Saturday, September 17th – our fifth wedding anniversary!! We picked a good place to celebrate.

We slept til almost 10, then felt like maybe we were over our jet lag. We got up and went to go find breakfast along one of the pedestrian thoroughfares nearby.

We found a little spot called Kompan 9 (a pun in Danish, it’s pronounced ‘company’). We had eggs and toast – that amazing Danish bread that’s way better than anything you get in the U.S. – and a couple cappuccinos apiece.

From there, we walked over to Nyhavn, which was already really crowded even though it was before lunchtime. One of the buildings was a giant art project:

Despite overcast skies, it’s as attractive as all the photos we’d seen. All those umbrellas are restaurants along the entire waterfront. Some of the ships have restaurants on them, too.

From the other direction:

From there, we walked over to Amalienborg Palace.

Admission to all the royal properties in Copenhagen is included with our CPH cards, so obviously we were going to take advantage of that. The building on the right above is open four touring.

One of the things I learned is that the king loved to surround himself with portraits of the family. Holy crap, the portraits. It was kind of creepy.

The guards seemed slightly more cheerful about having their photos taken with kids, compared to the British. I can’t imagine having this job.

We walked back along the canalfront, where the pedestrian/bike bridge had retracted to allow boats through. How awesome is that? (I realize the color in these photos make it look pretty crappy in Copenhagen. It really wasn’t!)

We walked back over to Nyhavn and found a place exclaiming about their world-famous veggie burger on a board out front, so we decided on that. We sat along the waterfront watching a million people and bikes go by. The veggie burger was pretty good, but by no means world-changing. After lunch, we walked a few blocks to a bus stop and hopped on a bus towards Carlsberg.

The buses in CPH were super-easy to use, since they had digital displays with the next destination, and that a stop had been requested. If buses in the US were all like that, I’m pretty sure more people would use them (especially travelers). It’s hard to use buses if you’re not familiar with a city.

We hopped off at Carlsberg and had a long walk to the visitor center, since the front gate was blocked. We showed our CPH cards and were handed tickets for two glasses of beer apiece, plus admission to the self-guided tour. We got a beer at the bar and went to go see their facilities.

Upstairs, we found the Guinness-Book-World-Record-Holding largest collection of beer bottles in the world. It was incredible, and this isn’t even all of them.

We learned that Carlsberg was responsible for huge advances in yeast production for brewing. Who knew?

In the stable, we found a bunch of horses standing around with their gigantic horse-dongs dangling all over the place. (I didn’t post a photo here, though I *did* take one.) We were a little confused, but realized most of the people there were also giggling about it. I’d definitely never seen that before, but I guess I don’t hang out with horses that often, either.

After our tour, we went to the shop and then upstairs to their gigantic taproom, where we used our other beer coupon. Then we got directions to the famous gate with the Carlsberg elephants, which we would have passed if the main entrance had been opened.

(Don’t worry about the swastikas – those predate Nazis by a lot.)

I like the skyways.

From there, we walked back to the bus stop and rode about halfway back to our hotel, hopping off near the Mikkeller taproom. It’s a small basement with a few rooms and picnic tables out on the street. It looked really crowded, but we managed to walk in just as two seats opened at the bar, which gave us a great view of the tap list. Which was spectacular, of course.

We stayed there for a few rounds (and wanted to stay longer, but dinner called). We headed down the block to an Indian restaurant Matt had read about, called South Indian. It was on the second level of a building and much fancier than expected. Since they were known for their dosa we ordered masala dosa, a bottle of Kingfisher to split, and I had okra curry. I don’t usually like okra, but this was really good.

After dinner, we walked the mile or so back to our hotel, past Tivoli, to drop off our shopping bags. I had big plans for our anniversary, which involved nothing more than having champagne at the Veuve Cliquot bar I’d spotted earlier on our walk down Stroget. So we headed back off in that direction, walked to the far end of Stroget, and it wasn’t there. I have no idea where the place I saw was – I’m usually great with directions – but it definitely wasn’t there. Instead, we decided to just get a glass of champagne back at our fancy hotel bar later than night. We turned and headed back that direction.

On the way, we walked passed Lord Nelson, which Matt realized was on his list of recommended beer spots in the city. We decided to stop in. Like Mikkeller, it was also half a story down in the basement, and this one was very dive-y looking, in an awesome way.

The bartender was friendly, and the beer selection was great. The wall was decorated with little wooden plaques that the guests had drawn. We sent a picture of this one to our Welsh friend back home:

One of their beers was a Surly collaboration based on Todd the Axe Man, which blew our minds a little bit. A Scottish guy wandered up to order and we ended up in a conversation about the way of things in America; we assured him that we were not vaccine deniers, and that Zika was actually a concern in Miami. I can only imagine what people overseas hear about Americans nowadays.

From there, we walked to Huset, a couple blocks from our hotel. It’s a multi-story building containing Bastard Cafe (a beer bar with a million board games), multiple show venues, and a movie theatre. We went up to the big showroom to see the David Bowie tribute going on there. It was in the 60s outside, but inside the room it was approximately 150 degrees. I don’t think this was smoke effect so much as sauna:

We got beers and stood around watching the band for a while. At first we suspected they were awful, then it turned out they were actually awful. There was very little David Bowie about it; the only good thing was the Commodore 64 that one of the band members had fashioned into a synthesizer. We watched a few songs before getting the hell out of there, laughing about the ‘tribute’.

We went downstairs to a quieter room that appeared to be a gay bar, had a beer there, and then headed back to the hotel bar, called Honey Ryder. It was in full swing. We worked our way through the crowd to the back of the room, where we found a spot at the bar. The menu was really excellent, so we ordered cocktails and took them out to the patio (in the courtyard that our room overlooked). Once we were done with those, we decided we had to get our anniversary champagne, so we went back to the bar to order. When I mentioned the big event, the bartender said it was on him. That was a pretty excellent way to end the night!

Miles walked: 11.23 / 23.12 total