Day 8 - Copenhagen walking

Armed with high quality insider information, we hit the ground running for our first full day in Copenhagen.

First stop: coffee and pastries at J&J's recommend, Lakagehuset (back near the train station/Tivoli). We each had lovely flakey crispy things, and small buckets of coffee.

I wanted to run across the street to investigate Tivoli's front door, but the gates were mighty high and very CLOSED. J&J had told us when it's open, lots of locals actually frequent the place for concerts and such, so it's not just a tourist trap.

We walked across the Rådhuspladsen (the square in front of City Hall) towards the central and old part of town. There were a bunch of trucks parked in the middle, with bikes being wheeled by the cabs. I ran up to one of the dudes near a truck and asked what was going on, and he said it was to demonstrate how well the newly designed (lower windows? or) truck cabs allowed drivers to better cyclist visibility.

We wandered down the street alongside the City Hall and caught the back-side of Tivoli. It was like a darker, slightly more sinister Disneyland.

We made our way through Strøget - kind of their version of Santa Monica's 3rd Street Promenade, with high end and smallish stores (like this one who'd put a sale rack out in the street). After beating down the cobblestones on Frederiksbbergade, we veered off towards the University.

I couldn't resist taking a snap of the windowful of smørbrød we passed by.

As I'm always drinking water, I'm always having to find a place to pee. This was the inspiration behind running into the University's library for a second - there was dark wood everywhere, lockers near the bathrooms - and these sinks that looked like water fountains.

We saw this guy taking some guards out for a walk...

...then walked through Rosenborg Have (the big garden near the castle).

We made it to the Danish Museum of Art and Design and promptly settled down to eat at the cafe.

Man o man - Evan calculated that I was paying nearly $20 for my soup, but it was delicious - full of crispy vegetables.

The bread was so wonderfully seedy! Warmed, fueled and caffeinated, we moved on to the exhibits.

The rotating exhibit was "VRROOOOM - Motorbike Design." Dang! I thought Husqvarna only made sewing machines!

This pretty pattern and wonderfully simple chairs were part of their standing exhibition on applied arts in the 20th century.

As well as these sketches.

Transportation design © 2009 Evan di Leo.

These were not part of the exhibit - just our contributions to the "interactive" area's Lego heap. This one is © 2009 Didi Oi.

We raced around the rest of the museum - they had a lot of awesome applied arts stuff - textiles, ancient gilded grooming kits, cabinets with illustrative wood inlay etc., and a library tucked away in the back - full of design books from all over the world.

Facing the cold again, we walked back through Strøget via the waterfront and Nyhaven, and stopped to defrost with $5 coffees. Feeling strong, we then hit up the Danish Design Centre - free on Wednesdays from 5pm-9pm!

"See the Light" - a show on the future of light design - was their main exhibit.

Time to hunt down dinner again - we walked back toward J&J's neighborhood. We'd seen this sign from up the street the night before and wondered what it could be. A Bosch spark plug factory? Like moths to the flame, we moved closer, and could see people crossing back and forth in front of the windows. For a second I thought it was a bowling alley.

Lo! It was a new restaurant! BioMio, as the cashier tried to explain to us, was healthy food. You grab a menu, sail up to the line of cooks at various stations, and they'd cook it right in front of you. Their menu was crazy - so many silly icons, touting the virtues of each dish. Some were purported to be more "manly" than others (the ones with meat in them had muscleman arm icons applied to them). After puzzling over the only-in-Danish menu (sometimes it pays to be a loud american!), a friendly Australian lady helped us figure out what was what.

The food was tasty and wonderfully fresh! And quite affordable! I had the broccoli thing on the right, and Evan had some kind of pasta dish. The Bosch sign (apparently left still attached to the building because it was some kind of historic/protected signage) had not lead us astray.