copenhagen in two days
I went to Copenhagen for a couple of days this week. We'd booked the holiday on a whim a few months earlier. I was so stressed and miserable leading up to the holiday, about things that - I don't want to say don't matter, but things that only mattered to me and I couldn't do anything about. I've gained weight which makes me feel self conscious in my summer clothes, I've -
Ok that was my original draft of this post and I'm just going to cut it off right there because I'm feeling better now!
Copenhagen is a cool city and I travelled with my friend, B - she pointed out that despite us being best friends for over 10 years, we'd never solo travelled together before. We stayed in a CityHub hostel, which is like a cross between a hostel and the capsule style hotels I associate with Japan.
One of my goals for the trip was the use a roll of expired film I'd been given by my boyfriends parents - not sure how old it is but at least a few decades. Here's a photo of the hostel.
It had a communal area with serve-yourself beer, food, drinks etc operated by the wristband, and some generic chill music piped in - I remarked to my friend I felt like I was in a sci-fi dystopia designed to keep us docile.
However, it was also clean and comfy and had a sauna, so you can't really complain.
On our list of things to do number one was go swimming in the harbour.
We managed to do this each morning - I wish we had something like this in the UK! The first morning was quite an adventure - we turned up not knowing what to expect and discovered no facilities at all. I'm not a stranger to wild swimming so I don't mind stripping off in public, but it's a bit different in the middle of a harbour in a busy city, including a marching band of children practising in the park next door 😅
The other factor was the weather - it started out raining, and then got so hard we had to grab our clothes and towels and ask the life guards to keep them in the life guard tower (the cute red and white building) so they wouldn't get soaked through. It then started to hail - a very refreshing swim! I genuinely mean this, aside from my anxiety about all my clothes getting wet I enjoyed the novelty of being in the water in this kind of weather.
We met another older woman and a man swimming together too - I initially assumed they were local but it turned out they were travelling from the Netherlands. We exchanged some fun jokey comments about the temperature of the water, and she told us that the Danish midsummer festival was the next day - that's why the marching band kids were practising.
Goal number 2 was go vintage shopping. I enjoyed this less because I forgot I don't actually like clothes shopping. I love looking at other people's style but I've never had the patience to shop myself, and particularly with how I'm feeling about my weight right now I wasn't really in the mindset.
I didn't buy anything but we had fun browsing.
Based on our conversation with the Dutch lady we found a midsummer event to go to:
This turned out to be a pretty small local event in a park (it reminded me of Bonfire night in the UK, but with less reckless firework activity). We had fun watching the fire be lit, and listening to a whole speech in Danish from a local politician beforehand we didn't understand a word of.
Someone in the crowd had bought along a protest sign I was very intrigued by so I had to translate it by copying the words out into google translate.
I can only assume this is a complaint about the number of dogs in Copenhagen and barking!
My friend was very excited to find they had 711 - we don't have them in the UK.
And I had the best cardamom pastry I've ever tasted - light and crispy.
