Europe 2023, August 28

Went running at Copenhagen Lakes on the west side of the city centre before breakfast. It's about four different lakes divided by roads, but most require crossing the street which is not great. It was an ok route except for those road crossings, with a mixture of road and dirt surfaces, but could have been a bit longer also.

I got back in time for the booked breakfast slot, it was still quite busy but just enough seating. The food was spread out all around the room so it was a bit hard to find everything, and some of it was strange unknown local Denmark products. Found a waffle machine at the end, put in the batter, closed the lid, and it starts makes this loud beeping sound. Apparently you have to flip the machine upside down after closing the lid, but it wasn't written on the instructions. Makes no sense to me why it's needs to be turned upside down to start cooking anyway. The rest of the breakfast was ok, got the usual apple juice, muesli, and yoghurt.

I decided to go to the nearby laundry before leaving for the day, so I wouldn't have to worry about that again for the rest of the trip. It turned out to be a pretty good laundry since you could pay by credit card and it automatically dispenses the washing liquid into the machine too. The instructions for the settings weren't that clear but I think I ended up with the default setting of normal temperature and 40 minutes.

Dropped off the clothes to dry, then off to the station to travel a few stops to Osterport. The problem entering the destination station into the machine is you need to know if the O is regular, has a diagonal line through it, or two dots above it. If you get the wrong one it just doesn't show up in the search results at all. Got out at Osterport (the O with a diagonal line through it) and walked over to Kastellet.

Kastellet is an old fort shaped in a star that also has a windmill in the middle. There was some serious looking guards with rifles at the entrance checking cars driving in, but at the same time the public can just walk in.

Also nearby was the famous Little Mermaid statue, which is as small as described, and sitting just off land in the water. There wasn't a massive amount of people there given the number of parked tourist buses nearby, maybe 100 people. The only annoying thing is the idiots who want to get right up close for their photo, so nobody else can get a photo without them in it.

Walked down towards the city via the Amalienborg palace district, it's where some of the royals live but I didn't know at the time. There was a Denmark version of the British palace guards standing around out front with a big crowd, but otherwise nothing was happening.

Continued walking past some theatre, saw the opera house (not as good as Sydney) across the other side of the river, then got to Nyhavn. It's a small inlet of water with lots of boats docked, and all the 3-4 story houses along each side are painted different colours - lots of restaurants and people around.

Got to Stroget next which is the main shopping strip, so started to have a look for some lunch after lots of walking. The supermarkets have all been quite disappointing as they have very limited bread and pastry options in their bakery. On the other hand they have heaps of different energy drinks but I have no idea which are good and what the flavours are. So far I've had one good and one very bad. One of them had "mega" versions of energy drinks which were like a whopping 650ml instead of the usual 500ml cans.

Walked to the nearby botanical gardens to sit and eat lunch. Half of the gardens were closed for renovations and only one entrance was open, lucky it was the corner I turned up at.

After lunch went to see if the Torvehallerne food market had anything good to buy for later but didn't find anything. Started heading back towards the hotel via another park and city hall square.

Lots of souvenir shops were nearby so picked up an expensive magnet, but they accepted euros so was good to get rid of some old currency at least. Continued on via the Hans Christian Andersen statue and the boundary of Tivoli Gardens to continue back to the hotel.

My watch was getting up to 30,000 steps for the day which is rather high, and my foot (left always) was starting to get sore as a result. Took some time to rest at the hotel before heading out to find dinner nearby.