Copenhagen

I haven’t had much to time to deal with pictures or the blog. I was working on getting everything organized on my computer and I had midterms.

Well, Copenhagen was fun. I took a taxi to the Sevilla airport at 6 am on Friday and flew to Madrid, it’s only a one hour flight. I had six hours before my flight to Copenhagen so I took the metro downtown and walked to the Palacio Real. I had not seen it yet, I didn’t have time when I was in Madrid last month. It was big and up on a hill with a good view of the suburbs. I took a panorama picture of the square in middle of the palace. There weren’t many people there that early. I saw an art exhibit and another exhibit on the history of the European Union. A display showing all of the euro coins was cool to see as each country has their own design. Italy’s one euro coin has Da Vinci’s geometric man on it and the Greek coins had some cool designs featuring Greek gods and goddesses.

I went back to the airport and flew to Copenhagen. I saw a beautiful sunset from above the clouds somewhere over France. I started looking for the metro at the Copenhagen airport to take it to the hostel where Mom and Dad were. I asked, there is no metro, but there is a train that takes you to a metro station a few miles away. So I bought a train ticket, luckily they took euros and not just Danish kroner, and followed the directions of the guy who sold me the ticket. One train came that was almost empty, a few people got off but no one who was waiting got on this train so I decided not to get on either. A few minutes later another train came and everyone got on that one, so I followed the crowd. I was waiting for the stop with the metro station, it was only a few minutes away. The train didn’t stop for 10…15…20 minutes. I started to wonder if this was the wrong train. I looked at the map of the train’s route on the wall and realized that the stops scrolling along on a screen in the train were names of towns in southern Sweden. I looked at my cell phone to check the time. It said I was roaming on Sweden’s network (I was on Denmark’s network earlier). I got a text message from my cell phone provider, it said “Welcome to Sweden, you can call Spain for the same rates…” in Spanish. This was not a good sign. I thought that everyone at the Copenhagen airport was going to Copenhagen. How could all these people be going to Sweden? I got off at the first stop. I was in Malmö Sweden. Oops, I went mistakenly went to the wrong country. I waited in the cold rain for the next train going the other direction. I didn’t have a ticket but the ticket lady just laughed at me when I told her that I went the wrong way.

So I got to the metro station, the right one, in Denmark. I had a hard time figuring out the machine that sells metro tickets. Then when I got to the metro stop near the hostel, all I could see was empty parking lots and dark buildings. I was in the middle of nowhere and there were no street signs or people around. I was going to just sit down and wait for someone to walk by, but then Mom and Dad showed up. Por fin!

They showed me the giant hostel and our big room, I dropped my stuff off, and I drooled at the new red Saab parked outside. We took the metro downtown and walked through the main plaza, sort of a Danish Times Square. We went to a wide cobblestone street that had a canal full of boats running down the middle of the street. We looked at every single restaurant before finally picking one. It was busy so we had a Carlsberg in the bar while waiting for a table. The food was really good. Herring prepared four different ways, lemon sole, a huge pile of mussels, and pepper steak (elk?). Tons of young people were out having a good time. People were drinking in the streets too, it felt just like Spain, except a lot colder.

On Saturday we walked all around Copenhagen after driving through the suburbs for half an hour. We saw all the shops, ate some falafels and shawarma, had coffee. It was cold all day long. We looked for restaurants in the University neighborhood. On Sunday we drove to Roskilde, a town that was an important city when the Vikings ruled 1000 years ago. There were a few old Viking ships recovered from the seafloor and some replicas of ships. We had more good food and chocolate in Roskilde. And then I went home. Scandinavia is really cool, I’ll have to go back in the summer sometime and take advantage of the warm weather and all the lakes and forests and old towns.

And then I had midterms this week. Spain plays Slovakia tonight to qualify for the World Cup. The Spanish prince and his wife had their first child last week, a baby girl that they named Leonor. Pictures of the baby are all over the news. An amendment to the Constitution is being discussed to allow females to inherit the throne. Right now the oldest male inherits the throne, a woman only does if she has no brothers.