Today has been an exhausting, but great, day! Woke up to the alarm and thought I’d just
close my eyes for a second. 20 mins
later, I was up and out of bed! Ate
another sumptuous breakfast and off we went to the train station.
We got off in town and walked to the castle that Christian 4th
built. It is quite an impressive
building! It’s called the Rosenborg
Castle. We looked around the outside and
then walked through the gardens. Ronnie
enjoys history and told me a lot. Gill
used to be a teacher and filled in other parts of history. Here is the link to the castle. It will give you a lot of history about the
kings if you’re interested. I haven’t
gotten very far with the blog because I started reading about them, haha!!
The Rosenborg Castle:
http://dkks.dk/english
It was a gorgeous day.
I did manage to get a little sun, but not so much I burned. It was about time for the guards to change so
we made our way up to the Amalienborg Castle. There are four buildings in the
compound. This is where the Queen &
Prince Consort and the Prince & Princess who are next in line live. The third area is for guests and Gill thinks
the other building is some sort of museum.
The changing of the guards begins at the Rosenborg
Castle. The guards then walk the two or
so miles up to Amalienborg to change.
When the Queen is in residence, there is a band. Gill says it is far nicer when they play, but
I did enjoy the military precision. We
got to the area and I managed to get about 3 people back and could sort of see
when the new guards walked in. Then, all
of a sudden, the policemen motioned for people to come forward and everyone ran
like crazy (except me) forward. I was
bewildered, haha! But, I was able to
sneak in a peek of what was going on.
Apparently, they change guards at all 4 of the
buildings. This was a good thing because
I was then able to be front row as the police parted the crowds so the guards
could march from one building across to the next. Then, they did the same things in front of
the next building. After watching twice,
we moved on. I’d seen what needed to be
seen and had gotten some nice photographs.
We then walked down to Churchill Park and over to find the
Little Mermaid. Well….it’s a
statue. And it’s little. And it’s of a mermaid. It is a very pretty statue, but I find it
amusing that it is THE thing that people associate with Copenhagen, haha! I managed to get a picture of Maggie with the
mermaid in the distance.
After we saw the mermaid, we walked down the harbor. Here I saw a submarine out of the water, a
huge and very elegant/expensive yacht, and the amazing opera house. We were a little hot and thirsty, so we sat
down and watched the world go by. They
had a beer each and I tried a lemon soda.
Feeling refreshed, we began our walk down the area that
looks like I thought Copenhagen would look like. Apparently Dutch architects were brought in
because a lot of it reminds me of Amsterdam.
The buildings were very old, some from the 17th century. There is one that has a plaque to note where
Hans Christian Anderson once stayed.
Ronnie said that Anderson traveled so much that he didn’t really have a
home, he just stayed in rooms that people let out to him.
There were canal trips available, but the waits were too
long, so we opted out and continued on our walkabout. We walked past the theater, and along the
oldest section of town. In the near
distance, there was a spire made out of the tails of three dragons on top of
the old stock exchange. We walked next
to the town square area where executions were performed until the 1780s. From there, we went to a place called The
Round Tower. It is a tower attached to a
church and you are able to walk up to the top.
Luckily, most of the walking is on a flat surface for about ¾ of the way
up. The rest is by stairs.
At the top, you are able to see all of Copenhagen. It was really nice that we did this toward
the end of our day because that way Gill and Ronnie could show me everywhere
we’d walked up to that point. It had
clouded over a little, so it had cooled down, which was nice. However, I don’t know how well the pictures
came out.
The Round Tower’s website is: http://www.rundetaarn.dk/en/
or I’ll give you a quick history here. It
was built by Christian 4th from 1637-1642. Its tower is 34.8 meters high and it united
the three areas available to 17th century scholars. It was originally used as an
observatory. This is why the first part
is a spiral ramp. This way they could
roll the equipment up easily. About
halfway up there was an area used as a library and hidden in an alcove you can
step onto a glass disc and see 25 meters below into the hollow core. Literature says that this core was used to
mark the center of Copenhagen in the late 1760s when they were making a map of
Denmark.
From there, we caught the metro and then walked through Christianshavn. It’s the seedier part of town, not to be
walked through at night :o) This is
where the spiral, outside staircase can be found. Apparently when the original architect
discovered he’d made the spiral backward, he committed suicide. It was supposed to be useful to people
fighting with swords, but the way it was built wouldn’t allow the right-handed
swordsman the opportunity to fight.
Bummer!
We are now at home and I’m writing the blog and Gill is
fixing a yummy-looking dessert and Ronnie is fixing a masterpiece for the
grill.
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