Copenhagen Episode 1

Hello, good morning and welcome to the summer 2023 Copenhagen edition of an English Fool Abroad with his Sketchbook: Episode 1.

Well, if you saw my post on Monday you’ll know that my flight was delayed by about 4 hours. Now, looking back from the safety of my room, I probably feel more sorry for Jenn than for myself, since she was so pleased when we booked the flight back last year because it meant that I would be arriving while it was still light. I don’t know why that should make so much difference to me, but it does. Also it meant that when I perpetrated my first act of foolishness – leaving my printed maps and instructions of how to get to the apartment and how to actually get into it at home, she was the recipient of several phone calls. Copenhagen is only one hour ahead of Port Talbot, so they were quite late as well. Never mind, once I got to the metro station things began to look up. Copenhagen is only the 4^th airport I’ve flown into that has a metro station with it. Heathrow was my first, Madrid my second, Edinburgh my third (alright, that’s a tram line rather than an underground railway, but it’s called the Edinburgh Metro and that’s good enough for me, laddie) and now Copenhagen. Once I got out of the Metro station trusty old Google Maps took care of the rest.

Ok, there was a bit of foolishness yesterday – which only became clear today. I’m staying in a room in an apartment in Vestamagr. When I got into the place, one of the other people there showed me the room I was staying in. How should I put it? The room could not have been more basic without playing ‘Basic rooms are here again!’ on a continuous loop. Yes, there was a bed. No covers, sheets or anything else but I was so tired I just laid down and went to sleep. Where’s the silliness Dave? Stay with me on this one. I will elucidate later.

Now, if you’ve read any of my accounts of these trips before you might well have noticed that there are some recurring themes – I think I’ve called them required elements at one time or another. One of them is shopping in a local supermarket. Now it just so happens there’s one opposite the Metro Station. Stocking up for the day, I went to pick up a packet of Tuc biscuits. Now, there’s not many varieties of Tuc that I don’t like. Guess what though? The only variety they sold was Sour Cream, the one that I don’t like. “Mean spirited bastards!” I announced. All heads turned towards me in disapproval. Yes, gentle reader, a hell of a lot of the good people of Copenhagen DO speak English, and a lot better than some English people.

It was a relatively fine November day in Copenhagen this morning, which was a bit of a shame since it’s supposed to be August. As we flew into Copenhagen yesterday the pilot announced, as we were landing, “The weather in Copenhagen at the moment is . . . “ I’m sorry, but pauses in an announcement are rarely a good thing, especially coming from the man who has your life in his hands for the next 5 minutes or so. “The weather in Copenhagen is . . . a bit windy.” Oh, they love their understatements, these Danes. Today it was blowing a gale. Still, I’m a hardy Brit (well someone once said I looked like Oliver Hardy) and we thrive on terrible summer weather. So I made up my mind that I was going to make a date with Lille Hayfrue. Nice girl, but she doesn’t move around a lot. Lille Hayfrue is of course the Danish for the Little Mermaid. I decided to see the Little Mermaid first, before the crowds started gathering. And to be fair, that wasn’t a bad move.

It’s really rather small, as world famous statues go, and it’s kind of. . . well, it’s just there. You see it and you think – oh, there you are then. The head is based on a famous Danish ballerina of the time, Ellen Price. Yes, despite the welsh sounding name, she was Danish. Carl Jacobsen, son of the founder of Carlsberg lager seemed to have taken something of a shine to her and asked her to model for the statue after being enchanted by a ballet version of Andersen’s fairytale. Ellen Price agreed, but refused to pose in the nude, so the mermaid statue has her head, but stuck for a model, the sculptor Edvard Eriksen said to his missus, “Get yer kit off, love” and he used her as the model for the body of the mermaid. Whether the long-suffering Mrs. Eriksen also had a tail like the statue, History does not tell us.

After being unveiled in 1913, old Lille has been in the wars a bit since. The head has been hacked off at least twice, and the arms have been damaged too. She’s been covered with paint on quite a few occasions, and as part of the George Floyd Black Lives Matter Protests in 2020 her base was daubed with the words ‘Racist Fish.’

