Copenhagen

We started our 100th day of the trip right by doing a free walking tour (we love doing these when we visit new cities)! We met at city hall, which was actually modelled after a cathedral in Siena, Italy. We found out that this was actually the 6th city hall and it was constructed in 1905.

We then proceeded to walk through the city, learning a lot of fun facts along the way, including that:
- Like Oslo and Stockholm, Copenhagen has also experienced a lot of large fires (it seems to be a theme in Scandinavia where they loved building with wood!!) In 1728, there was The First Great Fire which was started by a candle in someone's house and the couple blamed it on their 7 year old son! That poor kid was blamed for having burnt down half the city!
- In 1795, Copenhagen had its Second Great Fire where the other 50% of the city burnt down. After this, the city made some changes to try and prevent further fires such as making the streets much wider, they changed the corners of the streets so they didn't use 90 degree angles (so it was easier for fire-fighters to get around to houses) and there were rules about the construction materials which had to be used in Danish houses (I.e. they couldn't be made fully of wood).
- Danes pay a lot of taxes but have free school, university, health care and uni students get paid to go to uni plus support in finding new jobs. This is part of the reason why Danish people always score very high on the "happiness index" being considered some of the happiest people in the world.
- We walked past the house of the founder of Carlsburg's beer. Carlsburg was founded because the founder wanted to create the best beer in the world and travelled to many European cities to try different beers. He discovered that the first step was to ensure they had clean water and the problem in Copenhagen was that the beer there didn’t have taste consistency (because they used different yeasts which always tasted differently). With the king's approval (who just so happened to be a fan of beer), the founder set up a brewery just outside the city walls and discovered a great yeast that they shared with rest of world to help everyone have good beer! The yeast was discovered in 1883 and hence the Calsberg 1883 special beer was born!
- There are more bikes than people in Denmark and over 50% of people use bikes as transport, with bicycle highways to get from suburbs into main cities. There is quite a bit of bike theft in the city so people usually use their "worst" bike for riding into the city and then their "nice" bike for visiting friends.
- We had a quick language lesson, learning some phrases in Danish. We like that "hej" is hello and "hej hej" is goodbye. We learnt about the concept of "hygge" (which doesn't have a direct English translation. A lot of English words are derived from Danish/the language the Vikings used. For example, "by" is the word for town/city in Danish so any English towns which end in "by" were Viking towns.

During the walking hour, we visited a number of nice squares and buildings in Copenhagen including Christianborg which was a palace built for the royal family but they didn't want to use it so it is today used as the Parliament house. We also saw many students wearing particular caps which looked like sailor hats and riding around in trucks playing music loudly and drinking as we walked around. We even saw some of them jumping in the fountains! This is a Danish tradition for when students graduate high school and the trucks drive them around to each family of the families, having drinks all day and night!

We finished the tour in front of the Royal Palace and then headed into the Marble Church - a very European looking church in the heart of Copenhagen. Of course, we spoke about the modern love story of Prince Frederick and Princess Mary (who met at the Sydney Olympics). Interestingly, we learnt that the Danish royal family is the second oldest royal family (after Japan) so other European royal families have to bow to them when they meet up.

We then had a walk through the Kings Garden and stopped in the Botanical Garden for a quick lunch break before heading into the Rosenberg Castle. The castle had 3 above ground levels and one basement level, housing many artefacts from the Danish royal family, from paintings to sculptures and even some creepy wax figures of kings and queens! It was the home of where the royal family used to live and then where the royal family housed their dearest and most expensive possessions. We finished off the tour with a viewing of the magnificent Crown Jewels in the treasury.

We continued our walking through Copenhagen to our last stop of the day, Tivoli Gardens. This is the second oldest amusement park in the world but also contains some pretty gardens, fountains and a lake in the centre. We also went on one of the oldest running wooden roller coasters in the world (built in 1914) which was lots of fun (see funny photo of our faces!)

We enjoyed some organic burgers at Tivoli for dinner before watching the light and water show in the main lake at 10:30pm to end an incredible day of exploring!Read more