Friday, August 17 was our first full day in Copenhagen and the last day before we embarked on our nine-day Baltic Sea cruise. We kept things simple and didn’t try to do too much; mostly we wandered around the legendary Tivoli Gardens amusement park and dodged a couple of showers. Tivoli Gardens is the second-oldest amusement park in the world, dating back to 1843. (The oldest is also in Denmark, for what it’s worth.)
In a nutshell, Tivoli Gardens is like a large park with ponds and trees and grassy areas and a couple of concert pavilions, with restaurants and carnival-style amusement park rides scattered here and there. It’s located smack dab in the middle of downtown Copenhagen and we got the impression that a lot of locals have season or yearly memberships and drop by in the evenings to see shows or to walk around the paths. It’s not the sort of thing I’d take a bunch of hyperactive kids to; they’d get bored pretty quickly. The high point of the day, for us, was watching a very nice Commedia dell’Arte show at the Pantomime Theater. Commedia dell’Arte is silent (no speaking lines) buffoonery mixed with ballet dancing. It stars Pierrot, a clown dressed in all white, Harlequin, a trickster dancer dressed in bright colors, and a cast of others. We liked it a lot.
-
- Carole wandering around at Tivoli
-
- One of the large lakes within Tivoli.
-
- A pagoda and surrounding buildings at Tivoli.
-
- We were very amused by this “Chickens of Tivoli” sign.
-
- The “Chickens of Tivoli” were nowhere near as exciting as signs around the park had made them out to be.
-
- Always important. In Europe public restrooms are a lot harder to come by than they are in the USA.
-
- This turned out to be the sign for the women’s room.
-
- The bathrooms in one of the restaurants at Tivoli. We were taken aback by the full mirrored walls.
-
- The great lawn at Tivoli. Plenty of people seemed to come just to wander around and hang out and not really do much of anything.
-
- The appetizer course at one of the Tivoli restaurants.
-
- The pantomime theater at Tivoli
-
- Harlequin. Great dancer, but kind of a jerk.
-
- Harlequin and Pierrot.
-
- A somewhat more adult-oriented section of Tivoli Gardens, with bars and a “casino” of very modest scale.