Author: bbpeck

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.

Bob and I left Bury St Edmunds today after seeing the happy return of our homeowners from their driving trip through Norway. Angus and Mollie were quite excited to see them. Our homeowner kindly offered to drive us to the train station as it was raining.

We then caught the bus replacement service to Ely, due to work being conducted on the rail line, where we had a short wait for an initially very busy train to London Stansted Airport via Cambridge and Audley End.

We are spending the night at the Hampton Inn next to the airport as we have an early morning flight tomorrow to Copenhagen. We’ll be flying Ryan Air for the first time, so are expecting to have to pay more for our bags as their weight limit is a little lower than other airlines.

We walked back to the airport to pick up dinner before the start of the England game in the Eurocup, and both the airport and hotel seem quite busy.

Bob and I took our 3rd trip east today on the East Anglia train in the direction of Ipswich. The first time, we went to Ipswich, the 2nd time we went to Needham Market (stop just before Ipswich), and today, we visited Stowmarket (the stop before Needham Market). It was a quick 20 minute ride.

Just as a random aside, I liked this quick journey because there were only two stops before Stowmarket, and I remember them because I seem to have immediately associated them with other words. The first stop out of Bury is Thurston (Howell III from Gilligan’s Island TV show), and the second stop is (Alls well that) Elmswell. This is the kind of stuff that amuses my brain, and don’t even get me started on the town of Diss. I can solo laugh for quite awhile with that one.

Anyhoo, back to Stowmarket. As we noted during our trip to Ipswich, there is a 17 mile trail that connects Ipswich and Stowmarket and that runs along the River Gipping. As we did in Ipswich, we started our visit to Stowmarket with a short walk along the trail. While the path was fairly clear right in town, it was very narrow and surrounded by tall grasses as we left the town center.

Stowmarket is a market town with a population of approximately 21,000. Unbeknownst to us it was one of their biweekly market days today, the other being Saturday. There was a fairly active high street, and we enjoyed our walk around town.

As we start our last week in Bury St Edmunds, Bob and I are still finding new paths to walk. Today, Bob and I walked a bit on the Lark Valley Path where it runs in conjunction with St Edmunds Way. We headed to the train station to catch a path that brought us through a nice neighborhood to our desired route. Once on the path, we then walked north along the River Lark past a golf course before turning around and making our way back to near the train station for a Tesco run for ingredients for a kimchi omelette for dinner tonight.

One of the best parts of this UK trip has been visiting with former homeowners/now friends. Today, our Cambridge friends, Sue and Peter, treated us to a surprise outing to Ely. While Bob and I had visited Ely before while house sitting in Cambridge, today’s visit allowed us to see new sites while catching up. It was a lovely day in lovely summer weather!

And to top off the great day we got to learn about the My BlackBerry isn’t Working skit by Ronnie Corbett and Harry Enfield. So funny!

Random musings from Bury St Edmunds.

Whether weather? Wherefore art thou, summer weather? This is a tiny gritch in the big scheme of things, especially considering the man above and his possible 2nd presidency, but kinda surprised about the weather we’ve been having. It seems as if April may have been our warmest month. I think we may have had three days in Bury where it has reached 70 degrees F, but they have been quite spread apart. We are definitely not freezing but a bit surprised that we’ve had days in June that haven’t reached 60 and mornings still in the 40s.

Food. Bob and I rarely do big grocery shops while we’re traveling. While this would likely be more economical, it’s easier to carry smaller loads, and we enjoy the daily walk to the shop and also frequenting different stores. We have had a wealth of options here. To date, we have shopped at Aldi, ASDA (super store), Tesco (super store), Nisa Local, Waitrose, Co-op, and Sainsbury (super store). One of the things that we appreciate about the stores here is the markdown items section to help the older items sell. It always pays to check out this section for items we like anyway, especially produce, as we feel like we’re helping reduce food waste and they still cook or roast up nicely.

Books. Bob and I attended another book talk this week. This one was at the library, where they aren’t keen on pictures, so no photos, and was for a series of mystery books by the author Tom Mead. It was an interesting talk, although the moderator jumped right in with questions without presenting any background or introduction, but maybe that’s how these things go and we should have read the book first? Anyway, it was still an interesting talk, and we did learn a lot about the settings of the novel and some of the thinking of the author in terms of the 4 books he has now written. We have been surprised that these presentations come with free wine and/or juice and sometimes nibbles as well. I don’t know that this would be the case in the States for a book reading/discussion at a museum or library.

That’s it for now. We’re off to a gin festival tomorrow night at a cathedral, as you do, so will let you know how that goes.

Up the street from us and just around the corner is the West Suffolk Sixth Form College (similar to a junior college), where Bob read that they had a cooking program and a related restaurant, Edmunds, open to the public. Reservations are required while the restaurant is open during the school term, and by the time we learned about the restaurant, there were only reservations available for the lunch service. So today, we had a lovely long lunch while we helped to train some future culinary superstars.

Lunch is offered from 11:00 to 1:15, and there was plenty of staff on hand for food and bar service. There was also a manager/teacher helping to run things and checking on customers. All of our food was very good, and while we’re not sure our wait person has found his real calling (low energy, had to ask someone else for the answer to every question), he was very nice. He may prefer back of house operations. We’re not sure how the program works.

No more food for us today. We definitely recommend Edmunds for lunch or dinner. Good prices, great food, and good to help with training the next culinary generation.

Bob and I took the train today for a quick 25 minute ride to Needham Market to walk around the lake on a path we had seen from the train when we went to Ipswich and then check out the high street. See photos below from our short visit.

We snapped a couple of pubs on the high street and popped into an old church and cute hotel.