Copenhagen night 1

So we’re off for a short break to Copenhagen, Denmark. Various bits of today touched off recollections of our year of travelling. Hoisting a backpack onto the shoulders. Disgorging metal objects into a jacket pocket for the airport metal detectors. And yes, sitting down in front of this glowing screen in a little hotel room to write up the day.

Copenhagen seems a very pleasant city. This sounds like damning with faint praise, and obviously unfair as I have only the impressions of an arrival and an evening’s walk. Canals feature heavily, along with a sturdy mixture of historical and modern architecture, broad avenues both old and recent, impressive facades. Our hotel is a boat, which makes for a good twist. Although unlike the other boats we’ve stayed on in New Zealand and the Galapagos, this one is furnished like a proper little modern boutique hotel and the room is plenty big enough to stretch out in. In fact the floor-to-ceiling window makes being only a couple of feet above the water a real delight and I’d probably come back and stay at Hotel CPH Living on any other visit to Copenhagen.

After a chill out and a shower we set out to find dinner and aimed ourselves at one particular restaurant. This kind of attempt seems regularly doomed to failure in a strange city, with places either recently closed or not located where advertised or with us getting lost (like that would ever happen!). This time happily we hit the spot. No mean feat, as “Fiskebaren” is idiocyncratically located in an area of warehouses, wholesalers and food processors. We missed it on the first pass, only because we weren’t expecting a restaurant sandwiched between a shipping office and a meat packing plant.

I’m not going to roll into full-on restaurant review mode, that belongs in http://saltyplums.co.uk, the blog next door. But we certainly had a memorable meal of innovative modern Nordic cooking. The bill wasn’t too bad, but when I queried an item I didn’t recognise (for 15 krone, or about £1.80) I was startled to hear that this was the charge for tap water. Pull the other one, it’s got sleigh bells on! Why don’t they charge for wear and tear on the cutlery? How about napkin hire?

The meal had been so good I couldn’t summon the indignation to complain.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, April 7th, 2012 at 10:40 pm and is filed under Denmark. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.