World Denmark Kobenhavn Copenhagen

Paul & Steph's Odyssey

Copenhagen Oct 13, 2006

Days 1-4, Copenhagen: Copenhagen turned out to be a really pretty and entertaining city. The major drawbacks: very expensive and totally unpredictable autumn weather. Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark, is a very "walkable" city and feels smaller than its 1.7 million inhabitants would suggest. Interestingly, despite being a wealthy and cosmopolitan city, it has no skyscrapers - there are virtually no buildings higher than five or six stories. This definitely adds to the town's character and small town feel. While we had a great experience in Copenhagen and would recommend visiting the town, we didn't find the city to be exactly as advertised. According to our guidebook, there are virtually no cars on the streets of Copenhagen, nobody honks, nobody litters, and absolutely nobody jaywalks. While there was some element of truth to these claims, we saw more than our fair share of jaywalking, saw plenty of cars, and heard plenty of honking. Copenhagen is not as heavenly as described, but it is probably as close as a major city with two million people can get. The guidebook, however, was definitely correct about one thing - the Danes really love their bicycles. There were thousands of bicycles everywhere! In fact, it is one of the few cities that we have visited where the cyclist, not the pedestrian, has the clear right of way. Bicycle lanes throughout the city were three or four times wider than the sidewalks. Most impressive was the number of bikes randomly parked along both sides of the street - the vast majority of which were casually propped on a kickstand. Tiny, fragile-looking locks on the rear wheel were all that was used to safeguard against theft, and many bikes weren't even locked! If this was any major city in the U.S., all of these bikes would be stolen in a single morning and would be sitting in the local pawn shop by lunchtime. Overall, the weather was our main gripe with the city. The weather cycle went like this: sunshine for ten minutes, dark clouds and cold drizzle engulf the city for four hours, sunshine for ten minutes, dark clouds and cold drizzle engulf the city for four hours...lather, rinse, repeat. We recommend visiting Copenhagen in the summer.

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