København

It's hard to believe, but I've already been here in Norway a month, and with my time winding down, the time came for my last weekend trip. While, to be sure, there is quite a bit of Norway that I haven't seen, especially in the far north, I decided that it would be a shame to not visit Continental Europe during my stay. Thus (with staying in Scandinavia in mind), four of my friends and I booked passage by boat to Denmark. Our destination was the capital, København, or as we write in English, Copenhagen. It's a 16 hour trip to Copenhagen, and so we were sleeping on the boat there and back. I had had the boat described to me as a ferry, so I wasn't expecting much, however when we showed up, I could tell right away that ferry was a little of a misnomer.

As you can well see, it was a full size cruise ship.

It turns out that we were on a "mini-cruise" from Oslo to Denmark and back. It was nice, because they had all sorts of services, like money exchange and restaurants, but a little loud and crazy for my taste. They also had a duty free shop, where all the Scandinavians ran to buy lots and lots of alcohol and cigarettes, but which I utilized to buy delicious Danish butter cookies. After exploring the ship, eating our sandwich dinners, and staring at the ocean, we headed to bed in our little cabin. The next day, we awoke at eight in the morning to the sound of the ship's captain addressing us in Danish (A short aside on Danish: the relationship between Danish and Norwegian is an interesting one; I can read almost all of the signs, and the Danes can for the most part understand me when I speak Norwegian, but the language when spoken is for the most part unintelligible for me. Despite the close similarity of the written scripts, the phonetics of the two languages are very, very different). 

After arriving in Copenhagen, we tracked down bus passes and then headed into the center of the city. Our first stop was Assistens Kirkegaard, a walled cemetery, where the Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard is buried. During my studies at St. Olaf, I have come to appreciate Herr Kierkegaard's thoughts very much and so I endeavored to visit and pay my respects.

The Kierkegaard family plot

After visiting brother Kierkegaard, we were quite hungry, and luckily for us, we stumbled upon a bakery by the name of Lagekakehuset. There, we fortified ourselves with coffee and delicious pastries, and emerged quite satisfied. I could have sat there and eaten pastries all day, but luckily for my waist-line, my wallet, and my teeth, we had other things to do.

We wandered around the city for a little while and then headed towards Nyhavn for lunch. Nyhavn is a pretty section of Copenhagen with a canal and sailboats and lots of outdoor cafes. We got lucky in that the weather during our visit was wonderful, and so we sat in the sun and enjoyed the scenery.

Unfortunately, because it took so long to sail back to Oslo, we had only a short time in Copenhagen, and so it seemed that almost as soon as we got off the boat we had to get back on. However, short or not, it was a pleasant trip and Copenhagen is definitely on my list of places to visit and explore some more.