Enjablog

Our second to last full day in Copenhagen, we spent site-seeing downtown.  First stop was the Botanical Garden:

From there, we went to check out the Rosenborg Castle, but decided we didn’t want to pay to look inside.  Instead, we took a stroll through the King’s garden.

The National Museum has free admission on Wednesdays, so we stopped in to check out a couple exhibits. We weren’t interested in everything, so it worked out well.

We picked up lunch at a deli with Danish open sandwiches and found a bench to do some people watching. From there, we caught a bus to get to the Carlsberg Brewery. Spent the early afternoon there, enjoyed our beer samples, and then headed back to get ready to go out for dinner.

We had dinner in this nice restaurant outside of Freetown Christiania. They have a casual atmosphere with daily menus incorporating fresh ingredients, so they’re hand-written and different each day. Very good food!

After dinner, we took a walk around Christiania. I’ll stipulate that this area was different. And that was part of the reason Sune wanted to take us there and show us the “funny houses.” There was a main area where they had a wide variety of, um, plants available for sale. It was their own style of botanical garden.

Christiania… is a self-proclaimed autonomous neighbourhood of about 850 residents. From an official point of view, Christiania is regarded as a large commune, but its relation to the authorities has a unique status in being regulated by a special law, the Christiania Law of 1989 which transfers parts of the supervision of the area from the municipality of Copenhagen to the state.

Christiania has been a source of controversy since its creation in a squatted military area in 1971. Its cannabis trade was tolerated by authorities until 2004. Since then, measures for normalising the legal status of the community have led to conflicts, and negotiations are ongoing.

We took a stroll around Christiania, walked up an embankment, and made our way across a bridge and around a trail. I have very few pictures from this part of the day because there were a lot of signs prohibiting cameras in this area and while the enforcement of their rules may have been questionable, it just didn’t seem like a battle I wanted to take on.

After our walk, we made a stop for some coffee and hot chocolate and then headed back for the night.