Today was another sleep in day. For breakfast we had the slices of cake that we bought yesterday from the oldest bakery in Copenhagen. Then we started our day. The bookstore yesterday was a bust for rare Claude Shannon books, but Dawn has been looking at their online catalog for something she might like. The misleading ABE listing aside, the store seems really cool and Dawn discovered that it’s nearly 200 years old. She finds some Hans Christian Andersen books and we go back to check them out. Score one rare book for Dawn’s library. I’m sure she’s going to cover it in more detail.
Next comes a slightly sad bit of modern globalization. The thing is, I really like the blue watch I checked out at Skagen yesterday, but I passed on it because it was $80 more here than ordering it off the American Skagen website. This morning I checked the American Amazon listing and discovered the watch was almost a third of the Copenhagen price for the watch. So I ordered it from Amazon. I can’t say that I got it in Copenhagen, but I guess I could say I tried it on and then ordered it in Copenhagen. Not the same… but it’s hard to pay three times the price when it could be waiting for me when I get home in a few days.
After rare books and watches, it was time for today’s sightseeing. Dawn has been very keen to visit Christiansborg Palace, so we go there and check it out. It is the third palace built on the ruins of an even older castle. It’s the third version due to a combination of the having to keep up with the French and the obligatory fire that levels a palace. We started by walking around the modern palace and then toured the ruins underneath the palace. I actually thought it was pretty cool that they made the earlier ruins part of the tour. We also checked out the royal kitchen which is frozen in the moment of its most ambitious meal in the 1930’s. Lastly, we visited the royal stables, which still houses white horses still used for ceremonial purposes.
After the palace we headed back to the rental to fold laundry (the nice thing about being in an apartment instead of a hotel is access to a washer and dryer). Then we headed west to a cocktail bar named Lidkoeb. On the way there we realized that we only had a slice of pie to eat today and stopped at one of the many hamburger places in Copenhagen. Copenhagen is infested with hamburger joints. They are everywhere. We stopped at Halifax, and truth be told, we had some really good hamburgers complete with Danish beef. Lidkoeb was just around the corner so we went there next and enjoyed a few cocktails.
Later in the evening we also sought out a cocktail bar called 1105. The bartender there was Norwegian and we manage to strike up a rapport. He made us some tasty drinks while also providing a list of bars and restaurants we might want to check out while in Copenhagen. Spoilers, we had been working down his list on our own. While talking I expressed an interest in Aquavit and how surprised I was that I hadn’t seen more of it around, being that Scandinavia is its home. He said that it has a bad reputation here. It’s mostly drunk at Christmas and other festivals, and people drink too much of it then and don’t remember it fondly. He shared my enthusiasm for its use in cocktails and gave us the inside scoop on another bar, that we almost visited earlier today, but the description just didn’t seem strong enough. He informed us the Duck and Cover was a aquavit focused bar… so now I’m very interested to check it out. He also made me an aquavit themed cocktail that even Dawn liked (she’s not a fan of the spirit in general).
Now we’ve returned the room to write up the day’s adventures and pack because we need to move to the airport hotel tomorrow morning.
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