Wanderung 34

Our first sightseeing choice today was a train tour of the old section of Copenhagen, so we took the 3A and 2A buses down to the City Hall square, which really does have the City Hall on one side of it, very much like the Rathausplatz in Hamburg, Germany that has the Rathaus over on one side.

The train was, predictably, one of those "Tourist Trains" with a faux locomotive running on rubber tires, and a set of 3 open carriages trundling along slowly in back, but on a warm, sunny day there is no better way to see an inner city area. As the first "train" left at 10:30, we had some spare time, and while waiting for it we walked up and back down the cobblestone Stroget street, which is a pedestrianized shopping area during the day. That was fun and we found both the official Lego store and a shop selling beautiful albeit pricy amber jewelry. Returning to City Hall square, we sat down and waited for the trainto put in an appearance, but it snuck up behind us!

We didn't catch the train at its departure point as that was completely unmarked when we walked by earlier and the descriptions from passers-by were quite vague. Thus when we suddenly saw it trundling off down a bicycle path, we were all taken completely aback and ran to catch up. Fortunately it was delayed by a stoplight at the next corner and when we caught up, Jerry managed to talk the driver/engineer into a quick pause to scan our Copenhagen Cards and let us on board. Since the trains only leave every hour, that was an important thing.

In part, the Tourist Train is better than walking because it can wend its way through VERY narrow streets and alleys that are typically found in those old city sections in Europe. In fact, this train even took the bicycle paths to get from one place to the other, which surprised me as I would have thought that to be illegal. But it all saved a bunch of walking and we highly valued that aspect of it!

Our first stop was the old main building for Copenhagen University on the left, and the Church of Our Lady on the right. The university has over 20,000 students nowadays and has moved to other locations around the city, but they apparently hold some kind of initial induction of the students here, where the university President shakes the hands of each one and welcomes him or her into a reception inside the building.

The Church of Our Lady has a nice steeple, but had a much taller steeple prior to the Napoleonic Wars, when the original taller steeple was destroyed by British guns and the church burned down. I strongly suspect, but have to confirm, that the British guns were fired by Nelson at the Battle of Copenhagen because I know that he threatened to destroy the city by a naval bombardment if they did not surrender. It would be just like Nelson to blast the symbolic steeple to convince the King and people to surrender, which they eventually did.

The Danes are still bitter that Nelson fought the battle "unfairly", however, as I found out when I visited a Danish maritime museum and saw an exhibit describing that battle. In any event, the King had the church rebuilt using bricks to lessen the fire danger and the steeple was rebuilt to the shorter one that currently graces the building.

At our next stop at Norreport, we viewed the fields of bicycles stored in racks around the station and our guide informed us that each citizen of Copenhagen owns an average of 2 bicycles! That astonishing figure actually makes sense if you consider that many commuters may bicycle to a Metro stop, take the Metro into town, and then use their second bicycle to ride from that station to their workplace.

The city government is strongly encouraging even more bicycle use and building more bikeways, including a bicycle superhighway across the bay for bike commuters that I read about! The Powers That Be also carefully measure and monitor the actual extent of the bicycle use of various bike paths by installing counting machines on them. This is all part of Copenhagen's attempt to become carbon-neutral by the year 2025 according to our guide. In general, Europeans are taking Global Warming caused by CO2 deadly seriously even while our current government indulges in reactionary wishful thinking.

When we returned on the tourist train to the City Hall square, we visited the nearby Hans Christian Andersen "Fairy Tale House" exhibit located right next to Ripleys "Believe It Or Not" museum. There is a common ticket office for both attractions and we ended up seeing both as our Copenhagen Cards covered both entries, but they could not have been more different!

The Hans Christian Andersen "Fairy Tale House" was very informative for adults, with a timeline history of Andersen, his writings, and his travels, which were far more extensive than I had known. After failing to become a professional singer or actor, he took his friends suggestion and began writing. He initially became known for his travelogues that he wrote when visiting nearby countries like Germany, and then became much better known as a writer of children's fairy tales even though he apparently also wrote some novels.

