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Travel – What to do in Copenhagen

August 21, 2012 filed under: Copenhagen, Denmark, Travel

Now, I don’t consider myself an expert on things to do in Copenhagen as we were only there for a few days but I thought I’d show you a few of the things I got up to that I thought are worth recommending.

First off, it’s entertaining enough just to wander around the streets, as it always is in a new city, but Copenhagen is absolutely beautiful with it’s pretty canals, bright, colourful houses, fantastically dressed residents and street art on every corner.

The main tourist strip of the city is Nyhavn, which is pretty much the only picture that shows up in Google if you type in Copenhagen. There’s no particular ‘attraction’ there, it’s just that the brightly painted houses along the canal make for some pretty pictures, it’s also lined with restaurants so it’s a fantastic place to go for dinner.

I didn’t get time to take a canal tour but if I ever go back then it’s definitely something I’d try and squeeze in. While we were in the city centre we visited the Round Tower, which is used as an observatory and offers some lovely views of the city.

(that big bridge you can see in the distance is the bridge to Sweden!)

This next one is a bit of an odd thing to recommend but we stumbled upon it accidentally as it’s right by the great shopping street I talked about it my last post. It’s a graveyard, but a gorgeous one full of trees and flowers. It’s also home to the grave of Hans Christian Andersen. It’s very lovely and peaceful.

I had an afternoon to myself one day so I decided to grab the subway over to the zoo. I had so much fun! I love zoos and Copenhagen has a fantastic one. I’ve been to quite a few around the world and it’s not often you find a zoo that has elephants and polar bears. The elephant enclosure is amazing. There’s a huge indoor centre where you can get within arms length of the elephants (no glass!) and an enormous outdoor playground which backs onto Frederiksberg park so people can sit having their lunch outside the zoo and watch the elephants playing! They’re also opening a new bit later this year to house the polar bears which looks like it’s going to be incredible. The drawings I saw showed a tunnel with polar bears swimming all around – you can see them here. The hippo enclosure was also amazing, with a large outdoor area where you can watch them being fed as well as a huge glass indoor tank so you can watch them swimming about. (I’ve just read on Wikipedia that the zoo is one of the oldest in Europe – it opened in 1859! Apparently it’s also the only zoo outside of Australia to have Tasmanian Devils!)

I didn’t take many pictures as my husband had the camera for work reasons so there are only a few iPhone snaps.

Last but not least is probably the most popular attraction in the city, the Tivoli gardens and amusement park which opened in 1843, making it the second oldest amusement park in the world. It’s kind of strange, it’s not like theme parks we have here like Thorpe Park or Alton Towers. Basically, you pay a small entrance fee which just gets you in and you can wander around the gardens and look around all you like and then you can pay for each ride separately, or you can buy an ‘all-inclusive’ ticket which gives you access to all the rides. There’s also an aquarium and a theatre there and tons of restaurants. (I didn’t take any photos of the rides as we were always stood a bit too close to get any good shots)

If you’re going to Copenhagen for a short visit, I would definitely recommend buying a Copenhagen Card as this gets you free (multiple) entry to over 65 attractions and free transport around the city (including to/from the airport!). One adult card also covers 2 children aged 0-9 years. They come in 3 different time frames, 24hr, 72hr and 120hr and cost £27, £51 and £75 respectively and are about half that price for children aged 10-15 so they are well worth it.

Travel – Where to shop in Copenhagen

August 19, 2012 filed under: Copenhagen, Denmark, Travel

To be honest, shopping never tops my list when we go on holiday. I’m much more of a culture and sights girl personally, and if I wanted to wander around H&M, I’d have just stayed at home, but I do love a good boutique and am always drawn in when we’re hopping about cities.

Most of the shops in this post are from one street, Jaegersborggade, which is in the Norrebro area of the city.

First up is ‘Ladyfingers‘ which sells amazing handmade jewellery by 6 designers and other little cute odds and ends.

Next up is this random little art shop, which does have a name but I couldn’t work out what it was from the sign! Anyway, it’s down the same road and has some wonderfully quirky pieces.

The last shop I wanted to talk about on this street is called ‘My Favourite Things‘ which sells clothes by the likes of Petit Bateau and TOMs shoes as well as lots of amazing smelling perfumes and lip balms.

Lastly, while searching for Dop hotdogs as I mentioned in my ‘where to eat in Copenhagen’ post, I stumbled across the most amazing vintage shop tucked down a side street in the centre of town called ‘Time’s Up Vintage‘. Unlike many vintage shops that I’ve been into in England that are full of old ladies disgusting, smelly floral items that look like they’d go up in flames at the strike of a match, Time’s Up Vintage is filled with beautiful designer items from the likes of Dior, YSL and Chanel (those links go to the designer pages on the Times Up e-shop)

If you’re planning a visit to Copenhagen, don’t forget to check out my other posts on where to eat and what to do in Copenhagen.

