Viking Fishing Village

So I'm finally getting around to posting about my weekend in Scandinavia's second largest city and former Viking fishing village, also known as Copenhagen, with my parents.  Only about a month after it actually happened!  Here goes:

After arriving in Copenhagen and making our way to Nyhavn, or "new harbor" - not really all that new as it was constructed in 1673 - from the airport via the metro, this anchor statue was one of the first things that greeted us.  Taking a 180 degree turn gave us this view of the canal:

On the left in this picture you can see part of a party/drinking/restaurant boat that you can enjoy the canal on.  Nyhavn offers a couple of different canal tours, so we got tickets for the quick one hour tour and got to see some of the major sights of the city from a canal boat.  I had trouble staying awake for the duration of the tour as I had the bright idea to stay up all night in order to watch the Vikings get embarrassed on national television lose a tough game to the Packers.

After the tour, we hit up Amalienborg palace, the winter home to the Danish royal family.  One of the first things I noticed about Copenhagen relative to the rest of Scandinavia is that you can really see that loads and loads of money flowed through here throughout its existence.  They knew how to pillage and they knew how to turn their loot into cool things.  For example, Amalienborg palace:

Just lookin' around with my pops

Changing of the guard.  A pack of guards like this would march around to each post and one of them would march right up to the guard he would be relieving and get right up in his face for a few seconds before switching places.  I yelled, "Kiss him!" during one such swap but the guards either did not hear me or they did not appreciate my humor.  Must not have heard me.

Here's a picture of the Copenhagen opera house from Amalienborg.

And of course my mom had to harass some poor, innocent bystander into taking our picture.

The next morning we headed to Norreport, a really cool indoor market and food hub, to meet up for a food tour that my parents had booked.  I didn't really know what to expect, but I wasn't really surprised to find myself being the youngest member of the party by about 20 years.  I was pleasantly surprised, though, that the tour took us to some really cool places and that the food we ate was pretty good.  Some highlights:

After leaving Norreport, we took a stroll through the University of Copenhagen Botanical Garden on our way to a local brewery in Copenhagen's meatpacking district.

Inside the aforementioned brewery.  We got to taste a handful of beers including an ale brewed with jalapenos (much better than it sounds).

Other parts of the tour not pictured include eating smørrebrød, Danish open-faced sandwiches, eating organic (!) hot dogs from a street vendor, and checking out a 100+ year old candy shop.  After the tour finished, we went to check out Rosenborg castle, pictured below.

Had to take my picture with King Christiaan IV.  He pretty much built everything in Copenhagen which is impressive.  Not quite as impressive, however, is the fact that by the time his rule ended, Copenhagen was pretty much bankrupt.  At least they got some nice things out of the deal.

Because I'm 12 years old, the following pictures were my favorite part of Rosenborg:

Yep.  Here's a boat that was constructed by Danish prisoners while imprisoned in England built entirely from the bones that they saved from their meals.  You can't really tell how insanely intricate and detailed the boat is by the picture, but it's one of the coolest things I saw in a castle filled with cool things.

Here's another boat from the castle, but this one was made of ivory.  It's a really cool and intricate boat but was it worth murdering whatever amount of elephants/rhinos/ivory producing animals that it took to build it? Maybe?  Not pictured, but in this room there was a tiny elephant figurine made out of ivory.  Humanity!

 

The throne room.  You can't have a throne room without statues of lions all over the place.

Eventually we made our way towards the Church of Our Savior.  It features an impressive spire that, for those willing to take the 398 step ascent, can be climbed.  Here's the view from a few blocks away:

And the view from the first landing, which is the circular platform that the spire sits on:

And 398 steps later:

An assortment of pictures from the weekend, starting with the central train station:

Some canal swans:

A statue built as a part of the competition/movement put on by the Association for the Beautification of the Capital.  It is called the Dragespringvandet, or dragon fountain.

And this is one of my favorite pictures that I took over the weekend.  Just a couple of dudes killing time and some beers watching the canal go by from the comfort of this street couch.  If I had to, I'd guess that there weren't twenty teeth between the two, but I think they've got it all figured out.

Some other highlights not pictured: 

• Getting a beer at Mikkeller bar, which had over 40 beers on tap including many local beers.  I later found out that the owner of this establishment was the math teacher of my Danish friend who lives in my dorm.
• Eating at Fiskebaren and trying raw oysters for the first time (they were good!)
• I appreciated/was amused by in Copenhagen was that it's perfectly acceptable to drink in public.  Most restaurants and stores had signs out in front advertising the "take away" beer price.  Sometimes you just gotta grab a road beer and drink it in the streets.

