Every summer I am so fortunate to have the opportunity to travel. Ever since I was 15 years old and took my first trip to France I have been instilled with a passion for traveling and love of seeing the world and experiencing other cultures. If I hadn’t taken a trip in high school with my French teacher (thanks mom and dad!) I would be a completely different woman. I’ve been privileged to have been a leader on 6 trips with young adults, but this summer I was venturing out on my own- I wanted to explore the completely unknown to me; places that I had never been to, and for a matter of fact, places that my friends hadn’t been to. They’re not completely off-the-wall locations, but I decided to travel to Scandinavia; these were countries that I didn’t have a lot of information about, places that I didn’t learn about in history class, places where I couldn’t speak or read the language. And luckily, after I started talking about traveling, my two friends Erin and Heidi decided they wanted to go too. After finding amazing ticket prices we couldn’t turn it down! We watched some Rick Steve’s videos to give ourselves a basic orientation of the countries we were going to, and rented a car, but beyond that, we didn’t have much idea of what we were getting into; we didn’t write out a day-by-day itinerary, deciding instead that we would stay in a location as long as we saw fit, while also knowing that we had a lot that we wanted to see. I relied mostly on travel blogs to get an idea for what we wanted to see, but we were going to wing it. We were also going to do some camping and roughing it- something I’m not so used to doing. Before this trip I had never camped out in a tent! So now I am going to share my adventure with you, in the hopes that someone reading this will take my ideas and tips and get to these countries soon! And at the very least, I hope you enjoy the stories of my adventures and travel photos.
My first travel tip: If you want to find cheap tickets, look into www.skyscanner.com They even have an option of saying you want to travel to any country from the United States with open dates and they will just find whatever incredible deals are out there. And since my friends and I are teachers and have summers off, we could just go with whatever cheap deal we could. And I’m just going to put it all out there, we got tickets from Boston to Copenhagen round trip for under $400. It’s an amazing deal, we couldn’t pass it up. Our flight was with Air Canada, I had never traveled with them before and they were awesome!
Let’s begin with our first day of travel; our initial flight was from Columbus to Boston, booked separately from the skyscanner deal we had already purchased. We had a long layover in Boston so we thought we would be able to get out and explore the city for the day, but we experienced delays getting there because the Boston airport unfortunately was down one runway- I never even considered airports doing construction on a runway. Therefore, when we checked in to Air Canada early, to see if we could dump our luggage before exploring the city, they told us they wanted to put us on standby for an earlier flight because flights were getting cancelled- they wanted to make sure we made our connection. Those customer service ladies were exceptionally kind and caring. So our planned day jaunt in Boston was off, but luckily we got on the standby flight and made it to Toronto for our connecting flight into Copenhagen.
We arrived in Copenhagen the morning of the 28th at 10am, and had booked an Airbnb in advance (one of the few things we had planned out before leaving). Problem was, we had no idea how to get to our Airbnb, besides being told by our host to take a bus straight there. We had to figure out, from the airport, to take a train to the main terminal, to then find a bus. We were lugging all our luggage, we were sleep deprived, we didn’t speak the language or have any cash…it took us awhile, but we figured out the correct bus to take (by jumping on a bus and asking, which is how we found out we had to have cash- leading me on a search of a nearby ATM), but then once on the bus neither we, nor the bus driver, could understand the address we were given by our host. Our bus driver tried to help us, but after a couple stops he started asking every person who got on the bus to try and help the tourists- and so many people attempted to help us out! Not one person sneered or seemed annoyed by our confusion. It ended up that the accents in the address weren’t coming through on the text messages (it was reading Dansh?jvej), so someone told us what stop they thought we should get off at, but we had no idea where to go, and our navigation systems on our phones weren’t working. We started walking, it was raining, we weren’t feeling confident about what we were doing, and to top it off, Heidi’s luggage didn’t have a pull bar, so dragging her luggage was very difficult, it was banging against her legs and falling behind. Luckily, a lady on a bike rode by and helped us out, and eventually we found the street we were looking for (especially lucky since we weren’t headed at all in the right direction). So we learned quickly that navigating would at times be difficult, but that Danish people were very, very kind.
