copenhagen

on sunday sarah and i flew from stockholm sweden to copenhagen denmark.

this is another country in scandinavia :)

it was beautiful flying in over water and when we landed we took the metro to our hostel.

it was so easy to find it was ridiculous.

we started out by exploring and seeing the main sights on a map we found.

the first thing we saw was the marble bridge I saw featured on pinterest.

Pinterest is becoming my eyes before I get somewhere I want to go.

I usually find a pretty picture of something in the city we are going to visit and attempt to find it when we get there. This time in Copenhagen it was "The Little Swimmer" - a statue of the Little Mermaid.

Hans Christian Anderson - author of the Little Mermaid, Thumbelina, and many others(one of my favorite stories!)

So the marble bridge was neat but what it led to was even better...the Christiansborg Castle - currently unused. We were let in free to a museum because it was closing in a half hour but it was perfect because that is all the time we needed to get through it. It was underneath the castle showing remains of previous castles built on the same land.

It was neat to see... and especially neat because it was free :D Winning!

Next we walked a little ways to find "The Little Swimmer" - we ran into a little harbor called Nyhavn which was also featured on Pinterest. It is a charming canal with houses and many fishing boats. It reminded me of Amsterdam only the houses were all different colors and flat.

One of the houses was where Hans Christian Anderson lived... so cool!

Our spirits were lifted after we found this charming street and then onto the longest shopping street in all of EUROPE!

It was amazing! We found a souvenir shop and asked about "The Little Mermaid" statue.

The worker gave us directions and said we couldn't possibly miss it because all the Japanese people would be surrounding it. She recommended we walk to see it the next day because it was getting dark.

We headed back to the hostel after I had a wonderful meal of hamburger and french fries.

We also saw the round tower.

When we got back it was almost time for happy hour :) so I enjoyed two beers (buy one get one) of Carlsberg beer.

Then we decided to get ready and go to sleep so we had enough energy for tomorrow when we planned to see the rest of the sights.

So we slept at the hostel pretty well despite some middle of the evening snoring.

that night we slept in a ten person mixed dorm room - so its interesting to see who you are going to be sleeping in a room with. Its like camp but the people speak all kinds of different languages and are in Copenhagen for different reasons etc.

Its a bit different to stay in a hostel for me and this was the first time ... but its the cheapest way to do it when you are traveling with one other person.

In the morning we got ready and ventured out to see "The Little Mermaid," Kastellet a preserved fortificaion, Amalienborg castle, and Rosenborg castle.

At the Amalienborg castle I had seen on the internet that the guards change at noon - so we got there just in time to see a marching band and guards playing -- I was very impressed!

We walked around 4 hours and were ready to head to the airport to come home.
We made it safely back in Zwolle around 8pm that evening.

Overall it was great to see Scandinavia - the most expensive part of Europe - but glad it was only for two days so I didn't go completely broke :)