Brad still wasn't feeling his very best, so we took the morning slowly. Originally, we'd talked about taking the train out of the city a bit to visit a couple of castles (including the castle the Elsinore in Hamlet was patterned after), but we decided to stay in the city for another day. Our first activity was to visit the Church of Our Saviour and climb the steeple.
Our boat tour had mentioned this particular church the day before, and when I saw it, I immediately recognized it from a season of The Amazing Race (I'm a huge fan, guys). I looked it up, and yep. Season 19. We climbed and climbed inside the church for quite a while, each set of steps or ladder becoming tighter and steeper. I kind of thought that we were never going to make it. But we did! And then we climbed higher- on the outside this time. Now, I'm not exactly afraid of heights, but my imagination does go wild, and I start imagining what I would do if the railing collapsed and I was hanging off the side of the steeple by one arm. This is totally normal behavior, right?
We got some really great views of Copenhagen, and we could even spy Sweden in the distance.
There were these really helpful pictures around the steeple, labeling landmarks so that we could gain some perspective.
This was at the very top point you can climb to. I was ready to go back down after we snapped this. It was one of those situations where the whole structure moves a bit when the wind blows, and I wasn't crazy about that feeling.
But then there was this to go back down. Those are "stairs," but we turned around and climbed down them backwards as if it was a ladder. Each "step" was almost a foot tall.
See that gold tip at the top? That's where we climbed up to. You climb on the inside up to the top of the square-shaped part of the steeple, then you circle around on the outside of the round part.
And this was the inside of the sanctuary.
Please check out this children's table in the back of the sanctuary. It was equipped with quiet activity supplies, like books and crayons. I thought that was rather clever.
Quite a few of the churches we visited had displays about the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation.
At the back of the sanctuary, the pipe organ was held up by...elephants.
After all of our wanderings around and up the Church of Our Saviour, we bought nutella/banana crepes from a street vendor and headed out for another church. We had decided to visit the church that Kierkegaard had attended and occasionally preached at. It was about a 30-minute walk from the Church of Our Saviour, but we're nothing if not excellent walkers. Note: because the previous day had been so chilly due to the wind, I wore my jeans this particular day. Of course, the sun beat down all day, and there was very little wind. Can't win.
We walked through some of the less touristy areas of Copenhagen this time, which is always interesting to see. By the time we arrived at Kierkegaard's church, I was hot and cranky, so going inside where it was quiet and cool was great.
The inside was beautiful and so peaceful. The colors were so light and airy, and the layout was very symmetrical. Statues of the apostles lined the walls, and I really enjoyed looking at what the artist envisioned the apostles to look like. We sat in a pew for quite a while and actually read a sermon of Kierkegaard's that Brad had downloaded. It was a wonderful sermon and was really neat to read while sitting in a seat that he probably looked at while delivering the sermon. I really enjoyed the half hour we spent here.
By the time we finished up at the church, it was early-mid afternoon. We knew we needed to pack that evening and go to bed early (we had an early morning flight to Prague the next day), so we wanted a lower-key afternoon. We had read about (and heard about from friends) a coffee shop that Brad was interested in trying, so we made our way by bus in that direction. I say "that direction" because we had a super weird bus experience wherein we were on the right bus, going the right route... but that stopped at the wrong stops. We still don't know what happened. The screens in the bus listed the correct stops, but it didn't stop at those stops. It was super weird and left us walking a mile after being dropped off at the wrong place. But whatever. We found it!
Brad was pleased with whatever fancy drink he ended up ordering, and we hung out for a little while enjoying the very hipster-Danish ambiance.
After that, we called it a day and headed back to our Air BnB to pack/prep and go to bed early. For dinner, we ended up buying frozen pizzas from the grocery store near the apartment where we were staying, and they were quite good. Not particularly Danish but definitely within our budget.
We enjoyed our couple of days in Copenhagen! I would have enjoyed doing a few other things that I'd read about, but 2 days wasn't really quite enough time to do it all while on a budget and fighting a cold (Brad, not me). All in all, I have fun memories of visiting a place I'd wanted to see for a long time with my favorite person, so I count it as a win.
Next stop: Prague!
No comments:
Post a Comment