A Day in Denmark

Here is the second installment in the story of our trip with my dad and Jo. It’s going to be a shorter one because this part only took a few hours…

We took the DFDS Seaways ferry from Norway to Denmark, which is essentially an overnight trip. A lot of Norwegians do it purely for the duty free shopping opportunities. Once you get out into international waters the price of drinks drops substantially, so we all had a few drinks up in the ‘sky bar’.

We had dinner in one of the three on-board restaurants. They were having an American-themed menu so we had buffalo wings and steaks and so on… Jo had the salmon, again.

Chris and I took a stroll around the boat at sunset (around midnight) but there wasn’t much happening. There was some painful karaoke happening in one of the nightclubs and a ridiculous amount of cigarette smoke in the other. So we watched the sunset and then headed for bed.

That night we had a few issues… four people in one very small cabin, and one SNORER. It didn’t matter how many times we kicked him, pulled his blankets off or threw things at him, Dad was determined to do his impression of a wounded buffalo, so in the end Chris got up and walked around the ship all night while I stuffed my iPod earphones in and my pillow over my head and did my best to rest, if not sleep.

With around one hour of sleep under our belts, we weren’t really looking forward to six hours wandering around in Copenhagen before our afternoon train to Germany. But in the end we had a pretty good time. The weather wasn’t the best but the rain stayed away for the most part.

We (well I) was lucky enough to be in town at the same time as the Cow Parade, so many of my photos were of the various cows we found around the city. Very cute.

We were a little disappointed to find that the Hans Christian Andersen shop had either closed or moved, but we did pop into a bookshop so Chris could find something to read on the train and I managed to find a copy of HCA’s complete works with original sketches and everything.

Before heading to the train station to catch the train to Hannover, we walked up the ‘Round Tower’ to have a look at Copenhagen from above. It was a great view and definitely worth doing. It would have been great if we’d had time to see the botanic gardens as well, but I think we were really a bit too tired for anything more than what we did anyway. It was going to be around 7 hours to Hannover, so I think we were all looking forward to a snooze on the train.