I really liked Copenhagen and could picture myself living there some day, despite the seemingly endless throng of tourists.  Of the Scandinavian cities I've seen, Copenhagen rates the highest for me, but I also think that I would grow tired of Copenhagen sooner than a city like Oslo.

Tromsø and the Lofoten

I know I haven't posted about Copenhagen yet, but I have so many pictures from that weekend that I've been procrastinating going through and organizing them into a coherent blog post.  So, until I do that, you'll have to be satisfied with a post about my weekend in northern Norway with my roommate and three other Germans.  For the weekend, we rented a cabin at the Lofoten and a car to get us there.

After a five hour drive to Oslo and a two hour flight to Tromso, we got in our Hertz rent-a-car and began our trek to the Lofoten, an archipelago located in northwest Norway.  This should give you an idea of where we were at:

Since the trip from Tromso was a seven hour marathon drive - and because one of the Germans, Jonathan, had "keine blase" and needed to take bathroom breaks every hour and a half - we made quite a few stops along the way.  This was, more or less, what most of the way looked like:

And of course we had to stop and pick up a couple of cases of local beer some basic survival supplies for the cabin:

After what I would say is Way Too Much Time In The Car With Four Germans, we were able to find, in the pitch dark of 5:00 pm in northern Norway, the cabin we rented.  Here is the cabin:

And the view from the deck:

After getting up bright and early to greet the day and take advantage of what limited sunlight we would have, we set out for Reine for some hiking and to explore the end of the Lofoten.  Some highlights from our stops along the way:

A friend we made while snapping pictures

I was told I had to strike a pose

The Germans, (L-R: Jonathan, David, Matthias, and Simon) with Simon showing us how it's done

David and Simon taking in some Norwegian surfers

We were eventually able to pry David away from watching the surfers and made it to Reine, a town near the end of the Lofoten where there is a two to three hour hiking trail that offers a view of the town.  Here's a shot of the town from below and one from the top:

After the hike, we headed back to the cabin for a nice quiet night of studying and schoolwork and absolutely no drinking whatsoever.  We were hoping to be able to catch a view of the northern lights while in the north, but the weather did not cooperate as it was cloudy each night.  The rest of the stay at the Lofoten was uneventful and after another round of Way Too Much Time In The Car With Four Germans, we arrived back in Tromso to explore the city for a day before heading back to Oslo and then Kristiansand.  Here's the main square in Tromso - somebody put their mittens on the end of the statue's spear:

We pretty much just killed the eight or so hours before our flight back to Oslo.  I wanted to check out one of the record stores but was bummed to discover that it was closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, though my wallet was happy.  We hit up the Polar Museum before heading to a pizza buffet where we all ate a regrettable amount of pizza in an effort to get our money's worth:

Don't mess with polar bears - they have no remorse or morality

This hunter is about to get his seal clubbin' on

Cool model depicting a typical hunting vessel

Those seals probably had it coming

Pretty cool trip, despite missing out on seeing the aurora.  Will post about Copenhagen hopefully sooner than later.

There's Norway I'd go Oslo as to make two puns in one blog post title...

I'm sorry about that.  Here's a brief recap of my weekend with my parents, who came to Scandinavia to visit me for two weeks, in Norway's capital.

We visited the Viking ship museum just outside of Oslo.  Here are some pictures of three of the largest and best preserved Viking long ships in existence:

Afterwards, we hit up the Norwegian National Folk museum, which was located nearby.  We arrived about ten minutes before the exhibits closed, so we really only got to explore the outdoor areas.  There were replicas of the many different styles of houses used over time in Norway.  They were, apparently, all about having grass on their roofs.

The entrance to the museum was very pretty:

Some houses:

Some friends we made who live at the museum:

A cool tapestry, one of the few things I got to see in the exhibits before we were kicked out:

An assortment of pictures from around Oslo:

Some highlights from the weekend:

• Waking up at 10:30 on Saturday because both my parents and I overslept despite intending to get up early to explore Oslo
• Visiting a local brewery Schouskjelleren for a couple beers (really, really good) before turning in on Saturday and talking with some colorful characters that included an Australia professional paintball player turned cook (to pay the bills), a Norwegian IT student who was dogpiling on the Aussie for installing video games on his SSD without having a HD, and a world-travelling German-American chef who was extremely passionate about his craft and seemed like he had a pretty good handle on cooking, travelling, and life (he was also helping dogpile on the Aussie)
• Browsing one of Oslo's record stores that offered a really impressive selection of rock/metal records (especially Scandinavian bands) with a nice selection of blues, jazz, and even some country.
• Walking around Ghost Town Oslo on Sunday morning trying, unsuccessfully, to find somewhere to eat breakfast (almost everything in Norway is closed on Sundays).