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| Erin is so excited that we found the street! |
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The street of our first Airbnb, not Dansh?jvej- that’s an o with an accent
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| Heidi is back there somewhere with her luggage |
Our Airbnb was so cute! We were in a basement apartment and there were chickens in the front yard- check out that climbing wall on the house and all the flowers! However, we didn’t stick around the house long, we only had a day and a half to explore Copenhagen so we needed to get going!
We walked back to the bus stop and headed into the center of town, not sure what we were going to see or experience but open and ready for anything. We got off at a stop that seemed busy, because we found out it was Magasin du Nord- a department store in the heart of Copenhagen.
We walked through it, coming out onto a pedestrian street with lots of shops.
It was raining slightly, and we were hungry so we had a quest for some food. But already we were in love. Just look at the buildings in Copenhagen, so colorful and friendly and inviting.
One thing we noticed right away, besides the colorful buildings, were the mass amounts of bikes. We quickly found out that Copenhagen is a major biking city. Over 35% of people commute to work or school by bike; the number of people biking in Copenhagen is more than the total of people who ride in the entire United States! As we heard it referred to later, you need to watch out for those ‘Vikings biking’- haha! There were bike lanes running alongside all the roads, they have their own signals with the traffic lights and they were fearless!
We were just wandering around, no map, no clue where we were going, but we did find the Royal Danish theatre, and further down the street we saw a brick building with a beautiful courtyard that we just had to walk through.
I know now that this was the Kunsthal Charlottenborg museum. We walked through it, and we noticed that one of the buildings had orange objects hanging out of all the windows. 
When I got home I had to look up what this was about. This is an art piece by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. He has taken salvaged life jackets worn by migrants and has called it “Soleil Levant”, which means “Sunrise” in French, in an effort to bring attention to the refugee crisis in Europe. I love it.
And that is when we realized that we had effortlessly and haphazardly found our way to what is undoubtedly the most photographed spot of Copenhagen: the Nyhavn harbour. And man, in person it is even more incredible that pictures can capture. It was a rainy, cloudy, dreary day, but when you’re there standing on the pier you wouldn’t even know it. The colors are so bright, the atmosphere so lively, all the smiles of the people walking by so wide…nothing else seems to matter. I know, it sounds so cheesy, but hopefully you’ll see if for yourself one day and you’ll think “oh yeah, I get it now”. Be prepared for beautiful photo overload.
We were feeling very exhausted from the long day of travel and lack of sleep, but we decided that a harbour/canal cruise would be perfect. There are several that start there at the Nyhavn harbour, and we found one that was less expensive because “it isn’t as nice a boat”. The tour lasted about an hour and we got to see lots of sights.
One interesting thing about the Nyhavn is that Hans Christian Anderson lived in one of the houses, I believe it is the red building here. I may be wrong, but the red building certainly is pretty.
One of the first sights on our canal tour was the Opera of Copenhagen, which opened in 2005. Check out this roof! Its the size of three football fields.
Here is the royal family’s yacht.
This is the Danish Royal Playhouse.
The building below is called the Black Diamond, it’s the Royal Danish Library, completed in 1999. There is also an auditorium used for concerts inside, called the Queen’s Hall, and a few museums.
We also saw the back of the famous Little Mermaid statue. Made in 1913 by Edvard Eriksen, it’s always a huge tourist attraction, despite it being a bit of a walk away from the rest of Copenhagen. When we saw the huge mass of crowds around her we decided that we would accept this being our sole meeting with The Little Mermaid. The poor girl is only 4 feet tall and of late has been getting a lot of bad attention, being vandalized by political activists, most recently being splashed in red paint to protest whaling.
There were lots of other lovely sights from the canal cruise too, winding through some neighborhoods, going under bridges (some that seemed very low) passing lots of docked boats of all shapes and sizes. 
That canal cruise was not only beautiful, but also great at eliciting sleepiness. We were rocked into little naps, so after it was completed it was a pretty easy decision for us to head back to our Airbnbfor a full night of sleep. Our first day in Copenhagen was beautiful, and a great orientation into the city. And we were so excited to see what the rest of Scandinavia had in store for us!
Catching Katie 