Wonderful, Wonderful Copenhagen/There’s No Place Like London

Phew! I’m back. From visiting my sister in Copenhagen and from doing some research in London, in case you didn’t gather by the title. And I brought back pictures, video, and point-form for everyone. Yay!!!!

– First, I went to Copenhagen, where my sister is on a year of exchange, and all our maternal female cousins came to visit, too. Yay!

– On the first day, I was really jet-lagged, so we didn’t do much but wander around and eat. Here is my sister eating as she wanders by the canal.

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Unfortunately, our oldest cousin, Deb (yes, the same as my sister… we know), and her boyfriend, Seb, had to leave that evening. I unpacked all the stuff I’d brought for Sister!Deb. Among that was a 24-count box of Lik-m-Aid, which is a North American candy where you take a stick of sugar, lick it, dip it in more sugar, and lick the sugar off. Repeat, eventually consuming a good handful of pure sugar. Seb had never tried it before.

Seb trying Lik-M-Aid

Bet he’s sorry now.

– I also brought, upon request, Canadian Cadbury Cream Eggs so we could taste-test them against the UK variety. Canadian ones were much sweeter. UK ones won.

 

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– There aren’t many pictures of Cousin!Deb because she specifically requested that no photos of her go up on the Internet. But I feel I’m fully justified in posting this one. We’d just gone to Sister!Deb’s favourite bakery, and the others, not being jet-lagged, had all got cream-filled pastries that they insisted I try. I politely declined.

 

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– But Cousin!Deb doesn’t like to take “no” for an answer.

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– At the toy store, we learned that farts make different noises in Danish.

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– I can’t show the photos of us at dinner because both Debs insisted on playing a favourite family game, “Show”. Then Cousin!Deb and Seb left for Berlin, where they live. So now, there’s only one Deb in this story.

– The next day, Deb’s friend from Canada, Joanna, arrived. She’d been visiting other Canadian friends in Rotterdam and thought she’d stop by to see Deb DJ at the student club the following night. We went to Malmu in Sweden, just over the bridge from Copenhagen and had a picnic in a park with all sorts of goodies: lox, bagel, caviar, grapes, toffee tart…

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But first we stopped to get some cheese.

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Since I had only a few Swedish kroner left, I figured I might as well buy a giant 10-kroner liquorice-type thing at a nearby stand. Emily tried it, too.

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– We also went to a Swedish IKEA, about which Deb was terribly excited. But I’ll let her show you that in her own words.

[qt:http://www.srkriger.com/blog/ikea.mov 360 280]

– The next day, Deb had to spend her time with her French friend, Kevin, to prepare for their stint as DJs at the student house that night. So Katie and Emily (my cousins), Joanna, and I went to Helsingor to visit Kronborg Slot aka “the Hamlet castle” (see how Helsingor = Elsinor? Do you? Do you????) We had another picnic when we got there. We made sandwiches out of Danish rye bread and cold cuts and cheese… but we had a little mishap buying margarine.

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It came in a little square in between the tubs of margarine and pounds of butter, so we assumed that’s what it was, until we opened it. Then we realized it smelled bad and was brown and had the consistency of plasticine. Katie tried to feed it to the sparrows, but they wouldn’t eat it. Later, Deb’s landlady informed us it was yeast. Yum.

– Kronborg was fun and interesting, although half the plaques are there to inform you that something used to be there, but Sweden took it as spoils of war back in the seventeenth century. Interestingly, there were cool art exhibits as well as historical artifacts all around the museum – what is culture, how do you define yourself as Danish, that sort of thing. However, there was also a really obnoxious installation with avant-garde sculptures of skeletons and a laptop showing a looped video of the most pretentious guy in the world declaiming the “To be or not to be…” soliloquy.

– We preferred the children’s section, where you could build things out of Lego and draw pictures.

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– There was also a miniature fort/castle thing you had to crawl into.

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– We had dinner in Christiania, Copenhagen’s hippie-esque independent quarter where you aren’t allowed to take pictures and returned in time to catch Deb’s DJ-riffic-rama. She done so good they asked her and Kevin to come back to close the season :)

– The next day, Joanna, Katie, Emily, and I went on a boat tour of Copenhagen’s canals. It takes you under some VERY low bridges.

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We saw the Little Mermaid in the harbour, but I have no good pictures of it (ie pictures where it isn’t behind someone else’s head.)

– Deb and I spent some quality time alone having pizza, and then we rejoined the others to go to a pantomime I wanted to see at Tivoli, a local amusement park. We got there just in time to get seats and take silly pictures of ourselves. Here’s Joanna and Kevin, and then me and Emily (sort of).

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The schedule advertised the pantomime as Thumbelina, but after a few scenes, when a clown with black clothes and a white mohawk came out and kept sucking people’s blood, we realized we were actually seeing the play scheduled for the next day, Pierrot the Vampire. Still, it was quite spectacular and creative, a mix of dance, movement, stage fight, and mime.