But the focus of many of the displays were simple expositions of his rather short fairy tales, in something of a diorama fashion but life-sized. By pushing a button, you could have the entire original story told in Danish, German, or English, and they were a faithful, word-by-word retelling of the original stores in an engaging manner. The animation was distinctly old-fashioned, low-tech, so modern kids might tend to dismiss it as there were no video screens or computer graphics. I concentrated on the content of the stories being told, however, rather than the dioramas.

The only problem with that, was that many of H.C. Andersen's fairy tales have a very sad ending! The only two that I remember out of 7 or 8 presented there that had a happy ending were The Ugly Duckling, an autobiographical account of Andersen's awkward childhood but final triumph, and Thumbelina, who married and lived "happily ever after".

On a whim, we also zipped through the Ripley's "Believe It Or Not" museum next door after finishing the H.C. Andersen Fairy Tale House, but I think that took us well under half an hour. Many of the exhibits were, in a way, fascinating oddities, and we all enjoyed the Musical Staircase a lot--that's a stairway that plays a different note as you step on each tread of the staircase, and with all of us walking up the stairs it created quite a complex tune!

But I had to bug out when we came to the Torture Chamber exhibits, not because they were fake but because as far as I could briefly glimpse, they were quite real recreations of torture devices actually used at some point in human history. I recognize that distressing part of human history, but I surely do not wish to dwell on it or immerse myself in it! Once back outside in the square, we discussed the next attraction on our Copenhagen Cards that we should visit, and decided on the Old Carlsberg Brewery.

To get to the Carlsberg Brewery, which is kind of on the southwest edge of town, we decided to take the commuter train or Metro the short distance out there. As the big Metro stop was Norreport, we re-boarded the next tourist train and took it just two stops over to the Norreport train station. There we boarded a local B or C train down to the Carlsberg brewery. But when we got to that station, we were uncertain which way to walk, and finally had to consult a local map to figure out the route, which turned out to be about 2 long blocks back uphill along the train route, and then turn right to get to the brewery entrance.

The brewery is located so oddly inconvenient to the rail and bus routes because it is a preserved monument of the old 1800s-era brewery that made Carlsberg a major force in the world beer-brewing business. The old brew house has been turned into a museum, but a brand-spanking new micro-brewery has been installed in the old building across the cobblestone courtyard from the museum, which I think would have made Carlsberg happy.

But when we saw a horse-drawn carriage toting a bunch of tourists out of the courtyard, we enquired about the carriage rides. We found out that they were free, but it was 2 o'clock and the last ride had just left! But we were told that if we asked the coachman very politely, he might give us a ride even though it was after 2. As it turned out, a winsome young 20-something mom with an endearing 4 year old pleaded to have a final ride and the coachman agree to give all us last-minute folks a final coach ride.

The ride covered maybe a 2 block residential area on the far side of the brewery, and I think it was an upper-class neighborhood as the houses looked large, ornate, and had beautifully tended yards. One house that puzzled me seemed to be only 8 feet wide but 2 stories high and rather long. I really wanted to see the interior of that house and how they made it work, but our coach rambled on.

Turning the team around some surprisingly tight corners--I saw the horses kind of side step to accomplish that, which was quite impressive--we returned to the brewery. There we started touring the museum part, which is installed in the old 1800s brewery building. The time line for the history of brewing was traced from the initial farming of grains and establishment of cities between 5000 and 10000 B.C. up to the present day. Of course, the historical time line was heavily skewed to cover the history of events relevant to the Jarlsberg brand of beer!

The first Carl Jakobson was quite scientific and installed thermometers to better regulate the brewing process. He also switched from the traditional Danish top-down brewing of ales to the bottom-up brewing of lagers that he found in Bavaria, Germany.

The story was that the owner obtained some of the bottom-up yeast down in Bavaria and then very carefully transported it back to Denmark, using his hat as insulation to make sure the sample of yeast did not get too hot or too cold. But the story did not mention him BUYING the yeast, nor did it name any German brewery as the original source of the yeast. So a question occurred to me: Did he purloin the yeast and secretly bring it back to Denmark? In any case, he successfully had the yeast reproduce and used it to institute a revolution in beer production in Denmark.

