On Saturday I went on a day trip with a group of 10 including people from as close as UNC and as far as Honolulu or Sydney, Australia. It’s actually very easy to get over to Copenhagen from Lund, and it takes about 50 minutes on the train. We met at 8:00am and were on the train shortly thereafter, arriving in Copenhagen at about 9:30am. After regrouping in the Central Station we walked across the street to a bakery right next to Tivoli to get something to eat. As we were standing in line with our queue numbers (you know the ones where you take a number and wait to be called), an American-sounding and looking couple behind me was struggling with the machine to get a number so I helped them out. We started talking, and the woman asked where I went to school and what my major was. I told her N.C. State and Computer Science, and her jaw dropped. Turns out she taught Computer Science at NCSU for fourteen years before leaving in 2012 to teach at Georgia Tech. She knew all my professors at NCSU, and said I should of course come to Georgia Tech to do grad school.
We went to the tourist office on the same block next to try and get maps and buy tickets for a tour of the Carlsberg brewery later in the day at 3pm. We got tickets and then set off to kill a bit of time before the free walking tour started at 11am. The tour was three hours long and showed us several of the main sights in Copenhagen, but there’s always more to see! The tour ended at 2pm and we had planned to try and negotiate the bus system to get out to the Carlsberg brewery by 3. Unfortunately…due to the Copenhagen Pride festival and parade taking place at the exact same time, our bus never came. The good news was that the tourist office did refund our tickets!
Being pretty tired out after our long tour and trying to negotiate the bus but ending up on the subway, we found a coffee shop to sit and rest for a bit. Once rested we walked back to Christiansborg Palace to go up to the (free) tower and see the view from the tallest point in Copenhagen. It was pretty rainy and cloudy so the view wasn’t the best but it was still interesting! Will have to come back on a sunny day to see it again. After that we got our whole group back together and tried to find somewhere to eat but were largely unsuccessful. Copenhagen is the most expensive city I’ve ever been to, and the pride festival didn’t help things either. We eventually split up and three of us found a place to eat before heading back to Lund earlier than the rest of the group. It was a lot of fun even in the rain!
