Copenhagen
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Denmark's grandest city
By Rick Steves
While Rudy explained that I should pour the granola over the thick yogurt, Annette decorated my wife's crispy flatbread with a pickled herring. Rudy and Annette Hollender, who were renting us a room in their Copenhagen flat, then told us that they put the foil on the breakfast table so their guests wouldn't feel guilty about making a sandwich for lunch. In this and many other ways, the Danes eagerly help travelers sample their culture without going broke.
Staying in a local bed and breakfast lets me travel better because of — not in spite of — my tight budget. While the cheapest Danish hotels cost about $130 for a double, I enjoy double the cultural intimacy for half the price by staying with Rudy and Annette. In Denmark, the savvy traveler can travel well and reasonably.
For the tourist, Copenhagen is compact. After a busy day cruising the canals, touring its palace, and strolling the Strøget, Europe's greatest pedestrian shopping mall, you'll feel right at home.
Copenhagen's tourist office, across from the train station, is actually a blatantly for-profit operation, but it worth stopping by to pick up a city map and Copenhagen This Week (a free monthly listing of sights, museum hours, and events, including free English tours and concerts).
Copenhagen hums with entertainment throughout the year. Pick up a list of festivals at the tourist office or look them up in Copenhagen This Week. Jazz festivals put the town in a rollicking slide-trombone mood. In Roskilde, 20 miles west of Copenhagen, an annual summer festival features a week of music, theater, and film. While in Roskilde, see the well-preserved Viking ships.
Start your Copenhagen visit at City Hall Square (Rådhuspladsen), the bustling heart of the city. Inside the City Hall, the busts of three illustrious local boys — the storyteller Hans Christian Andersen, the sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen, and the physicist Niels Bohr — watch over stately functions held in the grand hall.
Next door to the City Hall are Tivoli Gardens, Europe's first great amusement park. Tivoli is wonderfully Danish; it doesn't try to be Disney. During the summer the park bursts with 20 acres, 110,000 lanterns, and countless ice cream cones of fun. Skip into a Hans Christian Andersen wonderland of rides, restaurants, games, marching bands, roulette wheels, and funny mirrors (open mid-April to late Sept). Schedules posted near the entrances list the day's free concerts, mime, ballet, acrobat, and puppet shows. Visit Tivoli with a full stomach or a full wallet — its restaurants are costly.
From Tivoli, the Strøget shopping street stretches through the heart of the old merchants' (køben) harbor (havn). Europe's first pedestrian street, Strøget (pronounced stroy-et) is actually a series of colorful streets and lively squares that bunny-hop through the old town, connecting the City Hall and the energetic Nyhavn neighborhood.
Nyhavn, a recently gentrified sailors' quarter, lounges comfortably around a canal. A few lonely tattoo parlors and smoky taverns stubbornly defend their salty turf against a rising tide of trendy, expensive cafés. Glamorous old sailboats fill the canal. Any historic sloop may moor here in Copenhagen's ever-changing boat museum, a scene of modern-day Vikings gone soft.
Just a five-minute walk from Nyhavn you'll find the Amalienborg Palace and Square, a good example of orderly Baroque urban planning. Queen Margrethe II and her family live here. While the guards change with royal fanfare at noon only when the queen is in residence, they shower every morning.
If your rambles whet your appetite for history, visit the excellent National Museum to trace Danish civilization from its ancient beginnings. Signs in English explain the story clearly. Mingle with mummified Vikings still clothed and armed for battle. Read translations of mysterious rune stones and ponder ancient lur horns.
Across a canal from the National Museum sits the Christianborg Palace, resting atop the ruins of Copenhagen's original 12th-century castle. Join a tour and slip-slide through royal reception rooms on protect-the-floor slippers. The highlight is a dazzling set of tapestries celebrating 1,000 years of Danish history. A 60th birthday gift for the queen, they were Danish-designed but Gobelin-made in Paris.
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To see Copenhagen by boat, take a cruise through the city's harbor and canals. Two companies offer basically the same four-language, hour-long tours. The Netto-Bådene company provide tours for half the cost of its competitor.
Or pedal your way through town by borrowing a bike from Copenhagen's "city bike" program. From May through November, 1,500 clunky but practical little free bikes are scattered through the old town center. Locate one of the 150 racks and slip a coin into the handlebar to unlock the bike. When you return the bike (to any rack), your deposit coin pops back out.
For an easy day trip, hop on a train in Copenhagen and cross the Øresund Bridge for a quick visit to Malmö, Sweden. This mega-bridge, a 10-mile-long engineering marvel, first linked Denmark and Sweden in July, 2000.
To taste a real Danish pastry, stop at one of the bakeries found on nearly every corner and ask for a wienerbrød. Just as common are small delis, which sell drinkable yogurt, caviar in a squirt tube, creamy Havarti, and dense rye bread. Hungry vagabonds with an eye for nutrition know that cheap liver paste tastes better than it sounds.
The pølse, Denmark's answer to our hot dog, is sold from sausage wagons (pølsevognen) throughout the city. Hang around a pølsevogn and study a Danish institution. These "cold feet cafés" are a form of social care: people who have difficulty finding jobs are licensed to run the wiener-mobiles. Danes like to gather here for munchies and pølsesnak, or "sausage talk," the local slang for empty chatter.
Denmark's famous open-face sandwiches cost a fortune in restaurants, but many street corner smorrebrød shops sell them for about $5 each. Drop into one of these family-run alternatives to Yankee fast food and get several elegant sandwiches to go. The tradition calls for three sandwich courses: herring first, then meat, then cheese, washed down with a local beer. There's no more Danish way to picnic. Skål!
Updated for 2008. For lots more information, check out our best-selling Rick Steves' Scandinavia guidebook — or join us on one of our free-spirited tours in Europe.