10-Night France, Iceland, and Norway Cruise - Day 16 Copenhagen, Denmark

Copenhagen

For our final morning in Copenhagen, I booked us a time slot for Rosenborg Castle. Timed entry is required for this castle, even with a Copenhagen card. It didn’t cost anything and I just had to show verification of our timed entry upon arrival and then our Copenhagen cards. I chose the first slot at 10 AM when they opened and it was absolutely the right call. We practically had the place to ourselves and by the time we were leaving, the place was starting to get really busy. 

We spent about an hour at Rosenborg and we all agreed that we liked it better than Christianborg. So if you are ever in Copenhagen and you only have time for one castle, pick Rosenborg. It’s older and somewhat smaller, but still really impressive and beautiful in its own way. There’s also a vault in the basement with an impressive array of royal…stuff, including the crown jewels of Denmark. I have pretty mixed feelings these days about crown jewels (colonizers, yay…) but they were still interesting to see.

We left there and walked the short distance to the Round Tower, an observatory built in the 17th century by Christian IV to continue the work of astronomer Tycho Brahe. The cool thing about this tower is that it doesn’t have any steps until you get almost to the very top. It’s just a wide sloping spiral pathway. We enjoyed the view from the top and then descended back down, stopping at a nearby juice bar to get some sandwiches and juice which we enjoyed in a park back near Rosenborg called King’s Park. 

Then we took the train back to our hotel to relax for awhile and recuperate. We did a little packing and I worked some on my trip report. After awhile we felt refreshed and made our way back out to one of Emmaline’s picks, the Glyptoteket museum, which houses Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Mediterranean sculpture and artifacts as well as Dutch and French paintings. We spent most of our time in the Roman section marveling at all the statues. They have one of the largest collections I’ve seen outside Rome and I again had that sort of weird feeling that I did when regarding the jewels. Do these objects really belong here? Why were they there? How did they come to be there? On the one hand, it’s nice for people local to the region to see the history and artifacts of other regions and people’s as they may not have the opportunity to visit those places to see them. On the other hand, do these things belong in a Danish museum? It’s complex. And if you’re interested in more of this discussion, I highly recommend the podcast “In Search of Black History with Bonnie Greer” specifically episode 8, though the whole podcast is really good. 

We hadn’t gotten very far into the French and Dutch paintings when we were just…done. Done with history, done with museums, done being on our feet. Just…done. So at 4 PM we found ourselves back at our hotel. When we arrived back there was water dripping from our A/C and onto our suitcases (thankfully shut and hard side plastic so everything was fine inside). I called down and told them about it and they said they would send someone. Then the phone rang a few minutes later and said that nobody would be available until the next day and they offered to move us to another room. Roger was reluctant but I didn’t want to deal with a mess of water and it had been making odd noises. We were mostly packed and so I told him that Emmaline and I could take care of it while he was out buying some wine he wanted to go pick up. 

So he left and they got our new room ready and as I was finishing packing up, I slipped in a giant puddle of water that we hadn’t even noticed. The A/C had been leaking worse than we had realized and there was a variable river of water flowing across the room. We made the right call! The room they moved us to was a junior suite and was so much nicer than our other room. We considered booking it but had decided to just book a standard room to save money. I wish we had booked that room because it was so much more comfortable with more space for all of us and a more comfortable bed. The only issue with it was that the TV was in an odd location and we couldn’t see it from the bed so we had to get creative with chairs later that night when watching our TV show (yes, the Tour de France documentary again). 

After settling into our new room, we went off in search of dinner. Roger had found a pizza restaurant recommended on a list of top pizza places around the world. We headed over there only to be turned away because we didn’t have a reservation. So for those of you who have been lauding my planning skills, know that sometimes I do fail. I quickly got on Google and found a different pizza restaurant that was highly rated and only one metro stop away. But before making our way there, I called and asked if they had a table. Could we get there in 15 minutes? Yep! So off we went and it was a cute place with good pizza so it all worked out in the end. We got back, watched the aforementioned documentary on Netflix, finished packing up and went to bed early to get ready for our flight home the next morning.

Click here for Day 17.