Copenhagen

We had one day in Copenhagen: the plan was to arrive by 9 or 9:30am, after our overnight train, check into our HUGE hostel, then see the city in one day. Because our train as horribly delayed (see previous entry), we didn't actually arrive until about 2 or 3pm. :(

We checked into our hostel, and headed back out into the city.

On our way to the Skagen store, we passed by the Copenhagen KPMG!! This was exciting for me because all the cities we've been in have PwCs and E&Ys and Deloittes everywhere but I had never seen a KPMG! Yay!



We stopped by the Skagen store, but it was even more expensive than in the US, so our dreams of buying cheap Skagen watches were destroyed mercilessly. Next we went to Christiania, which is a hippie commune in Copenhagen. It was a very strange experience...

According to Wikipedia, "Christiania serves as a haven for people with certain alternative lifestyles, and was founded in 1971 when the hippies took over an abandoned military zone. The Danish authorities have many times over the years done more or less serious attempts to shut Christiania, without success."

Everyone was wandering around in hippiesque clothes, buying knickknacks from street vendors or food from street vendors/tents or cafes. The strangest part was that there were street vendors selling drugs - with literally all the goods laid out on the table! It's illegal to sell drugs in Copenhagen...but for some reason people in Christiania don't get arrested!

There are no photos of Christiania, because they ask that people don't take photos.

Next up we went to see the little mermaid statue. Since Hans Christian Anderson was from Copenhagen, and he wrote The Little Mermaid, there is a small statue of a mermaid sitting off the coast of Copenhagen. Kim really wanted to see it, since she has an old photo of her grandma with the statue during her grandma's travels around Denmark. The statue is a famous Copenhagen icon and a popular tourist attraction, but this particular year its IN SHANGHAI. For the 6 months of World Expo 2010 its in the Danish pavilion in Shanghai. Silly us, Kim and I didn't think to ask Denmark if their world-famous icon was IN THE COUNTRY.

Instead there was just a screen where we could watch the little mermaid, hanging out in Shanghai:


After that misadventure, we went back to the hostel and sat around in the common room, where we met some other people from CA! There was a UC study abroad trip in our hostel, so we talked to them and a random girl from Australia.

Hostel Review:
Danhostel Copenhagen City was HUGE, with 1020 beds. It looked like a giant office building - we were on the 17th floor. We ended up getting our own room, not because we paid more but because we got lucky. Breakfast was crazy expensive, like $15 each or something, so we skipped it. Sheets had to be rented, but that was fine because we had travel sheets. Overall a good hostel, even though it was expensive and the breakfast, sheets and internet was ALSO expensive. (Internet = 5 euro an hour). It was very close to the train station, walking distance to that and everything else.