Thursday, June 16, 2011; in Copenhagen

Thursday, June 16, 2011; in Copenhagen

I woke up as we were creeping in to Copenhagen; oddly, it was the perceived lack of ship’s motion which awoke me.  Just like in the poem we did creep in on cat’s feet.  It never ceases to amaze me how Holland-America’s skilled navigators are able to maneuver these massive ships into tight places with apparent ease.  It is true that the “azipods” with which modern ships are equipped (360 degree-swiveling power pods beneath the ship) facilitate turning, but it still surprises me how the ships can quite literally “turn on a dime.”  We saw this Tuesday afternoon as ms Rotterdam left the dock in Rotterdam and spun around in the middle of the River Maas, and we saw it again this morning as the ship carefully fit into Copenhagen’s Longlinie pier.  We debarked just after 9am.

Lynn had had a brilliant idea to explore Copenhagen with as little stress and foot pounding as possible.  She planned to use the municipal “hop-on-hop-off” bus service to carry us where we wanted to go and to provide a recorded description of points as we passed them, all at a very reasonable price. 

Our first stop was the Little Mermaid. She rested comfortably on her little rock just a few feet out in the harbor, but we were saddened to hear that this cute and world famous stature is a frequent target of vandals who write graffiti on her, otherwise deface her, or sometimes perform physical damage.  She is small in size; at best just about two times life size, and is nestled on a small rock about a meter into the waters of the harbor.



The Little Mermaid Statue.



After seeing the Little Mermaid we cruised by bus through the heart of the city, obtaining many interesting pictures of this quaint Scandinavian city.  We could have dropped off the bus at any number of stops along the way, but we had a specific agenda: first to Carlsberg Brewery and then to Build-a-Bear at Copenhagen’s famous Tivoli Gardens to do some shopping.

Copenhagen has canals too.

We passed by museums (every European city seems to have plenty of them!), the royal palace, and other structures representing a range of architectures.  At one place where a Danish king had once provided housing for his navy’s sailors the tour guide told us the story of the “sea dog.”  The wives of sailors often would place a statuette of a dog in the street-facing windowsill of their apartment.  If the dog faced outward toward the street the message was that the sailor (“sea dog”) was at home between voyages and should not be disturbed, but if the dog faced inward into the apartment, the sailor was at sea and his wife was willing to “entertain” visitors.  Hmmmmm….

Another structure we saw at a distance was the clock tower-spire atop the Copenhagen Bourse (stock exchange).  Although we only saw it at a distance the spire was an architectural wonder, with a conical spire-roof which looked like snakes or dragons intertwined.  What message was this telling the world, I wonder?

Across the street from the main entrance to Tivoli Gardens we had to change busses to the “Yellow Line” route which would take us out to the Carlsberg Brewery.  This route took us through the fashionable Fredericksburg district where there still survive many beautiful homes built at the turn of the twentieth century by fashion-conscious middle class families.

The Carlsburg Brewery took me by surprise, but pleasantly so.  I had expected a huge operating brewery with a tour of the various stages of the brewing process, and I’m certain that is once what this tour offered.  Now, however, because the main brewery in Denmark has moved to a different location, the old brewery, with some buildings aging back to the founding of the brewery in the 1840s, has been redesigned as a corporate history museum.  Some areas discuss the brewing process with reference to the room design at that spot, others tell of the history of the company, from a family-owned enterprise in the 1840s to the vast multi-national conglomerate of today.  The old stables had some retired draft horses on display (they were very friendly), another area had a large display of delivery wagons and trucks (including a Chevrolet truck dating back to about 1918).  There was a display of the utility technology which once powered the old brewery, complete with an operating steam engine and a delightful old Edison bipolar DC generator.  Another area on display had what is claimed to be the world’s largest collection of beer bottles—over 20,000 as of this past March!  Of course the main product is not forgotten.  The tour ends at a pub where one glass from a selection of beers is available as part of the admission ticket price.  (For the record, Dr. Duke, I had a Schweppes Bitter Lemon.)  There was even a “shit shop” where logowear and other goodies may be purchased—I bought two books on the history of the company, as you would expect.  All in all, I was tremendously impressed by what had been done.  Instead of destroying and old and obsolete facility, it has been cleverly revamped to present the complex history and production processes of the company.  Oh, what I could have done at Edison if I had had a similar budget!!!

After our visit to Carlsberg we reboarded the hop-on-hop-off bus to return to the famous Tivoli Gardens amusement park near the main railway station.  The station was built in 1901 to replace an earlier structure which, interestingly enough lives on as a theatre.  The “new” main station has a distinct Danish architectural style, but is not particularly noteworthy.

Tivoli Gardens, built in the 1850s as an amusement park for Copenhagen’s lower and middle classes, is a very famous place.  Walt Disney used the concept as the basis for his original idea of Disneyland.  We went there not to ride rides, however, but to visit one of the few “Build-a-Bear” stores in Europe.  Lynn’s teddy bear Suzie, who is on this trip with us, wanted to do some shopping.  After s short time looking around and struggling to read the Danish language signs, Suzie picked out a cute outfit and a nice tee-shirt which says “I Love Denmark.”

We returned to the ship around three o’clock in the afternoon, went to the Lido for some light refreshments and then retired to our cabin.  The plan was for me to download today’s pictures into the computer while Lynn wrote in her journal, but it wasn’t long before both of us were asleep with little achieved.

Now it is 7:30 in the evening and we are about to get ready for dinner as the mighty Rotterdam steams southward toward Warnemunde, the Baltic Sea port for Berlin, where we will dock at 6:30 tomorrow morning.