Catching up

Not having internet reliably in Copenhagen has slowed down the blogging a bit. The images in this post are from Monday afternoon and Tuesday, but as of now it's Wed. afternoon and we are in Warsaw.

Seeing that Copenhagen is very oriented to bicycle traffic--as you can see from the photo below from outside the central train station--we decided to rent bikes ourselves and tour a bit.



The bikes tend to be basic and sturdy, and come with handy little locking devices which hold the rear wheel in place, thus discouraging theft. Sven the waiter told us that there is a bicycle theft in Copenhagen 2X per hour. With as many bikes as there are, I'm surprised it's not 2X per minute.

One of the areas we toured which is most photogenic is the area near one of the canals (or lakes? They don't seem to join up with the sea).





Later in the day we rode beside another such lake or canal.



There's a long pedestrian shopping area called the Stroget which we explored quite a bit. Tuesday night we explored it to excess, looking for the perfect shawarma stand . . . eventually having to settle for a less-than-perfect one. Plenty of miles on our shoes so far.

Nearby streets have shopkeepers at work maintaining their stands, as with this man.



Later in the day we went to Helsingor, a.k.a. Elsinore from Hamlet. Here's an exterior view of the castle:



The castle's bastions are quite impressive. We took the casement tour underneath this bastion, which was like a large, dank, dark, unpleasant cave. That's where the soldiers stayed in time of war or for punishment. On the tour our guide had to relight a dozen or so kerosene lamps which some young scamps had turned off. We suggested they be imprisoned in the casement for a while as punishment . . .



Here's the castle's courtyard:


Two interior shots, one of the room where the kings met with military officers, one of a fireplace with Wendy and a guide. Kronborg was a real money-maker beginning with Erik of Pomerania, who began charging ships a fee allegedly for protection from pirates. The fee initially was a single gold coin roughly equivalent in worth to a cow; a later king raised the price to 1.1% of the cargo and first rights to buy the cargo itself. Eventually in the mid-19th c. Denmark was paid an enormous sum of money to stop charging tolls.





Here's a shot of one side of the pulpit in the Kronborg chapel.



The better of our two guides--she was very well-informed and helpful about the castle's history--not about its art--and as you can see, she has a very nice smile.




We prevailed on some fellow tourists to take our picture by the cannons.




Dinner at Restaurant Dubrovnik Mon. night. We ate a little late, but it was fairly empty. Dinner here is expensive—a bit of sticker shock is setting in, when you spend $90 on a fairly ordinary, but good, meal, with limited alcohol. Intended to walk through Tivoli after dinner, but we discovered the admission price of 240 DK or $48 US each, which is pretty steep for what we wanted to do (i.e., not ride rides or attend a concert or anything).

Wed. lunch in Warsaw at Restauracja Slowianska--better meal, for my taste, at perhaps 1/3 the cost of the Dubrovnik dinner. It's a measure of the relative economy in both cities.