Copenhagen

I haven't finished the Iceland wrapup yet, but I am going to briefly move on and talk about places we went to afterwards when it is relatively fresh in my mind.

Flew in to Copenhagen from Keflavik Iceland on July 25. Plane was a small Boeing jet, an MD-90 I think, have never been on one of those before. We got to our hostel at about 9pm to find that we didn't have a reservation. Being a summer weekend the hostel was full. They were nice enough to give us a phone list of about ten other copenhagen hostels to see if they had room, five of which the hostel told us were also full. I set to trying to decipher a Danish pay phone in the lobby, not even four years of computer science helped with that, I found out later the phone was actually broken. In the mean time two beds in different rooms opened up and it being late and us being tired we took them. The hostel, the biggest one in Europe and maybe the world, was nice enough but the stress of not being sure where we were going to sleep and staying in different rooms was annoying to say the least. We also had the prospect of trying to find somewhere else to stay for the next two nights as the hostel was booked solid for weeks. The next morning we through in the towel quite early and stayed at an actual hotel. We still had to share a bathroom but we got our own room and a TV. Interestingly enough a channel on the television showed nothing but pornograhpy all day. Not the soft stuff played latenight on TQS in Quebec, full on hardcore porn, shocking. Once the novelty of that wore off we ventured outside. By luck the Glyptotek was free that day, it is an art gallery in a beautiful building donated by the guy who ran the Carlsberg beer factory. We also went to the Danish history museum and took a tour of the old Carlsberg beef factory, which is a masterpiece of 19th century industrial architecture. Our hotel was nice enough, but happened to be located in the red light district so we got lulled to sleep every night by arguments of prostifutes and police sirens. It really wasn't that bad, red light districts in Scandanavia are nothing to be afraid of. The amount of bicycles in Copenhagen is astonishing, I would say there was 5000 bikes locked up outside the train station at any one time. They even have this program where you can "borrow" a bike by putting in a coin and unlocking a bike, kind of like how you unlock a shopping cart at the super market, you get the coin back when you return the bike. The bike are kind of rickety but work well enough, especially in a city as flat as Copenhagen, probably the number one reason why so many people ride bikes there.