Friday

I slept a little better – at least I wasn’t wide awake at 2:00. Our plan for the day was to go over to Malmö, Sweden. My paternal grandmother was Swedish, and I wanted to visit Sweden since we were so close. There’s a tunnel and bridge (the Øresund Bridge) between Copenhagen and Malmö, and travel between the two takes less than an hour by train or bus.

The Øresund Bridge is apparently famous, so when I asked the Concierge at the hotel about visiting Malmö he asked if I wanted to see the bridge or visit the city. He recommended taking the bus to Malmö and the train back. The bus travels on top of the bridge and the train is under, so the bus route would give us the opportunity to see a little bit more of the bridge.

He gave me a bus schedule and good directions on getting to the bus, but not on how to purchase a ticket. It’s a private company and not a service offered by the regular mass transit company, so we couldn’t purchase tickets at the regular train/bus station. Turns out you purchase your tickets at the bus itself: cash only. 100 kroner round trip, though we didn’t actually need the round trip. The bus made several stops including the Copenhagen airport before crossing the bridge to Malmö. Several more stops before we reached the end of the line near downtown Malmö.

We had a tourist guidebook to Malmö that the Concierge had given to me but it took some time to get our bearings. He had recommended walking down one of the pedestrian walkways. Lots of shops and restaurants.

Apparently their Starbucks equivalent is Espresso Stop, since we saw them on almost every block.

We saw a pretty Lutheran church.

And walked down to Folkets park. Malm̦ is not the touristy, historic area that Copenhagen is Рmore of a residential community. Quite a few people live in Malm̦ but work in Denmark. We saw lots of people with little kids who were playing in the park.

I liked these cat sculptures along the canal.

In the pedestrian sections we saw lots of of teenagers parading up and down and blowing horns and celebrating and making lots of noise. The girls were all wearing white dresses and the boys were dressed in suits and hats. Lee finally asked one of them what they were doing – they were seniors celebrating their high school graduation with an all day (and all night) party. They were having a great time.

We went over to another park, Slottsparken. This one had a number of different gardens in it. Including a “water-wise” type of garden that looked like something from California!

A lot of the flowers were very large!

And there was a very picturesque windmill.

This building is called the Turning Torso. We weren’t that close to it, but it was so tall, and standing off by itself, that it was visible from a long way away.

One thing that was new to us: all of the public toilets we saw had attendants, and charged 10 kroner to use them. We didn’t have any Swedish kroner, but fortunately they accepted Danish kroner, also.

The trains back to Copenhagen ran every 20-30 minutes, so it was easy to catch one back to the central train station which was about 1/2 mile from our hotel.

After a short break we headed out to take the bus tour of Christiania. We made our way back to the Strøget only to find that Distortion had taken over that part of town. In addition it was a national holiday (Constitution Day) and the streets were blocked off. It turned out the bus was now leaving from a site near our hotel, but we didn’t have time to walk back to catch what was going to be the last bus of the day.

We ended up at the large mall near our hotel – but all the shops were closed – we assume because of the holiday. Lee found the (closed) Apple Store. 🙂

The restaurants were open and we had a good meal at a Thai place – and they served a Belgian waffle for dessert.

We were back in our hotel by 7:30, and just relaxed for the rest of the evening. We were headed to the port the next morning, so didn’t have any big plans.

Saturday

I actually slept pretty well and it was Lee’s turn to get up in the middle of the night. Jet lag. I think it’s been worse than when we went to Asia last year. Both Copenhagen and Hong Kong are 9 time zones away from San Diego, but it’s been much more difficult going east than west. Maybe the long days have something to do with it too, since we don’t have the cue of darkness to trick us into thinking it’s nighttime.

Saturday morning we packed. I laughed when I found this note under our bed. 🙂

We took a quick walk downtown to stretch our legs (and I wanted a few souvenirs). Once we returned we paid our hotel bill with cash (saving us a number of fees). The lobby was very crowded with guests waiting for the Disney buses to the port. We had opted to take a taxi so we could set our own schedule – I know from previous experiences that the Disney buses don’t get you to port until after boarding has started. Taking a taxi ended up being a lot faster as well as a lot cheaper.

I really enjoyed our time in Copenhagen. It was a beautiful city, and there was a lot to do. There were many more things that we didn’t have time for – I would’ve enjoyed visiting some of the Hans Christian Andersen sites, trying some of the rides in Tivoli Gardens, maybe getting to Helsinger (Elsinore – location of Hamlet’s castle), touring the Carlsberg Brewery, the Round Tower, etc. I guess we’ll just have to go back!

That said…I was very happy to see the beautiful Disney Magic at the port. I’m not a seasoned world traveler, and this few days of being on our own was the hardest part of the trip. It was a great relief to realize that the hard part was over and we could just leave everything in Disney’s hands for the rest of the vacation!

Coming Next: Sailaway, Day at Sea

Comments (3)