Travel & Food – Where to eat in Copenhagen

August 15, 2012 filed under: Copenhagen, Denmark, Food, Travel

Obviously my knowledge of where to eat in Copenhagen is limited as we were only there for a few days but we did have some insider’s recommendations from Mark at Nordic Food Lab and his beautiful model sister. Although the food in Copenhagen is wonderful, it is rather on the pricey side.

For breakfast on our first day we visited Dyrehaven over in the meat packing district. Be warned, the menus aren’t in English but everyone in Copenhagen speaks it so you only have to ask. Which is what I wish we had done. We just picked something at random and it turned out to be cottage cheese on rye bread with a boiled egg, which was lovely, but then we saw the guy next to us tucking into some rye bread piled high with guacamole and instantly wished we’d ordered that instead. (We only ordered one dish and shared so that we could save vital belly-space for trying other places)

It’s a very cool and quirky atmosphere in Dyrehaven and the decor is very brown and wooden, giving it an almost log-cabin kind of feel.

After that, we walked across town to find Granola for our second breakfast, although it was technically brunch at that point. Here we shared a sweet breakfast platter that consisted of a pancake, some cinnamon toast, homemade nutella, pears, orange and some fruit salad with yoghurt and jam. It was delicious.

As you can imagine, we weren’t particularly hungry after all that so we skipped lunch. The hotel we were staying at was just around the corner from the new food market, Torvehallerne so we decided to hunt down some dinner there. Being a food writer, my husband is far more adventurous with food than I and he’d been on a mission to find sild (herring) smorrebrod ever since we arrived and we managed to get some at Hallernes Smorrebrod. I was a little more reserved with my choice and opted for fish and chips from Fiskerikajen – in my defence they were amazing fish and chips! This was followed up with a mini nutty pie and a Danish pastry called an overskaren from Laura’s Bakery inside the food market.

The last thing on our food list was a Dop hotdog. We’d tried a regular hotdog from a stand outside the train station when we first arrived and we weren’t too impressed but we were assured that the Doep hotdogs were much better quality and far superior and they were not wrong. Everything used at Dop is organic and the bread is wholegrain. We paid a tiny bit extra and upgraded to a wild garlic hotdog and it was absolutely delicious. The train station hotdog had been drowned in mustard but this was perfectly assembled and tasted divine. You can find the Dop hotdog cart outside the Round Tower in the centre of town.

I know I’ve only covered a couple of meals here but the first night we ate at Badudlejningen (don’t ask me how to pronounce that!) which is on a canal boat and I had an amazing steak but forgot to take the camera, we also had a free breakfast buffet at the hotel for 2 days and skipped dinner on the last night as we got distracted drinking beer at Mikkeller.

Travel – Copenhagen

August 13, 2012 filed under: Copenhagen, Denmark, Today I'm wearing, Travel

I’ve been away in Copenhagen the past few days and I thought I’d show you what we got up to. I have to admit that Copenhagen was never really on my list of places to visit but we ended up going there on business and I actually rather enjoyed it. If you’re thinking about going, then I would say that a long weekend is definitely enough time to get everything done as it’s not a massive city.

The first thing that struck me about Copenhagen was that it feels extremely calm and relaxed. The second thing that struck me was the crazy amount of hipsters in the city! Everyone dresses like a model.

So, this is just a general post about what we got up to and I’ll be following it up with 3 more posts this week about where to shop, where to eat and what to do in Copenhagen – bearing in mind that it’s a limited selection as we were only there 3.5 days.

The houses are gorgeous in Copenhagen. It’s a little Parisian-looking in places, but much more colourful. There’s lots of canals too which is nice.

Copenhagen is such a bike-friendly city and as such, they are the main way to get around the town. Seriously, you should see the size of their bike lanes, they are pretty much the same size as the car lanes, while here in the UK we have to ride in the gutter.

We stayed in the Hotel Kong Arthur which is in a really great location, right opposite a canal and round the corner from the popular food market, Torvehallerne. It’s also got a spa attached to it which is free to use for hotel guests so made the most of it and spent several hours in there! It also has the best ‘do not disturb’ signs – I wish I could have fit all of the options in one photo!

These are the only outfit photos I managed to take due to the limited hand luggage we took – my other outfits were only jeans and t-shirt so you haven’t missed out. I had hoped to be able to wear this dress with bare legs but Copenhagen had other ideas and I chose the coldest, windiest day of our stay to wear it – boo.

Dress – Zara

Shoes – TOMs

Lastly, I spotted this sign in a window of an opticians and it made me chuckle…

(Thanks to Wonderful Copenhagen for accommodating us)