Oh, my aching feet. We left the ship believing what the daily ship’s travel page had said. Of course we could walk from the ship to the Little Mermaid and then into the city center to catch a barge tour of the old city.
Our morning started with Linda announcing that she was to be in charge of the map and was going to perform due diligence by writing out our route and listing the main street names that we would look for. She drew lines on the ship’s simplified map to mark the route she had laid out. It would seem that she had lost confidence in my navigational skills, most of which consisted of asking directions of any person I passed. Those who know me are probably cringing as they read this, silently screaming “Oh no. Jody is navigating?” So, Linda held the map and pointed to the direction of the Little Mermaid that was printed on the map. I will be gentle when I say that from the start, our senses of direction were not aligned. We did ask directions several times and did, eventually, find the mermaid. She is lovely and was well worth the many extra blocks we walked before finding her.
After buying bottles of water (bottles of ice would be a better description) we headed in the direction that Linda felt sure would take us to the canal area. For some inexplicable reason, we found ourselves instead at the railway station. At this point, Linda was ready to admit that we might need a taxi but I insisted that if I asked directions again, we were certainly close enough to continue walking. So, I asked the first person I came to where the Nyhavn (New Harbor) section was. Well, perhaps I could have chosen a better guide, but he was pleased to be asked. He was a Romanian from Oslo who claimed great familiarity with Copenhagen and we should just walk with him. Linda was rolling her eyes but I trusted the young man with half of his teeth and started walking. After several blocks we realized that his girlfriend was trailing behind our entourage and berating him in some language neither of us could understand but could tell that she was really pissed. So, we said thanks and claimed to know exactly where we were and sped up to leave the Romanian Norwegian dental dropout in our dust. So, after several more blocks of both of us stubbornly believing the other of us was an imbecile, we took a cab to Nyhavn, ordered a beer and lunch and caught our breath.
After lunch we hopped on a barge for a tour of the harbor and the old section of Copenhagen. Again, it is a beautiful city and we both took lots of photos. We wound our way through the canal and harbor system, passing past Christiania, a hippie commune complete with a gentleman nude sunbather at the end of a dock. The weather has been bordering on too hot, but who can complain about that? It was a perfect day to be on a boat tour. I just hope I can get my shoes back on before dinner.
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