Month: July 2024

Bob and I have begun our housesit for the imposing but sweet Kobe after having had a great walk through with our young family homeowners, who are off to the US for a family visit with the husband’s family, a short cruise from California to Mexico and back, and a trip to Las Vegas. A great way to celebrate the wife’s 40th birthday!

Kobe is a 3 year old German Shepherd (female) named after Kobe Bryant. She is a mostly calm girl except when meeting new people and/or dogs she’s not fond of. She likes to be near her people either playing ball in the yard or lying on one of her beds.

In terms of our new location, we are loving the super clean Solrød Strand (known as Solrød) with all of its neighborhood paths (usually a separate walkway and bikeway side-by-side but divided. Our current house is in a small subdivision near the daughter’s school and about a 20 minute walk into the town center with multiple grocery and retail options as well as hair salons, one of the two local train stations, and municipal buildings.

In addition to all of that, Solrød lies on the Koge Bay, so has a beach as well as a marshy inlet. We went to check out those areas today as well as do a small shop at the Netto grocery in Solrød Center.

Bob and I spent the US Independence Day and the UK Election Day exploring the Black Diamond Royal Public Library before taking an S train (as opposed to a regional train) about 30 minutes out to the town of Solrød for a walk through with our homeowners for our housesit that begins tomorrow.

The Royal Danish Library is located on Søren Kierkegaard Plaza and is located in 3 very different buildings. Facing the water is the Black Diamond, designed by Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects in 1999, in the center of which is Preben Hanson’s narrow extension built in 1968. At the back is H. J. Holm’s historical library building from 1906.

From the library we walk to the Nørreport station to catch our train to Solrød, where we had a great walk through with our homeowners and their 6 year old daughter and German Shepherd. The husband will pick us up at 7 tomorrow at the hotel to bring us to the house.

When we got back to the hotel, we went up to the walkway between the two towers on the 23rd floor to see the views.

See prior blog for today. The following photos are from Bob and my short excursion to Malmo, Sweden, today. Malmo is the 3rd largest city in Sweden with a municipal population of approximately 360,000. It struck us as one of the cleanest cities we have ever visited.

Bob and I had a great day today exploring the waterfront area of Copenhagen by boat, and then taking a 40-minute train ride over the Oresund Bridge to Malmo, Sweden. We ended with a drink at the Nimb Hotel on the grounds of Tivoli Park, which we had seen promoted (both the hotel and park) on an international hotel show that we saw while in the UK.

Due to the amount of photos, I’m going to break today’s activities into 2 blogs — one for Copenhagen and one for Malmo.

The Copenhagen waterfront is active with pedestrians and bicyclists on the 13k hiking/biking trail and people enjoying the water in kayaks, small rental boats, harbor taxis, and tourist boats like what we rode in today. During our 1 hour tour, along with the cultural and military sights, we also saw a boat that picked up trash, a lifeguard boat as well, lots of moored houseboats as well as some floating houses, and a couple of swimmers.

First, a few fun facts about Copenhagen. The city has a population of about 700,000, with a population of 1.4 million in the greater urban area. It has 250 miles of bike lanes, and is the capital of Denmark (or Danmark to the Danes).

Today, we headed to the geographic center of the city center but a bit north of the main tourist spots. We had an easy 25 minute commute, 5 minutes by foot to the Bella Center stop on the M1 line, and then 17 minutes to the Nørreport stop. We saw a number of beautiful park areas today, other museums, toured the Denmark Design Museum and then walked through the governmental plaza to the Kongens Nytorv metro for the ride back to the hotel. Had some mist off and on, but not too bad.

Our first park visit was to Ørsted Park, a cute city park that was built on a section of the large fortification ring that was constructed around Copenhagen in the 17th century. It has a lovely lake, meandering walking paths, and a number of bronze statues.

From Orsted Park we walked to the Botanical Garden, much of which, unfortunately, was undergoing maintenance. But it was still lovely. On the way, we got a unique big head photo for Bob.

After walking through what was open of the Botanical Garden, we walked farther along the road to Østre Anlæg Park, with a couple more museums and more gardens and ponds.

We then walked to the Kastellet (citadel), a lovely star-shaped fortress built in the 17th century as part of the larger fortification ring around Copenhagen. It now contains a number of memorials as well as a windmill.

The Design Museum was just a short walk away, and we decided to pay to visit. We were not alone. It was popular today. In addition to the regular visits, the museum had special exhibits on Japanese screen printing, futuristic designs, and a man who has created his version of outfits representing different areas of Denmark.

The museum noted that Danish Design became an international concept in 1949 after some American journalists visited the annual furniture exhibition of the Copenhagen Cabinetmaker’s Guild.

From the Design Museum, we continued down Bredgade Street, where we saw Frederick’s Church and then walked on to the Kongens Nytorv metro station.

Bob and I traveled from London Stansted Airport to Copenhagen today. Unexpectedly, we had a better experience with Ryan Air than with the airport in general. We had expected our bags to be overweight for Ryan Air, and they were not, so that made us happy as we didn’t have to pay extra money. We also thought there would be quite the queue for the bag dump, but all went well.

We started having (admittedly first world) issues after making our very long way through the duty free shops. I had wanted to buy one last UK newspaper, but by 8 am any shop that sold newspapers were sold out, and quite honestly the stores looked like quite a mess. More importantly, however, we are currently unable to use international data roaming, so are reliant on Wi-Fi, and the wifi at the airport was terrible. So we felt very old school and out of touch for our time at Stansted and were happy to leave it behind when our flight left.

We left London about 40 minutes late, but made up time in the air and arrived in Copenhagen only 15 minutes late. We had a quick trip through Immigration— only asked about length of stay — and absolutely nothing to do for customs.

After picking up our baggage, we headed towards the metro, where we bought and put a balance on a couple of train cards, as we will be using the metro and trains frequently while here.

We took the metro from the airport 7 stops, where we changed to another line for a 4 stop ride to where we got off to walk a few blocks to the AC Hotel. This hotel is connected to a convention center and is south of the downtown core of Copenhagen.

After getting settled in the room, we left to check out a bit of the surrounding area. Much of it seems new, but we did find some cute small groceries and walked through an older housing area across a couple of canals from our hotel.

We’re looking forward to getting into the city center tomorrow.