Things have been a little quiet on the exploring front these last couple of years. Between one thing and another, Explorer Beastie and I haven’t managed to get further afield than Donegal in a long time! But all that changed last week…
Look! We’re on a plane! And that’s a pretty good indicator that we’re leaving the island… But where are we off to?
Well, this is a good start – a nice bit on sunshine on our first morning! Time for a quick stroll around this lake, I think.
Beautiful! Now maybe we could try getting a bird’s eye view of this city, so that the good folks watching at home can see where we are…
Aha! So, we have spires, verdigris…
… And in the distance, the bridge to Sweden. Welcome to… COPENHAGEN!
One of our first ports of call here was the Rundetaarn (Round Tower), which gave us these great views out over the city, and helped us to plan our wandering for the day. This tower was built by King Christian IV in 1642 as an observatory (it’s actually the oldest functioning observatory in Europe) and it is also Denmark’s “zero point” – when the country was first surveyed by Thomas Bugge in the late 1760s, he took the Rundetaarn as the starting point for all his calculations of distance throughout the kingdom. And there’s more to the tower than the viewing platform at the top. You can see this working model of the solar system on the wall as you come back down…
… And that (unfortunately hazy – it was dark!) picture in the bottom right is the tower’s hollow core, where you can stare 25m straight down through the plate glass floor. As you can see, Explorer Beastie wasn’t fazed by this at all, but the most I could manage was placing one foot on the glass while the other remained firmly planted on the stones at the edge! Although it turns out that I really needn’t have worried – in 1880, a choirboy tumbled out of a toolroom at the top of the core and fell the full distance to the bottom, where he remained trapped for the better part of a day before being discovered, alive, with nothing more than a scrape on his arm and a few missing teeth!
Copenhagen’s skyline is packed with beautiful tall spires, but one particularly caught our eyes from the top of the Rundetaarn. So when we found ourselves back at street level, we made a Beastline right for it!
This is Børsen, the old Danish Stock Exchange. If you look closely, you’ll see that the tower has four dragons at its base, and their intertwined tails form the 50m tall spire. Beast-tastic!
And, although this was our favourite, there were plenty of other elaborate buildings to distract us as we wandered through the city streets.
We also found some monuments on a more Beastie-sized scale. Well, we could hardly visit Denmark and not set foot inside a Lego store, could we?
And after a long day’s meandering, our weary paws brought us to one of the most iconic parts of the city – the tall, colourful townhouses at Nyhavn! Of course, I couldn’t resist taking one more photo before it got dark…
Perfect!
You can see more of our Nordic adventures next week – but what do you think of Copenhagen so far? Have you ever been, or is it on your travel-to-do list? Let us know in the comments!
It’s time for another between-the-numbers post, courtesy of Blogging 101!
This trip was one of many I made in 2012. I had applied for a sabbatical from my long-term job, and at the end of January that year, I walked out of my workplace with no intention of ever going back. Of course, I knew I would need to look for a new job eventually, but first I was going to have some fun with the savings I had accumulated after five years of working full time and living thriftily. A few days later, I was enjoying the sub-zero delights of winter in Berlin, with some friends who were based there at the time!
I’d love to say here that leaving my job and taking some lovely holidays to clear my mind was a miracle cure-all, and that when I got home I instantly dropped everything to start pursuing my long-held dream of making monsters full-time. But we all know real life isn’t so easy, so linear or so trite, and those of us who make things for a living are all too aware that it’s a long-term labour of love, not a get-rich-quick scheme. That said, making the break with my old, unsatisfying workaday life was a really important first step on a journey that’s still ongoing, and I relish every opportunity to remember the places I visited while I was trying to figure out a better, more interesting way to spend my days. So thank you, travelmagnolia, for letting me see Oslo through your eyes, and giving me the chance to share my own travel stories!