DAY 316

Tuesday 22 May 2012

Yes, besides the car pulling in and facing our van for more than an hour, past 1 AM, with lights on and engine running, did we mention we were about 25'/8m from the commuter train tracks? Oh, where's our peaceful comfy Holy Toledo Hilton? ... all in the name of a year's worth of travel -- and we were fine with it.


The last to get to sleep, Charles woke at 7, took a stroll to check out the neighborhood and found a parking lot just around the corner within walking distance of the castle, four hours free parking, so he moved the car. We were in Hamlet's hunting grounds way before opening time at 11 but fortunately everything but the chambers inside were accessible so we got to spend a leisurely hour+ strolling the grounds and the ramparts and the moat paths, the courtyard and the beachside area, where Charles no sooner started fantasizing out loud about ancient warships landing on that very beach than Nicole pressed a button on a short metal kiosk there and got several minutes of recorded dramatic reenactment -- so unexpected and really fun.

Gargoyles in storage

Kronberg castle, with a sister castle on the eastern shore, controlled for centuries the waters through which much commerce had to pass to northern Europe. The Danish kings collected a passage fee and became very wealthy and powerful. There's more, but we don't often recount all the history here, and more often we don't know it all. The old no Wi-Fi thing. Yes, we would probably appreciate more some of the things we'd seen with more background info, but we'd done our best. We found a lot of treats by popping into tourist info offices, asking locals and fellow travelers, checking out postcards, and so on.


At the end of our Kronberg time Charles finally let the others know of the surprise he told them was coming: he had decided to use part of his birthday money gift from Dian's parents to celebrate a week early and take them on a canal boat tour of Copenhagen, followed by some of the famous open-faced sandwiches. With big smiles we headed down the road to the Big C, only 40 minutes south.

On the way there we read about the changing of the royal guard, in their really tall really fuzzy black hats (made of bear!) and sharp blue uniforms, that happens just once daily, at noon. We GPS'd straight to Amalienborg castle, found parking right around the corner and made it just in time. They marched across town for half an hour and the changing ceremony, spread far over the vast castle courtyard, took another 20 minutes, so we had plenty of time to take it in and get some great photos and videos.

One of the royal's shuttle boats, which blew steam out for us

The Little Mermaid statue

We drove not far to where the canal boat tours left, parked and picked a good'n, and climbed aboard to meet our guide Josephina, who spent the next hour dispensing history and anecdotes and ducking, sometimes head to knees, to avoid being decapitated on the low bridges. We loved cruising way out into the big harbor, past the royal yacht with its sharp white-uniformed sailors in waiting (for the prince), the new dramatic opera house, the even more dramatic "black diamond" (great singles spot, J said) and of course a stop to see the famous Little Mermaid statue... from the back. But we knew not to expect much (she's very small). 

Our guide, Josephina and the captain

These sailors couldn't wave to us because they were standing at attention, but they still
 subtly waved their hands behind their backs at us

Interesting to hear from Josephina that famous son, Hans Christian Andersen came to the big city to join the famous Danish Royal Ballet, but failed because "He was too ugly." That seemed harsh but hey, that's show biz, and when he turned to writing we got "Thumbelina," "The Little Mermaid," and (hmmm) "The Ugly Ducking." Look up a rendering of ol' Hans -- even from the back row of the theatre he would stand out.

The great fun of our tour turned sour as soon as we got back to he car to find a parking ticket on the windshield. Even though we tried to be careful and use common sense, read the signs as best we could, and shelled out 45 kroner (nearly 8 bucks) for a voucher from the automated kiosk which was displayed in our window, we violated a 10-meters-from-the-corner rule (that was illustrated and explained in Danish on the SIDE of the kiosk, not the front where everyone stands to pay, and not on the other two sides splashed pink with advertisements). 510 kr = $85/68 Euros! Thanks for the welcome, Denmark/Copenhagen. You know a Dane should know better or at least be able to read the kiosk warning, but how about a little slack for a visitor's car with out-of-country plates, who was obviously trying to follow the rules by paying the expensive kiosk fee? Or.... maybe foreign plates were targeted? We waited for a while to see if the meter person would come back around and maybe we could talk to them, but finally decided to push on and go see Christiania, the bohemian part of town we had heard so much about.

A street artist at work

There was a children's daycare center along the lake in Christiania with a sign saying "Please no hanging out on weekdays unless accompanied by a child" 

It would be hard to give you an idea of this amazing area in words so we'll let Nicole's photographs do most of the telling. It's a huge area, crammed with tiny homes decorated outrageously, tiny shops selling everything including exotic selections of hashish and pot (no photographs allowed there), and even a big lake so hidden we kept walking past it until someone said, "Yeah, it's right behind me, go up the steps then down again." Art everywhere! A real feast for the senses. The area grew up in the late '60s, then.... never grew up. Europeans seemed blase when mentioning it but we found it a living breath of fresh air in a continent crammed with cathedrals and museums honoring the distant past.

After we got our fill it was time for those open-face sandwiches but we hadn't passed any place that had them, so Charles headed out on a hunt. He went many, many blocks with no results till finally someone directed him to a terrific bakery that did not have them but had an employee who thought she knew of a place three blocks away, and bingo! She was right! But bummer, they were closed. Charles spotted a young man in the back working so he banged on the window and finally got his attention. When he came to the front door it took him a good minute of key twisting and banging with his fist and finally a serious waist-high kick before he got it unlocked... just to hear what Charles wanted to ask. 

Turns out he was very gracious about selling half a dozen of his finest and even threw in an extra "for taste." In scarily expensive Scandinavia, the seven sandwiches plus a baguette of good dark bread came to only 88 kr, $14-something. Charles finally marched back to the van triumphantly carrying his prizes, we grabbed some libation from the nearby shop- (a tall Carlsberg Elephant for the sandwich hunter) and headed off two blocks away to the canal area to join all the locals celebrating the good weather by dining on the canal.

People brought picnics, tables with glassware, even small barbecues; families, large groups of friends, young, old, singles, lovers of all stripes (two tall thin very young very very blonde skater-types; one young female couple who were particularly striking, both gorgeous, nicely dressed, one Asian brown and the other African black as midnight), people lazily cruising down the canal on small boats. We settled onto one of the benches provided and enjoyed our special repast while also watching a man working on his beautiful masted boat in front of us. Drop down into that scene and you want to move there in a flash (ignoring the draconian parking punishments, if you can). 

Having had enough of the evil side of Copenhagen we decided to hightail it out of town and drive south toward the ferry that would take us to Germany and our new friends Heinz and Luzie and doggie Don, Germans we met on the beautiful beach at Tarifa, Spain, on the Strait of Gibraltar, who said, ''Please come visit us if you're in the neighborhood," and so we were. Not far out of Copenhagen we decided to stop, both drivers being tired from a very long day, and found a rest area for trucks and pulled into a far corner for the night.