Copenhagen!

Boy, fellas. Copenhagen surprised me. I'd been told how great it was by a few friends I'd run into in Bergen, as well as close friends from back home, but it really just sent me swooning in a way that no other Scandinavian city had done or would do. This city was a joyful spot, and I'll try/fail/try-again to articulate how after the jump...

Near the Little Mermaid statue is this infinitely-cooler sculpture/fountain, which is frustrating ONLY IN THAT as a photographer you're technically only supposed to be able to take pictures in one dimension so you can't take a picture that shows you the boats behind the fountain in one direction AND the gorgeous church on the other side of the fountain, because reality is a crock!

My friend John talked a lot about how Copenhagen had a great culture of play, and: yes. It's full of playgrounds and little green spaces, and sure, there's a part of the city where the sidewalk is suddenly made of trampolines (NOT KIDDING, WATCH THE VIDEO), but it goes beyond that. The architecture itself is playful - for a city packed with modern buildings, it's gloriously thin on boxy skyscrapers, opting instead for a slew of approaches that cumulatively feel like the city's poking fun at the old line that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. Well, this city's buildings dance, so whatever, apocryphal-quote-speaker.

Two major points of Copenhagen stick out as worthy of mention here. (Three if you count food -  while there's plenty of overpriced and not-great stuff, the Noma trickle-down effect has left the city full of people making incredibly tasty, delicious food at reasonable-for-Scandinavia prices.) Tivoli Gardens and Louisiana Museum both feel like variations on the city's playfulness, and both made me very, very happy. (I should note that while I visited Christiania, I didn't take any photos or videos inside the gates - partly because in much of the settlement you're not supposed to, and partly to unplug from that end of this project. It, too, is a special spot, but one I didn't get a ton of time in and didn't love quite as much as... well, at least the Louisiana.)

"Nyhaven" is the Danish word for "dumdum creek with some stupid old boats stuck in it who even cares, what time is Netflix on"

Tivoli is an amusement park, with an "It's a Small World" style ride modeled on Hans Christian Anderson's stories, a handful of roller coasters and big drops, and a sprawling arcade with games and food. I sidestepped most of that (with the exception of the ferris wheel and the HCA ride) in favor of the park's surprisingly extensive cultural offerings.

A corner of Tivoli as viewed from an extremely dangerous Ferris wheel. Whoaaaa some brave photographer must have risked a lot to get that shot huh.

 As evening rolls in, the park becomes a bit more adult-oriented, with jazz, classical, and pop concerts as well as theatrical offerings. Some of these are free in the open air (the above video gets you a glimpse at the kind-of-terrible panto the evening I visited, and below there's a little snippet of a jazz concert) and some require an additional payment (the night I was there, the Norwegian Youth Symphony was playing the Symphonie Fantastique). There's also a lot of green grass where people just sit, drink, picnic, play around on rolling wooden seats, and generally enjoy the fading light of the day. As amusement parks go, it's hard to top (if, like me, you aren't a roller coaster hound).

But if there's one place that blew me away in Copenhagen it was Louisiana. This museum is incredible. All modern art, with a collection far too extensive to be displayed all at once, the curators rotate their displays and fill the rest of the museum with new works, loans from other museums, commissions, and the like. It's beautifully curated, but the actual layout of the place is what makes it special. It's built out of an estate on the sound separating Denmark from Sweden, and as it was developed, the grounds were turned into a sculpture garden designed to serve as a playing space for museum patrons.

Giacometti is the coolest, and this place is jam packed with his stuff. Also: NATURE???

The result is the most balanced, humane, relaxing and invigorating museum I've ever visited. Most of the galleries open out to the grounds at some point, so that you can move effortlessly from gallery to grass, down to the water, over to a wooded area, across a bridge, down a slide, back up through the (delicious!) cafe, and back into another gallery.

Blah di bloo, some kinda "sculpture" if you can even call a mesmerizing interplay between lively and untrammeled nature, its reflection in sleek modernity, and an inverted slab of earth "a sculpture." MY KID COULD HAVE SCULPTED THAT, etc.

There's even a children's wing, multiple rooms full of supplies for kids to create their own pieces, many of which are hung in the wing itself. I came expecting to spend three hours or so (I tend to fade after that point in most museums.) I stayed the entire day. It's just the best.

Botanical gardens? More like... substantial gardens! Wait, hang on, I know I have a sicker burn, just give me a couple of hours and a rhyming dictionary, please give me a chance to redeem my family's honor

In a way (SPOILER ALERT) I was happy that Stockholm, while fun, didn't blow me away, because it made Copenhagen seem more real/meaningful. I wouldn't have guessed it, but this is one of the cities I most want to spend more time in, and I think stands with Berlin and Glasgow as a top-three city in which I would jump at the chance to live. But we'll chat more about Stockholm, the end of the trip, palimpsests, the bourbon trail, and my return to Boston, in the coming days and weeks. (After another post dealing a little more with Copenhagen's architecture and a li'l video of a canal ride thanks to The Magic Of Public Transit.) For now, let's just all get ourselves a slice of rhubarb pie and think about how lucky we are to be alive and on this planet for some reason! Okay!