– Of course, you can’t go to a theme park without doing theme-park stuff. The rides were way too expensive ($8-12 US each), but we did get ice cream and cotton candy.

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Kevin got a LOT of cotton candy.

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But he showed it who was boss.

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Some parts of the Tivoli grounds are like the sort of carnival that you see in horror films when kids creep into the back of a tent and have something awful happen to them.

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Apparently, for Emily, that awful thing is ice cream.

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Deb and Katie, on the other hand, got turned into bannisters.

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– The next morning, Emily left to visit her brother, Mark, in Finland. It was his birthday, so we sent him a present and a card with her. But, before she left, she and I tried some kind of Danish flower-juice that tastes like lichi.

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– Then Joanna, Deb, Katie, and I went up the Round Tower, a Copenhagen landmark and museum from the top of which you can see the entire city. But not when Deb and I are in the way.

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– We also wandered the streets of Copenhagen and found a cool shop where they were selling awesome Viking paraphenalia made of wood and foam.

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– Also, I like Danish cream-puff-balls best when they’re NOT being shoved up my nose.

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– We hung out with Hans Christian Anderson, too. He didn’t want any cream-puff-balls.

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– That night, Deb’s friend Florence was having a going-away beach BBQ, so we went to that as well and met some more of her friends.

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Playing soccer barefoot on the sand is hard on the feet.

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– Joanna caught a 3am flight out, which left just Katie, Deb, and me. Naturally, we went to the Viking Museum in Roskilde. We had the obligatory picnic lunch first. Viking style.

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– The Museum exhibits consist mainly of the remnants of actual Viking ships.

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– However, there is a section where you can dress up as Vikings and play on a replica Viking ship. Some of the clothing isn’t for adults.

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– But a lot of it is. :D

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– At the gift shop, we bought some mead, and we tried a few sips of it in a Copenhagen park. Even I kind of liked it, and I hate the taste of anything alcoholic. Mead smells (no kidding) like honey.

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– Katie and I both left Copenhagen on Sunday morning. :( She went back to New York City, and I went to London.

– I didn’t take any pictures of London, because a) it was just me, b) I don’t like to take pictures without people in them, and c) I feel like a douchebag taking pictures of myself at arm’s length all the time. But Heathrow Airport really rocks because it has a direct subway link to downtown London. Also, have you ever had the fire alarm go off at a hotel you’re staying at? I have. It’s like when the fire alarm goes off in a university residence, except instead of drunkenly singing your school fight song, everyone takes pictures of themselves and the fire engines as they arrive.

– I went to do some research on J. N. Maskelyne’s automaton Psycho at the Museum of London at Harbourfront’s Jack the Ripper exhibition. Go on, ask me about my PhD, I dare you.

– Also went other various places to kill time between ticketed events. Like, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Natural History Museum, Harrod’s (mmm… pure melted chocolate at the chocolate bar and scones with clotted cream at the cafe), and the Sherlock Holmes Museum (actually, planned to go there from the start – needed to pick up prizes for the treasure hunt, doncha know?)

– I saw The Woman in Black at the Fortune Theatre in Covent Garden. Now, this was billed as a terrifying and suspenseful ghost story, but really it was that old Lovecraftian favourite technique wherein for the first half of the story, the main character goes somewhere strange and rural where all the people he meets hint at how something horrible/eerie/unworldly has happened/is about to happen/is happening. The main character scoffs and goes to do what he wants to do anyway, and then something horrible/eerie/unworldly does happen. When he narrowly survives, he returns a changed man, and all the people who warned him not to go explain the details of the horrible/eerie/unworldly thing that would have been a damned sight more useful if he’d known them before he encountered it. Throw in obligatory making sudden, loud noises to make the audience jump and a couple references to things everyone’s afraid of (eg unpreventable accidental deaths of children), and you’ve got The Woman in Black. And yet… I totally should have known better than to see this when I was spending the night on my own in an unfamiliar place. ‘Nuff said.

– I saw A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Globe. Enh. Nothing special, nothing particularly bad about it. A couple quite funny jokes, and a whole bunch of others that were old and always-done. Next!

– Finally, I saw Derren Brown’s new London show. Which was quite interesting; I like stage magic because it’s like a logic problem to me. Given: information cannot pass from the future to the present AND it appears that no one has touched the sealed box since the beginning of the show, how can it be that the box contains information about the middle part of the show? I waited to get Mr. Brown’s autograph after the show, but unfortunately, he was sick and not signing. Sad.

– And now, after seven hours of flying time and two hours of getting from Pearson to U of T campus (did I mention how Heathrow has a direct subway link to downtown? Hint, hint, Toronto.), I am home, be it ever so humble, etc.

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