The interference of government in the history of brewing was a cautionary tale. Initially the brewing guild influenced the government to impose an "equal brewing" rule where every brewery had to produce exactly the same amount of beer per year. That strongly anti-competitive regulation was unpopular with the consumers, and was finally repealed, contributing to the ultimate collapse of the brewing guilds and the rise of large-scale, industrial brewers such as Carlsberg.

But even then the government made some bad regulations in the brewing industry. When Carlsberg was succeeding so dramatically, the government imposed a specific tax of 40% tax on the bottom-brewed Bavarian-style beers. The predictable effect of the tax was to greatly decrease the consumption of Bavarian beer and Carlsberg sales in particular. But decreased beer consumption led to increased consumption of hard liquor like Aquavit, which was untaxed at the time. That tax was finally rescinded, possibly to try to decrease the alcoholism problem with hard liquor, and Carlsberg brewery survived. The whole story reminded me of the gin epidemic in England during the 1800s.

The son of the brewery founder was initially assigned to supervise a branch brewery, but ultimately he set off on his own and established a brewery that competed with his father! That caused a father-son rift that continued for a couple decades, but they finally reconciled and the two branches of Jarlsberg breweries were recombined when each person died and left their brewery to the same scientific and philanthropic foundation that was established by the father, who publicly released all the results of his research for other beer breweries to use, which I thought was admirable.

In fact, the original laboratory used by the Jarlsberg brewery was re-created in the basement. I found both the laboratory, the old steam engine, and other bits and pieces of the old brewery equipment such as a huge leather belt to transmit power from an engine to another machine, to be quite fascinating.

When Linda and I finally emerged into the sculpture garden, we found Jerry and Elsbeth sitting there. Both of them were enjoying a second free beer curtesy of the free coupons included with admission, but their extra free beers were the two that belonged to Linda and me! They explained that we two were taking much too long in the museum for them to wait around without refreshments! The sculpture garden was small but had a replica of the little mermaid, since the original had been commissioned by Carlsberg.

We continued into the stable area where the two horses who had pulled our wagon were now resting in their stalls. Other horses were harnessed to the wagon, so we took a picture of them before finally exiting through gift shop.

But once back out in the cobblestone courtyard, we two bought and split the 2-bratwurst plate, while Jerry and Linda bought and split a hamburger. We took our meals upstairs to consume in the micro-brewery installed in one of the old buildings. That way, Jerry and Elsbeth could have some of the very nice craft beers for Happy Hour. Linda and I had enjoyed an interesting museum and Jerry and Elsbeth had a nice Happy Hour, which made our visit to the brewery a clear Win-Win!

But all this all took a surprising amount of time, so we only had a couple of hours to get back into downtown Copenhagen and do something else. We decided to end the day with a second canal boat ride around Copenhagen, but this time try the second purveyor of canalboat rides, the competition to the version we had taken previously.

In the end, the two competing companies used an almost identical course to loop their canal boats through the city center, so in that sense the canal trip was almost a duplicate of the sights we had seen previously.

But today it was cloudy and quite cool, and that made the experience very different than our first canal tour even though the circular course was the same. This tour boat was also in better condition than the first one, with varnished wood fittings, nicer steps and such. I became super cold and we were almost shivering before Jerry lent us his fleece, thank goodness. That was very kind and kept us just warm enough that I could occassionally whip out my camera and take some pictures. (Thank you, Jerry!)

Since I already had some pretty nice pictures of most of those sights, I concentrated on taking pictures of things that I had missed the first time, like better pictures of the royal yacht. Really chilled after the tour, we felt it was time to come home at the end. After warming up back at our B&B, I had enough energy to go out and purchase grapes, Coke, orange juice, and bread. But the Aldi was closed, so I had to get it all at Netto, which took a bit of time as the layout was quite different. At last I rejoined everyone else for an evening snack, and we talked about the events of the day before turning in early for the night.