Our Scandinavia Adventure: Day Four (3 August)

Our last day in Copenhagen started with more animals and a fiend or two.
Our first stop of the day was at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, one of the highlights of our visit.
An amazing art space that greets visitors with its impressive "Winter Garden,"

my only regret is that photography isn't allowed in most areas of the buildings, so you'll have to take my word for it that the museum has a fantastic, architecturally pleasing, logical layout--something that many museums lack. Here's the view from the roof deck,
and Bob and I both loved this sculpture room, with its natural light and fantastic mirror:
The Glyptotek also contained a few new (to me) paintings by Pierre Bonnard (a constant favourite of mine), although I was also very disappointed to find out that the giftshop didn’t sell a postcard of my favourite Bonnard in their collection. After the Glyptotek, we headed over to the Danish Design Centre, which has a lovely bookshop and café. The café's design magazines could have easily kept me occupied for the entire morning over coffee in the airy space.
The basement of the design centre has a very odd shop, run by the FLOWinstitute, called FLOWmarket. They don't sell everyday kind of things--well, actually, they sort of do, with a difference: much of what they sell is normally promised, on one level or another, by the commodities we buy or long to buy.
The catch is that all the containers in FLOWmarket are empty! You can buy stress killers, empathy, inner calmness, identity finders, tolerance, clean tap water, collective consciousness, clean air, and (my favourite) time for each other, among other things.
I'm not sure about the story behind it, but the design centre's permanent exhibit of 20th-century design credits the US Navy with designing the t-shirt in 1942! I had no idea . . .
Speaking of design, I liked how all the information signs in Copenhagen wore little crowns:
We walked over to the Royal Library, and were impressed with its gorgeous garden, which featured an idyllic pool with fish, a duck family,
and Søren Kierkegaard.
Before we went into the library, we made a short stop at the Danish Jewish Museum--I must admit, more for the building than the exhibits.
Photography isn't allowed inside the museum (it's the only place I've been where they go to the extreme of making you leave your camera in the cloakroom!), which is a shame, since the interior is all angles, shards of light, and a sense of disorientation that no doubt relate to the exhibits it contains. Shaped like the Hebrew characters for Mitzvah ("good deed"), the corridors of the museum are simply remarkable. Since you can't enter the library from the garden side, we entered through the new extension (which we saw from yesterday's canal-boat tour):
The library has an appropriate address,
and won me over with its wonderful interior, right on the water.
I wish I had a better photo of this fantastic ceiling mural--the colours contrasted so nicely with the rest of the building that I found myself wanting to lie down on the floor to take it all in!
We crossed over to the old part of the library, which basically contained my library dream: great colours, wood, light fixtures, and typography.




On our way out, I quite enjoyed this scene in the library shop: We wandered around for a while, passing by Arne Jacobsen's Danish National Bank building,
and this intriguing sign that pointed out an underwater sculpture:
We tried to see the sculpture, but could only see the top of a head. Others have had slightly better luck, but this piece of art still seems mostly hidden! We had a look at the Friday flea market
and walked down some shopping streets, where I spotted this pair of creatures:
It was a perfect day for strolling around . . .


The domed light suspended in this next photo
is a streetlight--something which I felt really silly took me a day to realise! With all the bicycles (most not locked to anything--bikes in Copenhagen tend to be upright, with kickstands extended, locked to themselves on the sidewalk) and people on the already narrow sidewalks, it's a good thing the streetlights are suspended instead of adding to the clutter! We walked through a nice park to get to our next destination, Rosenborg Castle,
whose moody interior contrasted with the sunny summer day outside:


