Day 32 Born to Ride

In an attempt to really experience the city, and to not just be tourists, it seemed that the obvious thing to do in Copenhagen was to hire pushbikes for a day. Thankfully this was made easy in two ways. Firstly Copenhagen is flat so you can enjoy riding a bike without having to worry about gears, and also with something that Richard thought was a very quaint reminder of his childhood, back pedal brakes. Secondly the city has followed a program started in other European cities where you can rent a bike at one part of the city and then just return it to a rack later and your money (the equivalent of $5) is returned much like a trolley in a privatised airport or a greedy supermarket. So we ‘girded our loins’ and headed out for a day in Copenhagen, on push bikes.

Again this task was made easier by the fact that many of the streets in the city have bike lanes. These lanes are well populated especially by tall blond beautiful Scandinavian women who ride on mostly black old-fashioned ‘girl’ bikes with wicker baskets attached to the front. Many of these women look incredibly elegant as they ride sitting very upright and wearing their high heals and stockings ready for a day in the office. But they also ride very fast so you have to be able to keep up with the bike traffic. Our day was great fun. We visited a 400-year-old astronomical tower, which still is one of the tallest buildings in the city. The tower affords a visitor, willing to climb its circular ramp to the top, an amazing view of the city. Then we witnessed the changing of the guard outside ‘our Mary’s’ palace. After that we checked out a wonderful museum, which explained what it was like to live in occupied Denmark in WW2. Finally we rode across the city to lunch at our favourite building, The Black Diamond.

After dropping Peter at the station to return to the Logos Hope we continued to explore the city on foot and discovered some charming city lakes that are probably ice skating venues during the northern winter. In the late twilight about 9pm we ventured out to a hippy neighbourhood called Christiania, which we decided was not one of Copenhagen’s greatest assets.

The sun finally set at about 10pm and the day ended with a hot chocolate in a pub overlooking another beautiful canal. Hans Christian Anderson’s city has charmed us and we are very glad to have paid it a visit.