Here’s a thing I’ve found out about Copenhagen. It has more palaces in the centre of the city than you can shake a stick at. In a bracing relatively short walk from the Little Mermaid I passed the Amalienborg, the Charlottenborg, the Bjornborg and the Locutusofborg. (I may have made a couple of these up.) Now, you know how all of our guards regiments who take turns to guard Buckingham Palace wear red ceremonial tunics and bearskins? Well, in Denmark their guards wear bearskins and blue tunics. There you go.

Today seemed as good a time as any to check out the National Museum. And it’s very good too. As you’d expect the Vikings are given prominence, but I was surprised just how much the museum showed about the pre-History of Denmark. Goodness me but didn’t the ancient Danes love shoving things in bogs?! Seriously, it seemed as if well over 2/3 of the exhibits were found in them. The museum passed the 2 hour test. What I mean by that is that you know a museum is good if you can suddenly look at your watch and realise you’ve been there for two hours or more without really being aware that this much time has passed. Mind you, a fair proportion of that was taken up in sketching the skeleton of an Aurochs, while waiting for the crowds of primary school Danish kids to be moved on by their harassed teachers. As I exited, so did one party, and as the teacher called the register I was sorely tempted to shout yes for each name . Professional courtesy won over schoolboy mischievousness, but it was a hell of a battle.

Not far from the Museum is the entrance to the famous Tivoli Gardens. Now, I have to say that this famous Pleasure Park does illustrate something less pleasant about Copenhagen. Here’s a question. Why will you never see the phrase Gratis Adgang in Copenhagen? Because it means free to enter, and nothing is free to enter in Copenhagen. Well, apart from the public pissoirs – no, I’m not making it up, they do have them and they do call them pissoirs. When it comes to the cost, to be fair, I kind of expected it would be like this. I enjoyed both Reykjavik in Iceland and Stockholm in Sweden, but they were the two most expensive places I’ve visited on these expeditions. It’s a Nordic thing, I think. Still, the thing is that I just wanted to walk through the Tivoli Gardens. I had no wish to go on any of the rides thank you very much, and the prospect of being rushed over a tenner to do so was one at which I baulked. Getting into the Prater Park in Vienna, which is a similar sort of thing, is free, for example. Still, when I turned away, on the opposite side of the road I noticed two pubs side by side. One was “The Old Irish Pub.” Right next to it was “The Old English Pub”. The Old Irish Pub was packed to the rafters, inside and out. The Old English Pub was empty. Maybe the proprietors had gone too far with the English theme and perhaps they had stuck a couple of old codgers in flat caps by the bar, playing dominoes and moaning about the price of a pint. I blame Brexit.

Time was getting on but the international sketcher must laugh in the face of fatigue. Then quietly pretend to be an OAP to take the last available seat on the Metro. It’s not big and it’s not clever, I know. Whereas the Copenhagen Metro itself is not big, but it is pretty clever. The newest line opened in 2019, and the oldest stations were only opened in 2002. The first thing that struck me about the platforms was how short they are. There’s a reason for this. The trains themselves are only 3 carriages long, and these carriages are not separated by carriage doors between them. They remind me just a tiny bit of London’s DLR, because the trains are driverless and if you are lucky enough to bag a seat at the front you have a clear view ahead of you.  Last destination of the day was to have a look at the Oresund Bridge. Naturally enough I went to Oresund Metro station. Hmm. Oresund Metro station is not as close to the Bridge as the Airport is. I reckon it was at least a couple of miles away from the bridge. Nonetheless, the thing is so big – 5 miles long – you can see it from Oresund.

Now, light of heart but sore of foot I turned for home. When I got there, I found a rather indignant young fellow waiting for me. ‘You are David?” he asked. When I answered in the affirmative he informed me that the room I had slept in the previous night had been the wrong one. When I replied that another guy had told me to sleep in there when I arrived, he wrinkled his nose and for a moment I thought he was going to ask me, “If he told you to jump in the Skaggerak, would you do it?!” but instead he replied,

“I do not understand why he would do this. I do not understand why you would sleep in this room with no sheets and no pillow.” I considered telling him that if he’d left his house at 7am and only arrived in the place he was staying at gone 11pm then he, like me, would have been ready to sleep on a chicken’s lip. But I didn’t. I even spared him the ever popular ‘Because I ain’t a bleedin’ mind reader, mate’. Instead I gave him an apologetic ‘I’m a clueless Englishman’ smile, which often has charms to soothe the savage European, and moved my stuff. Sorry, but that’s about the best I can do you for foolishness this morning.