This wine was labelled "1615"!
We emerged from the castle starving, and were happy to find a great, simple restaurant directly across from Rosenborg, with great food (we both had Danish open-faced sandwiches with beef and freshly-grated horseradish--yes, there is bread under all that meat),
great views,
and (surprisingly) at uninflated prices compared with other non-castle-view restaurants! Lunch gave us the energy to tackle the expansive National Art Museum,
whose "Sculpture Street" is a beautiful space currently filled with (in our collective opinion) horrible, horrible sculptures by "one of Denmark's most important sculptors." Decide for yourself here if you like, but don't say I didn't warn you.
The views OUT from the sculpture space were great
and once we moved elsewhere, I did find plenty to like, including this painting by Victor Vasarely
and the metalwork by Robert Jacobsen at the left below.
A quirk of the museum was the way the paintings were displayed, which didn't make for relaxed viewing or encourage prolonged meditation of any given piece, as the surrounding pieces tended to distract from any single painting.
Too bad, because I liked quite a bit of the work on display, but don't feel that I really took any of it in very thoroughly. Ah well, I guess that's good for visitors to Copenhagen who are watching the clock! I liked these paintings by Georges Braque (top) and Juan Gris (bottom),
as well as this one by Braque
and this one by Picasso.
I snuck this photo of Bob and another male specimen to see how they compared . . .
(Bob says that it looks like the statue is about to punch him!) Another Robert Jacobsen piece in a different medium caught my eye
before we left the museum to enjoy our remaining time in Copenhagen. We saw many cyclists during our visit (the bike lanes during rush hour are phenomenal), but only two who rode while holding hands . . . now, that's love!

In contrast, I liked these wee figures who appeared to have just had a spat of some sort: We browsed in a few secondhand shops and I found myself standing over many tables and chairs, lamenting the fact that we were so far from home.
These birds called to me from a shop window,
as did the excellent wares at this organic bakery.
We spent a bit of time walking through Assistens cemetery, which was a beautiful place where we spotted quite a few picnickers enjoying the warm night.

Some of the tombstones were pleasingly unconventional



and I really liked the illustration on this headstone:

We walked past Niels Bohr's imposing owl tribute
and the slightly less dramatic resting places of Hans Christian Andersen
and Søren (Aabye) Kierkegaard
before making our way to the exit.
One of the things I enjoyed about walking around in all three cities on this trip was peering into window displays; even usually austere bank windows were often livened up with a bit of quirky personality:

We decided to spend our last few hours in Copenhagen in Nørrebro, whose restaurants, coffee shops, and shops all made for a great feeling on the streets. We had a fantastic simple Picnic dinner, this time not an actual picnic, but dinner at a place called "Picnic"

where we mix-and-matched mezes and bread for an extremely satisfying meal.
After popping across the street
for some great coffee (by now, the expected norm in our Norwegian and Danish experience),
we headed back to the hotel to get our bag, passing a nice attempt at evoking a rural backdrop in a very urban space

and a bike mural shining in the sun,
before descending into the sci-fi-like subway.
Now, I mentioned earlier that we were taking the train from Copenhagen to Stockholm, but I don't think I mentioned that we took the humble overnight train! Yes, and not only that, but the cheap private cabins were sold out by the time we booked, so we opted for something that was called "just nu badd" on the SJ Trains website. (Most of the website was available in English, except for "just nu badd," and I was 99% sure that I had booked us two bunks in a mixed-gender six-bunk cabin. Thankfully I was right.) Unfortunately, a six-bunk cabin is about as bereft of glamour as it sounds--but it could have been WAY worse. The other four occupants of our cabin were very nice, quiet, and odor-free, but when we boarded the train, we mistakenly boarded the wrong carriage, and the entire carriage seemed to be full of loud, drunk backpackers, whereas our correct carriage was dead silent (and sober). Very strange. I wanted to get a photo of our sleeping quarters, but we were the last occupants of our cabin to board and by the time we got there, the other four people were already in their bunks, so I felt a bit self-conscious about taking a photo. In lieu, here's one of Bob peering down the tracks as we left: (Our cabin is right behind him, with a narrow standing space and rows of three single bunkbeds on either side.) When we booked our "just nu badd," we had a choice of top, middle, or bottom bunks, and we agreed that we made the right choice by reserving the bottom bunks. In fact, the occupants of the middle bunks, who were sitting on our bunks when we got to the cabin, looked a bit disappointed when we arrived!