staying up past 2:30 fighting with the WordPress app, and then I found out I’m almost out of picture storage, but I persevered. (Thanks, Jonathan). This is what I do for your readership, Daddio. Sleep came with such a sigh of relief, but of course it didn’t last long enough.

Sara and I had plans to visit the Louisiana Museum, after all! And first, we hit up the cafe. I was personally offended to find that they were not serving their lunch buffet all week because their dishwasher was broken, and I settled for three desserts in its place. 

There was a really cool exhibit all about an architecture firm named Elemental. One section focused on their work with government-assisted or low-income housing, and it detailed the conditions and prices of standard low-income housing in the area versus the homes they created. One thing I really liked about their designs was that they allowed the owners to easily customize and expand the original buildings.

The focal point of the exhibit was a five-sided box, where the bottom side was missing and the whole box was floating about two feet off the ground. Viewers were meant to crawl under this space and lie under the box to view a video that was projected onto the ceiling. It was pretty neat to see all of these adult Danes crawling around and laying on the floor together.

The other exhibits were largely familiar.

As was the beautiful outside.

Sara decided to show me the children’s area, where kids could play with Legos, clay, and paints. And since the whole painting area was empty, we decided to try out our artistry.

That was fun. The rest of the museum walk was nice and casual.

We did a little shopping in the museum store to wrap up the visit, and then it was back to the city to check out the Copenhagen Light Festival.

The old stock exchange building has been used by a private company as an office building for many years, and since they took over, it has only been opened to the public once. This night was the second occasion, and we took advantage of our luck.

Very pretty. We spent the next hour or so just wandering the city and shopping around.

We found a secret way to get a great view of Tivoli, and it basically felt like we were inside. Saved $15!

I really wanted some of these desserts we found, but we were supposed to go get free boas at a new bar called “Hidden Dim Sum by Night.”

It was the grand opening of the restaurant, and at 8pm, they were hanging out a free bun and a free beer to the first 100 customers in line. We got there around 7:45 and… It was pretty obvious we weren’t going to make the cut. They did have some lion dancers from the Chinese-Danish Association of Copenhagen performing to celebrate Chinese New Year, so that was fun. (Sorry for the blurry picture.)

I’ll save you the long story, but basically, we stood in line for about an hour and a half, Sara managed to get a free beer, and I managed to get a free bao. Yay! It was tasty. Sara ordered some extra food because she was hungry by that point, and that was good, too. It was also just a cute little spot. We met one of the owners, the architect for the restaurant design, and a bunch of DIS girls who were waiting in line. Overall not a horrible experience. Just cold!

We marched back to Sara’s place to get some sleep, but first Sara somehow whipped up this fancy chicken meal in no time at all, and we feasted on that a bit. Then sleep time for an early flight in the morning.

Sara was a lovely host, the Jensens were just as wonderful, and I love that I get to see them so often! Copenhagen and Birkerød will always be my home away from home, and it’s thanks to them!

Next stop is a bit more exotic. Until then…

Venlig hilsen/ best regards,

Lizzy-wa

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