My discoveries in Copenhagen

I went for a road trip with friends from Belgium to Copenhagen(more than 1000 km) in May 2016 and stayed in Copenhagen only for 2 full days.
Apart from the most famous things about Copenhagen, Calsberg, Lego and Hans Christian Andersen, I did not really know much about this city. After the trip, especially thanks to the free walking tour, I discovered so much about it’s beauty, history, culture and I decided to share it with others. There are for sure some less ideal things in Copenhagen, but it has been balanced by the rest of the trip.

Free walking tours
This is one of the best thing I experienced in a city trip, the free walking tour is very well organized by mostly the students of Copenhagen. The tour in the morning starts from the city hall and ends at the little mermaid statue, you will enjoy a lot of beautiful views and interesting stories along the way.

Who knows there were so many fires in Copenhagen?
There were 2 big fire in Copenhagen, the first one was in 1728, it was the largest fire in the history of Copenhagen, Denmark. It began on the evening of 20 October 1728 and continued to burn until the morning of 23 October. It destroyed approximately 28% of the city (measured by counting the number of destroyed lots from the cadastre), left 20% of the population homeless, and the reconstruction lasted until 1737.

The second fire in 1975 was also disastrous, read here for more.

Carlsberg
Carlsberg now became the fifth largest brewery group in the world, founded in 1847 by J. C. Jacobsen in Copenhagen. Jacobsen named this brewery after his son Carl, who also opened another brewery in 1882 named Ny (New) Carlsberg.

Lego
Lego Group was actually not founded in Copenhagen but another smaller city in the west of Danmark – Billund.
The person who started this company was actually a carpenter who started making wooden toys in 1932, he name this company Lego after a Danish phrase “leg godt” which means “Play well”. Soon Lego began to massively produce the interlocking bricks in plastic.

Our company also uses Legos for a lot of training:

Hipster region – Vesterbro
We happened to live in an air bnb apartment in this area, everything we found in this apartment gave us this “hipster” feeling. Vesterbro was formally famous for it’s sex industries and butchers, today it has developed itself towards another direction. It turned out, this area is ranked to be 4th most hipster area on earth according to this blog.

The apartment we lived was very small but compact:

I’ve honestly never seen the owner of the apartment, but I imagine he looks something like this:

In the neighborhood, you can also see other indications:

I have very big interests knowing other people’s life style, I am hoping to meet some hipsters and discover more, if you consider yourself a hipster(preferably gay), leave me a comment we can go for a coffee. You can check this wiki how to find more about hipster.

They love this weird bread
Back in 2014 when I was living in Brussels, my roommate was this guy who grew up in Denmark. He complained to me in that it was really hard to find real bread in Belgium.
“Real bread huh ?” I was confused, I can understand if someone complains China about it (We really don’t have bread), but Belgium is full of bread!
Then he explained that the bread in Denmark he only needs to eat one piece for lunch, but the one in Belgium he has to eat 4 pieces.
After he took me to the supermarket, I understood that he meant this:

And indeed it is so popular in Denmark, we went to this lunch cafe and enjoyed their open sandwich:

And he was right, you do not need much of those to fulfill your stomach.

Watch out for cyclist
Copenhagen is a city welcoming bikers.
In 1995, Copenhagen was one of the first cities in the world to launch free city bikes for its citizens and visitors.
Like in Belgium and the Nederlands, there are a lot of bicycles circling around, they bike drunk, they yell at the cars, they don’t stop for pedestrians… We were told by the walking tour guide more than once, “watch out for the cyclists!”.

The weather is a bitch
They say there are lots of reasons Danish people are happy, and weather is NOT one of them. It was exactly like Belgium, it was sunny, and then rainy, then sunny again. I admire Danish people’s humor, they say often, it is not raining, but liquid sunshine!
Since I am used to bad weather in Belgium, in the end it was not that a big deal, just remember to bring an umbrella next time you visit!

They are creative
One of the restaurants uses vases as ash tray, and since it is outdoor and it was sometimes windy and rainy, I find it quite practical:

In their lady’s rooms, they have a very simple equipment for disposing trash:

I find it quite fascinating, it’s clean, simple to take out, easy to use, who needs a trash can in ladies room?

Free entry to museums
Although the food and living in Copenhagen is quite expensive, the rest of the visiting is quite affordable, being mostly free. In this link you can find top 10 free things to do in Copenhagen.

We visited both free of charge the national museum and the parliament of Copenhagen, if you climb on the tower of parliament, you can even see Sweden on a sunny day.

Unbearable
On the other side of the parliament building, you will see an interesting sculpture, which is a pole in exponential curve with a bear on top. They name this sculpture “Unbearable”, since then when I hear people complain about something “This is unbearable!”, I try to be funny and show this below picture and say “No, THIS is unbearable :)”.

In fact, this sculpture has a very good meaning behind, it is to indicate that the climate is changing rapidly, the amount of CO2 and the speed of ice melting is increasing exponentially. Indeed it will be unbearable.

The little mermaid is actually not so disappointing
We all know the fairy tale by the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen about a young mermaid willing to give up her life in the sea and her identity as a mermaid to gain a human soul. The statue of this little mermaid is located in the east of the city on the water.

I was told many times “The little mermaid is sooo small, it was voted as second most disappointing sculpture in the world”, I have to admit that my expectation was lowered a lot before I saw it for real.

Another reason is, the word’s first disappointing sculpture is actually located in Brussels – le petit Julien/manneken pis, so the fact that the little mermaid is bigger than Julien already makes is less disappointing.

Freetown Christiania
The Copenhagen free guided tour also provides a tour especially to this area. It is an area where the Danish law has been bent a bit, not at all dangerous though. We had a walk in there, the instant feeling is this area is like 70th century.

Initially, this was an abandoned military area which was squatted by local people in 1971, soon more and more people started moving in this area, as a result, the spirit of Christiania quickly developed into one of the hippie movement, the squatter movement, collectivism and anarchism. Soon enough famous for its main drag, known as Pusher Street, where hash and skunk weed were sold openly from permanent stands until 2004 came into existence.
Walking in this street is quite chilly, some of the drug traders even wore face mask(Unfortunately no photos were allowed).

This probably explains in another way why Danish people are happy.

So the above are the discovery of Copenhagen from my little trip, in my opinion it is definitely a city worth visiting!