Copenhagen – Biking the city – part 2

I’m still not done writing about the cool weekend trip to Copenhagen, that I had with with some friends, early June. Here are Copenhagen’s Friday’s, and Saturday’s excursions 🙂 And now we are here…

Day 3 Copenhagen – Sunday

Since we had such a great day biking around Copenhagen Saturday, we decided to spend Sunday on the bikes as well. As you can see from the map, we took off in a different direction of town this time around.

Botanical garden

Our first stop on the way, was Copenhagens Botanical garden (1). There is no biking allowed inside the park, so we locked the bikes outside the gate and meandered around for quite some time. For some reason there wasn’t all that many people around, which I loved. It felt peaceful, you could sit down and relax and see no one for a while. And when inside any of the glasshouses, you didn’t trip over people.

The botanical garden has as many as 27 glasshouses, the oldest one, the Palm House, was built in 1874. The Palm house is the tallest glasshouse and there are spiral stairs that leads you up into the dome, where you can walk “among the top of the palms”. You can see some beautiful pictures of the Palm House and surrounding gardens here.

We walked through most of the garden and then took a side trip out of the garden and across the street to:

Rosenborg Castle and The Kings garden

Rosenborg Castle (2) is situated right next to the Botanical garden and has a garden of it’s own, the Kings garden. Rosenborg Castle is a renaissance castle, built originally as a country summerhouse for the royal family in 1606, expanded several times until it was completed in 1624.

The castle was in use by Danish regents as a royal residence until about 1710, and since then it’s been only used as a royal residence twice. The first time was when Christiansborg Palace burned down in 1794, and the second time was during the British attack on Copenhagen in 1801.

Today, it’s a museum, where you can see, among other things, the Throne Chair of Denmark, The Crown Jewels and the Danish Crown Regalia

There are several buildings “attached” to Rosenborg Castle; Slotsforvalterboligen, The Commandant’s house and the Rosenborg Barracks, The barrack building is an old orangery complex (1709) that was converted into barracks for the Royal Life Guards in the years 1785-1786. The building was in use by the Life Guards until 1985. Today it has a small museum, and I believe it’s a protected building.

We didn’t go inside the castle or it’s surrounding buildings this time around, but we did saunter through the Rosenborg Castle gardens/Kings gardens.

After hanging around the Rosenborg Castle for a while, eating ice cream and sunning ourselves. We walked back to the botanical garden gate, picked up our bikes and continued on to…

Den Lille havfruen/The Little mermaid

Just about everyone (at least in Scandinavia) has heard about the statue of the Little Mermaid (3) in Copenhagen. It’s almost impossible to buy a postcard from Copenhagen and there not be a picture of her on it 😉

The Little Mermaid is a bronze statue based on the fairy tale of the same name by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen. It’s an icon in Copenhagen and a major tourist attraction.

I always thought the little Mermaid was sitting on a rock out in the water, but it turns out she is landlocked, sitting on a rock by the waterside at the Langelinie promenade.

Since there was a lot of tourist around (it was a bit crowded) we didn’t stay long before we moved on to …

Kastellet/The Citadel

Just down the road from the Little Mermaid you will find Kastellet (4) This old citadel was built in the years 1626 – 1663 (1626 initiated, 1663 rebuilt), it’s one of the best preserved star fortresses (a pentagram) in Northern Europe

In the Citadel area, there are several old buildings. A church (1704), the Commander’s House (1725), the Powder House (1712), the Prison complex (1725) and even a windmill (1847, replacing one from 1718) ++.

Kastellet is still an active military area, but it’s open to the public. You can walk around the ramparts overlooking the Øresund Strait, and the moats surrounding the citadel.  It was a beautiful place to lounge around, we even had our lunch sitting on the benches relaxing 🙂

Right next to the Citadel, you will find the Gefion Fountain, and St Alban’s Church (first church made of flint I have ever seen).

Leaving the Citadel, we biked along Amaliegade, which took us right into…

Amalienborg Palace square

Amalienborg Palace (5) is the home of the Danish Royal Family.  It consists of four identical palaces around an octagonal courtyard, and in the middle of it all, you can find a equestrian statue of King Frederick V.

Amalienborg was originally built for four noble families; but, after Christiansborg Palace burned on 26 February 1794, the royal family bought the palaces and moved in.

Amalienborg is just a stone’s throw from Frederick’s Church also called The Marble Church (6)

As you can see.. the sights in this city is just about everywhere…  and you can get lost in the all if you really want to, but we started to get hungry and continued on past The Royal Danish Playhouse (7) down to Nyhavn to find a place to eat.

Nyhavn was packed (as you would expect on a beautiful summer day) so we found ourselves an Italian restaurant down the road instead.

After the meal we took of towards the Amager side of Copenhagen, and the Opera house. Before we got to the Opera house however, we found this really cool place where we could drink and eat (had we only known that before our so so Italian meal).

Copenhagen Street Food

Copenhagen Street food (8) is this awesome place (yes I could hang here all day) with colorful and tasty food trucks with food from all over the world. All of them situated inside warehouse 7 and 8 on the Paper island.

We had seen a lot of people hanging outside on the quay and was curious about what this place was all about, you would have laughed had you seen our faces when we walked into the warehouse… I just couldn’t stop grinning 🙂 The hustle and bustle, the smells (yes good ones) we were kicking ourselves for already having eaten. There were food truck upon food trucks, food stalls, drink stalls, music and did I mention all the great food smell?

We just had to get our hands on some of it… hungry or not.

Some sushi and a GT later, we got back on the bikes. After biking all day, and eaten our self silly on sushi (yes we did, even though we weren’t all that hungry, it was just that the food was THAT good) it was time to call it a night and head home… but… we decided to do a little detour first, as we wanted to see the Opera House, which conveniently was just one quay over 😉

The Opera house

The Opera (9) on Holmen, is an awesome building, at least from the outside. It was starting to get late so we only biked past it. One of the cool features of the placement of the Opera is that when you stand in the main entrance of the Opera, you can see the Marble Church through Amalienborg.

Just past the Opera House we saw an interesting area we just had to check out (did I mention we did a detour on our way home?)

The Naval Station – Holmen naval base

Turns out it was the Naval Station or Holmen naval base as it’s also called (10). The Naval Station used to occupy the entire area of Holmen, being the command base for the Danish navy in the years 1690 til 1990. Today, this Naval base is confined to it’s northernmost island of Nyholm, and is mostly a mix of residential, educational institutions and some military activities.

The base is open to the public, and it’s worth a trip if you are into naval ships. You can find historic naval ships and a few historic buildings like the Mast Crane.

As you can imagine, it was the ships and Mast Crane that caught my eye 😉

Christiania – again

Leaving the naval area, we found this quirky road following one of the canals, turns out the road we followed put us right smack back in the middle of Christiania (which I wrote about here).

Had I known we were biking along this narrow stretch of land close to the lake at Christiania – Stadsgraven (11), I would have moved us one street over, so that we could have followed the road alongside the lake instead, and maybe, just maybe I could have found some of the houses I had missed out on, on our Saturday trip… Oh well, now I know.. for next time!

Onward to home we biked! And ended our day on the balcony, relaxing, winding down and preparing for our departure the next day.

Where did we stay? Well, we decided to try out Airbnb, first time ever, for all three of us. How did that go? Stay tuned and I’ll tell you all about it…

And I promise, it wont take me weeks.. like this post did! It was all due to computer trouble, which is hopefully now fixed…