København.

Whoa time for a new post on the travel blog? I THINK SO. About time right? Well mostly up to this point has been traveling around Hamburg, doing homework, and planning trips. Well and watching scary movies. But that's besides the point.

Anyroad, we (being Marsha, Peter and myself) decided to take a night bus to Copenhagen on Friday night. Because we thought that "Hey, if we're going to go to Copenhagen, then we'll GO to Copenhagen!" Right? Makes sense. So we packed our backpacks with bed linens for the hostel, an extra shirt, a toothbrush and camera. We were fully aware that the bus would arrive in Copenhagen at 5:30 in the morning. Meh. Little did we know that the bus would be so packed and smelly and hot.... Marsha and I certainly didn't sleep, unlike Peter.... But anyways, we all sat by weird people who wouldn't let us sit together and such. And then we took the ferry across... well, whatever sea that is, to Copenhagen, Denmark! :P

We arrived at the bus station at, 5:30AM, and it was FREEZING COLD. We were not expecting it to be that cold. It said 15 degrees on the weather website! Lies... All lies. And we were dead tired of course, having took Gravol, we were super groggy but I thought the cold would wake us up a bit. We managed to convert our Euros in Danish Kroner without much problems, and then managed to worm our way onto a bus that would take us to our hostel. I had printed out a google map from the hostel website and everything! And we found the hostel just fine! Turns out.... that that hostel was the wrong hostel, a different branch of the one we had apparently booked (although that one matched the picture on the website, I'll say). The lady pointed out where our hostel was, and it was like 4 blocks away from the bus station we were just at. DERP. So we took the bus back (with the same driver LOL) and then walked through the blizzard of wind to the actual hostel.

Marsha and the park by the wrong Hostel.

But the check in time for the hostel was between 2PM and 5PM, so we put our luggage in the luggage room and decided to kill some time. Keep in mind that it's like 7AM at this point. We decided to walk around and maybe try and find a café or something to eat at and wake up. Except nooooooothing was open, it was like a ghost town! Which is very unlike Hamburg, where there are always people, no matter what time of day or night or morning. We also had our experience with the kamikaze bikers of Denmark, they're... crazy. And merciless. Although I did read that Copenhagen was the most bike friendly city in the world. Which I would believe, they barely have any traffic at all! Anyroad, we walked around and then had to warm up in the hostel lobby again. So we decided to go to one of the museums, which had a lot of ancient artifacts. Except we were so tired, we were basically just wandering around like zombies. I don't really remember much of that museum... We even fell asleep for a little bit in one of the rooms, with mummies and movies and chairs and such. GO US. We then decided to walk around and take a boat tour through the harbour and canals of Copenhagen. But we waited at the wrong stop or something, or the weather was so bad that it didn't come. We waited for like half an hour at least but nothing came, so by that time we could check in at the hotel. We made our beds and did some research of where to eat.

I forget what building this is...

We don't look freezing at all!

In the hostel room

So then we went exploring and came across this lovely little café with delicious looking hot chocolate, so we took shelter in there for about an hour and listened to the somewhat muted band playing out side in the pouring rain. We then went to this traditional Danish restaurant, which was quaint. Had some steak with an egg on it (for Marsha and Peter) with some Copenhagen native Carlsburg beer. I had this smoekd salmon thing, that was also delicious with amazing cider. :)

We then wandered around and Peter wanted to go to the Planetarium, so we wandered in there, read some stuff about stars in Danish and put marbles in the black hole machine, and watched a movie about the hubble telescope in the imax theater! My first imax movie and I fell asleep..... I actually don't remember the end because all of us just woke up at the credits because the screen was so bright. :P Although I do remember the big close up shot of the Canada Arm *REPRESENT*.

We then decided to retire early for the night, because we were all so useless and tired all day. Which was weird, I've never felt like that in my life, and never have I fallen asleep in 3 public places in one day. I honestly went to bed at like 9:30 or something. Out like a light. For the first time ever all in time, I fell asleep before Marsha. Which never happens.

The next day, we hijacked some breakfast and decided to go on the free tour that the hostel had advertised. After some mishaps on finding the meeting place, we got to the starting square that has the Copenhagen town hall, or the Rådhus, and met our awesome Danish tour guide.

Rådhus, and giant flower pot.

Excited tour guide!

The free tour was fabulous. We learnt about a Danish 007 badass whose stories were so crazy that they were almost unbelievable. Like one where he apparently refueled this tiny farming plane while escaping to the UK while still flying... TWICE.. also he apparently almost assassinated Heinrich Himmler when Himmler was scheduled to stay a night in Copenhagen but didn't due to illness. He was poised and ready to shoot him with a crossbow (yeah that's right a crossbow) from the room across the street that had a view into Himmler's room. Wonder how things could have turned out differently eh?


The rest of the tour mostly consisted of seeing old buildings that had been built and rebuilt several times thanks to the awful fires Copenhagen seemed to be plagued with again and again and again. Finally they started to figure out to build things with stone. Derp.


We also saw where the prince and princess of Denmark live - they were home since the flag was flying, but unfortunately the queen was away. Jena and I both agree that something crazy should happen to us like how future the king and queen met. It's like a real life fairy tale :D

Badass Royal House!

We learnt about Hans Christian Anderson's life story and how he eventually came about writing all of those charming little stories. And of course we can't forget about Jacob Jacobsen - founder of Carlsberg beer! He also funded a lot of projects around Copenhagen as well.


After the tour our guide led us to this little place by the water that sold the most delicious hotdogs. It was like 2 or 3 euros for a beer and a hotdog but the hotdogs were so incredibly hard to eat. Seriously. Messier than eating crab almost. The salsa or whatever he put on just spilled everywhere. Oh well. Totally worth it.

Next stop was the museum that Jacob Jacobsen donated his collection to. It had stuff from all over the world (like Egypt etc) but it was mostly sculptures and although interesting I think Jena and I got fairly bored of it pretty quick. So we ended up sitting in the middle room that kind of reminded us of the secret society room at UBCO and stared at the awkward baby statue. And the Degas collection we were excited about turned out to be just a bunch of his bronze casting studies of the body. Which was kind of interesting I guess since you don't normally see that BUT I would have preferred the paintings obviously.

CREEPY BABY STATUE!

Then it was time to head over to the awesome hippie area of Copenhagen called Christiania or Freetown Christiania ^^ It took us awhile to walk there but we finally arrived to the 'Green Light District'. Now I've been to Amsterdam but this was quite different. First of all Marijuana is not legal in Denmark but the authorities just sort of turn a blind eye in Christiania so when you're walking through the area you're not allowed to take any photos and with good reason considering they just sell everything out in the open. It was certainly an interesting experience but we didn't stay long since we still had a lot of exploring to do. We set out to see the Opera House up close but somehow managed to walk the whole entire island.. it felt like it would never end. But on the bright side we did get on one of the ferries for free!


We skipped seeing the statue of the mermaid since it was a little out of our way.. I mean it's just a mermaid -_- and instead we headed towards the castle and its gardens. The castle itself wasn't all that impressive but it did have it's own mote and the weather and scenery were quite pleasant and worth the extra mile or two to get there.

Treeeess. 

Castle. Complete with moat.

After that we decided to head back to the hostel so we caught a bus grabbed our stuff and headed to where our big bus was supposed to stop. It took walking up and down the street before we figured out where it actually was supposed to stop. Once it came we got on an claimed several seats to ourselves, which proved to make our trip back to Hamburg much more pleasant than the trip there. XD

Oh man it felt pretty nice to be home in Hamburg again!~ Although it was (almost) just as cold. SKÅL!

-Jena & Marsha