Amman is a challenging city to live in, so for our spring break, I wanted to go somewhere completely different. Vivian had signed up for a Spanish class trip to Spain, so it was just going to be me, Jeff, and Elena. Jeff suggested Denmark, and when I looked it up, I saw that it wasn't that expensive in the off season, and Copenhagen has this cool card you can get for a set number of days that covers all public transportation and admission to pretty much any attraction you'd want to see. It seemed like the perfect, easy vacation for the three of us.
We stayed at the Marriott, which was right on one of the canals and had a club for breakfast and dinner. We have no idea if there was any practical purpose for the giant chairs out front, but Elena had fun with them.
Our first day was overcast and a bit chilly, but we didn't let that stop us from walking along the water and exploring, although we couldn't figure out exactly how this slide was meant to be used.
There were several parks and play areas along the water, and Elena tested out every feature we went by.
Our destination was the tour boat port, because we wanted to start our touring on the water. We got tickets and hopped right on a boat. There were tables with their own personal heaters, which was lovely.
One of our favorite sights in Copenhagen was the church with the spiral tower, which we got to see from the water as well.
By the time our tour was done, the sun was coming out, and it was lunch time. We walked up and down the trendy, waterfront restaurant area and finally settled on one that had a good combination of outdoor seating and blankets.
I really wanted to try the traditional, Danish open faced sandwiches, so I got a selection of three and soon learned that two would have been enough.
They go really well though with local beer. Since I usually like lighter beers, I decided to try the Royal Blanche which they had on draught. It was yummy!
The sun came out some more, the people watching was good, and Elena had sudoku to keep her busy, so we spent a couple hours enjoying our lunch. Part of Elena's excellent behavior stemmed from the fact that she had spotted a place selling churros across the way, and she was building up good will towards a big dessert request.
It was not cheap, but they gave her enough churros to feed a small army. She opted to cover them in Quella, which tastes like Nutella and advertises itself as "the first and original spreadable cream for gelato". Jeff and I were happy to help her out with her churro stash, and we all agreed that they were delcious.
For our afternoon adventure, we got on the hop on hop off bus. This was not the Big Bus company we've used in other cities, and unfortunately, the route and narration were not as good as that brand's, but we still got seats at the front and saw as much of the city as we could.
The next morning, we woke up to rain, but we weren't worried, because there are lots of great museums in Copenhagen that were covered on our Copenhagen Card, and we had already prioritized them for a rainy day. We started out at the Experimentarium, a children's science museum in the city suburbs. We got there right at opening time, so it wasn't very crowded. Elena started out in the nature area, where they had a virtual reality game that let you experience being an insect and performing certain tasks.
She liked it so much, that she insisted on trying all the insect options, and since there weren't any other people waiting their turn, we let her. Jeff couldn't resist the allure of VR, so he became an insect as well.
Afterwards, we got some cute pictures of Elena in the cut out photo wall.
There were lots of fun exhibits, but the optical illusion tunnel freaked Elena out.
She had more fun with the "jet" simulation that tested your reflexes by seeing how quickly you could hit whichever button lit up. Jeff and I helped out a bit as co-pilots, hitting the buttons behind her.
There were lots of fun mechanical and gravitational experiments to conduct,
but Elena's favorite, was the brain surgery station. Her first patient had a bit of a rough time, but she soon perfected the procedure.
There was also a really fun area to simulate shipping things with ships, trains, and conveyor belts, but it was so cheerfully chaotic that we didn't get any good pictures. After a couple hours, the museum was getting more crowded, and we were getting hungry, so we went to the shopping mall across the street to look for a good lunch option.
Elena had been asking for sushi, and, while we weren't in Japan, the Danish definitely know good fish, so we were able to find a yummy sushi place for lunch.
We successfully navigated the public transportation system back towards our hotel, and came out near Tivoli Gardens with the statue of Hans Christian Andersen across the street staring at it wistfully. It was the perfect, Copenhagen in a nutshell moment, so I got Elena to pose for a picture.
We just had to walk a bit to our second museum destination for the day, the Glyptotek. We learned more about its history later in the week when we went on our Carlsberg Brewery tour, but on our second day in Denmark, we just knew that it was one of the best museums in the city and it was part of the Carlsberg funded art collection.
Its standout feature is the glass domed garden in the center.
Elena and I had talked about what she could do to make the museum extra fun, and she decided she would like to have a notebook and pencil to sketch and take notes, so we got her those in the museum gift shop before we started exploring.
She was dedicated, and picked several paintings as we went along to plant herself in front of and try to capture.
One of the museum guards who rotated through a couple rooms with us, very kindly said that usually the museum doesn't allow this, but in Elena's case, he could make an exception, since he could see it was making her happy, and she wasn't bothering anyone. Luckily, the museum wasn't very crowded, so she never got in anyone's way, but lots of people got in her way when she was trying to sketch this cat painting, because they wanted to more closely examine the sculpture in front of it. It was a good exercise in patience for her.
The son of the founder of Carlsberg, Carl himself, had travelled all over Europe to acquire the pieces in the collection, and there was quite an assortment of Greek and Roman sculpture. Elena had fun finding familiar gods and goddesses, since she is still in full on Greek mythology mode.
Jeff took pictures of most of the statues in the museum.
It was a really interesting collection, and we were especially impressed with the care that had been put into staging the pieces in the various rooms.
The nose and ear collection was particularly amusing.
There was even a specially designed atrium to hold columns, statuary, and beautiful floor tiles and mosaics.
Some statues were labelled better than others, so we occasionally had to guess based on props.
While our afternoon museum was very different from our morning museum, we really enjoyed both of them. The rain had let up enough for us to walk back to the hotel, but it was still chilly, so we went to the club to make tea. While we were out, I had also bought a cardamom pastry, which is a typical Danish treat, and I got to enjoy it with my tea, yum!
For dinner that night, the hotel restaurant was advertising a British Sunday Roast, with a flat price for all you can eat. We thought, why not? It was delicious, and they brought more food to our table as we went. We may have overdone it a bit, but it was delightful.
Elena worked on her illustrations of the day and discovered that she really liked the Danish version of Sprite. We had a lot of fun saying Faxe Kondi,
and we were very impressed with Elena's finished interpretation of our second day in Copenhagen.
