Saturday, 8 september 2018

We left San Francisco Thursday afternoon, arrived in Copenhagen Friday afternoon, and found our way by Metro to our lodgings. Here’s the unsolicited ad for HomeExchange: if you’re lucky enough to have Marie and Johannes stay with you in SF as they did last summer, you get to stay in their apartment now. We’re in a neighborhood full of shops, close to public transportation, within a pleasant walk of the big name sites in Copenhagen. All terrific, with no money changing hands.

We didn’t plan anything demanding for our first day, so this is just some smatterings of things we saw. First, lots of people ride bikes, mostly sit-up-straight city commuter bikes with baskets and fenders. (Unlike California, Copenhagen gets rain.). Here are two bike-share examples we saw today: Bycyklen, which are electric,

and Donkey, which are not.

Near our home is this group, who made Dan say

“Klaatu barada nikto.” Gort did not reply, but Dan’s no Michael Rennie.
On our walk to City Hall, we saw a fountain with a dragon and a bull, but it was too hard to distinguish one beast from another for me to say more. However, I liked one of the minor lizard-like characters a lot:

We will visit Tivoli Gardens another day, but from across the street we saw this mini-Matterhorn

and wonderd if there are lots of pigeons (or Western gulls . . .) in Denmark.
More creatures are illustrated in this building along the main pedestrian shopping street:

which makes me wonder if B & O equipment works in exotic environments. Finally, you can get the weather report from this building

where today the golden lady rides her bike. On rainy days, another lady comes out with an umbrella. The thermometer running up the corner of the building shows 16C, 61F. A good day.