Copenhagen

We are staying in at Morten's Guesthouse in the Christianhavn area of Copenhagen (blue house, pink door). We climb one flight of stairs to our room and the shared bathroom and another flight of stairs to the kitchen.

We can store food in the fridge and borrow plates and cups if we promise to clean up after ourselves.
Here's the toaster.

Dave went across the street to the bakery this morning while I was showering and brought back these pastries.

Let me just say that is this not like Solvang pastry. The texture is light and crisp with no gummy center and the flavor is buttery sweet. We are really hoping that the bakery will be open early enough tomorrow to pick up some to eat on the train back to Berlin. I like the long twisty one on the left the best.

We took the City Cirkel bus around town to get oriented. With a 24 hour metro/bus pass you can get on and off as often as you want. However, our driver clearly hated his job--heaven forbid we should ask him exactly where we were on the map. We were the only two passengers on the bus. So we got off at the tourist information office and bought tickets for the Hop On Hop Off sightseeing bus, which advertised a recorded narration in English and had headphones at each seat.

The headphones didn't actually work, so the English narration was also delivered over the loudspeaker. It only took a few blocks to realize that the narration was completely out of synch with the things we were passing. Apparently it was recorded on a traffic-free day. So the driver kept backing the tape up and replaying it until we arrived at the point of interest. Some of the segments were repeated three or four times and some were explained long after we passed the building or monument. Oh.. and it turns out that the mermaid in the harbor has been shipped to China for an exposition so they have some kind of video representation of her there instead.

After going through the full tour, we got off the bus in Christiana, which is a community of squatters who took over an old military base in the 1970s and turned into a hippie community. Photography is not allowed on Pusher Street where hash is offered for sale. We bought a falafel and latte instead and avoided the brownies. We did take a couple of photos of the colorful graffiti, which is everywhere--even on the rocks.


I'll another on my Flickr page under in the Denmark set. They also had fires burning in steel oil drum containers where we warmed our hands. (The sun was out but it was still a cold day). Those drums give off a lot of heat. We didn't take photos of them because the guys standing around them with us looked like they might be hash salesmen. As we left Christiana, we passed a sign that said "Re-entering the E.U."

We decided to stroll through the more upscale pedestrian shopping streets but didn't really see anything we wanted to buy. So we stopped at a bakery to get pizza for dinner and brought back some pastries for dessert.

The cherry tart has almond paste piped around it. The cherries were sugar syrup sweet and the almond paste had that extract flavor so that one was disappointing. The round chocolate truffle was pretty good. The nut tart lacked character but is a lot tastier if you take a bite of truffle with each forkful of tart. The pistachio paste log surrounding a fudge-like center was the best. One end is dipped in chocolate. It's not too sweet and the combination really works together.

So that's my report for today. We head out early in the morning for our 7-hour train ride back to Berlin. But first I have to write a note in the guest book.

Complainments? This reminds me of one of Wolfgang's first visits when he thanked us for our hostility as he was leaving.