Copenhagen, May 23, 2010

This morning Chris, Louise and I had a typical simple Danish breakfast of tea with bread, butter and cheeses. Then we went to the Copenhagen Marathon to cheer on the runners, just a few blocks from Chris's flat.

After that he decided to take me on a bike tour of the city. We headed from his apartment to Kastellet, where the Little Mermaid lives. This is an incredibly famous statue portraying The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen. Unfortunately she's currently visiting Shanghai for the World Expo.

So...in her place is a screen showing the Chinese visiting her. Underneath that was, uhh, a couch with a live mermaid who is sitting there all day to show support for people who need psychological help. No idea what the connection is...but here's Chris in front of it.


Next we biked through Langelinie Park, a well known tourist area and saw the Gefion Fountain. It's a really cool statue depicting the goddess Gefion driving her oxen sons to plough the earth.


We biked around the palaces of the Queen Margrethe II and the Crown Prince (despite the guards, the palaces are very accessible, a taxi dropped someone off right outside one of the palaces). Even the Queen herself is very accessible to the Danish people. She's an artist...a painter, illustrator and translator in addition to queen.

We ended the day with more Carnaval events in the Faelledparken. It didn't really get dark out until after 10pm. I took this picture of Chris and Louise at 9pm. It was a lot lighter outside than it looks:


The Carnaval events included another parade--the same one as yesterday. It also had multiple live music tents and stages, and there were tons of vendors, vending anything you can imagine (including dental instruments??)


And finally, amusement rides for little kids, that I found to be kinda frightening.


More pictures from the Carnaval event are on Flickr.