Day 2 of our Baltic Sea vacation was our first day in Denmark. Our red-eye flight from Chicago got us to Copenhagen at 1 pm local time, which actually worked out well. By the time we got our bags (all four made it! yeah!) and caught a train from the airport to Copenhagen’s central rail station downtown, it was 3 o’clock and we could check right in at our hotel a couple of blocks away.
Hotels in Denmark are a bit different from what we’re used to back in the States — they (mostly) don’t have air conditioning and you don’t see as many chain names as you would back home. We wound up in a boutique hotel called the Axel Guldsmeden, two blocks from the train station (this was in fact the main reason I picked it; we didn’t have to worry about taking taxis to and from the hotel) and three blocks from the legendary Tivoli Gardens amusement park.
The hotel was comfortable and far-from-cookie-cutter, with “Bali-esque” decorations and quirky room features like a stone bathtub with handheld shower and no shower curtain. They had a breakfast buffet you could add to your room for a pretty decent fee and that way we had a Danish-style breakfast (albeit without any danish) each morning without having to venture out.
We didn’t do a whole hell of a lot our first day what with having arrived on a red-eye and all. We walked around and looked at things and took pains to stay out of the way of the gazillions of cyclists that were absolutely everywhere in Copenhagen. They didn’t move at the batshit dangerous speeds we’d been told to expect, but you had to watch out nonetheless — stepping out into a street blindly just because you didn’t hear a car coming was not advised.
We walked past the Tycho Brahe planetarium, walked by but not through the Christiansborg palace (Carole had a fun time walking on the decorative tiles in a pool at Bertel Thorvaldsen Plaza), and wound up getting ice cream in a little shop on the waterfront along the Nyhavn canal. It was a beautiful sunny day, but we were pretty zonked. We walked back to the hotel, had a light dinner in the little brasserie attached to the lobby, and passed out.
Everyone spoke English, by the way. Most of them spoke it very, very well. The only people we met who didn’t speak English were tourists from elsewhere in Europe, some of whom only spoke French or German. As far as we knew, anyway.
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- Dessert at the hotel cafe
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- For some strange reason the Axel Guldsmeden elevators had fuzzy walls.
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- Hanging out in the garden at the Axel Guldsmeden hotel
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- The bathroom sink at the Axel Guldsmeden
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- The hotel was all set for the Copenhagen Pride Festival.
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- One view of our room on the fifth floor of the Axel Guldsmeden
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- Carole eating ice cream in Nyhavn
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- Radhuspladsen statue of Two Vikings blowing lurs (horns)
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- The Nyhavn canal
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- Fifth floor hallway at the Axel Guldsmexden
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- Radhuspladsen (CIty Hall Square)
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- The ice cream shop in Nyhavn
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- Dinner at the hotel cafe
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- Breakfast at the Axel Guldsmeden
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- The bathtub and shower at the Axel Guldsmeden
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- The Axel Guldsmeden
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- Reception desk at the Axel Guldsmeden
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- Street level entrance to the Axel Guldsmeden
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- The Axel Guldsmeden had a lot of art from Bali plunked here and there around the garden and inside.
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- The stone bathtub at the Axel Guldmeden.
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- One view of our room on the fifth floor of the Axel Guldsmeden
Ahem. You forgot to mention the *really* *weird* furry wallpaper on the walls of the elevator. But as luck would have it, it is visible in one of the pictures here. The furry wallpaper is also on the reception desk.
And btw, I believe bathtubs with hand-held showers and no shower curtain are standard in Europe. At least that’s the impression I got in England. (The stone tub is not standard, though, I’m fairly confident in saying.)