copenAIDAN

This week, my family came to visit Copenhagen! We did the perfect mix of things I’ve already experienced (with a new twist) plus places I’ve never been and have always wanted to go but haven’t yet had the time. It was so much fun to spend time with them and show them around Copenhagen! 🙂

When my family first arrived on Saturday, we went to Bastard Café (somewhere I’ve really been wanting to go) for a hot chocolate while we waited to check in to our AirBnB. Bastard Café has very cozy vibes – I definitely need to go back! There were twinkly lights, heat lamps, and board games everywhere. That evening, we took my roommate Hope out to dinner on Kompagnistræde, a super cute cobblestone street (where I’ve always wanted to eat!) with lots of twinkle-light restaurants. We ate in a cozy and warm restaurant with lots of candles – my family really enjoyed meeting Hope!

On Sunday, we went to brunch at Sonny and then explored Copenhagen with a free walking tour. It was the same tour I did at the beginning of the semester, and we even had the same tour guide, Allan (with his 62 secrets to Copenhagen). He’s the best! It was cool to feel like I was on the other side of it – I knew about everything Allan was talking about, and he even asked if I was Danish (but then he remembered me from the tour in August). After the tour, we had lunch at the glass market (a place with lots of indoor food stalls). We ended the day with dinner with my host family in Nørrebro at a cool brewpub, BRUS, home of the Danish microbrewery TO ØL. It was really fun that my family got to meet my host family – two families united! 🙂

On Monday, we rented a car and drove to Møns Klint, the beautiful white chalk cliffs on the edge of Denmark. It reminded me of our family road trips growing up as a kid! We drove through lots of cute small towns and stopped along the way to climb Camp Adventure’s Forest Tower, a spiral structure that ascends above the Danish forest. It was cool to get out of the city and experience the nature side of Denmark. We saw a gorgeous rainbow on the drive back as we listened to some Nordic folk music. 🙂

On Tuesday, we took the train to Malmö, Sweden, for the day! I showed my family around the town, including Malmö Saluhall (a cool food market), Malmöhus castle & gardens (with a windmill!), Lilla Torg (AKA little square), and the main shopping street. That afternoon, we came back to Copenhagen and picked up bikes for the week. My family was a little uncertain about the rules of the road at first, but they eventually got the hang of it. I was proud of them for biking – it’s definitely not an easy feat on the city streets of Copenhagen. 🙂 They even got all the hand signals down! We biked to “freetown Christiania” (an independent commune of around 900 residents), where we walked around to explore a completely different area of the city.

On Wednesday, we traveled to Hillerød to visit Frederiksborg Castle, a palace built as a residence for King Christian IV of Denmark in the early seventeenth century. The castle was HUGE and absolutely beautiful, and the surrounding gardens and lake were so pretty. The town of Hillerød was cute as well – my mom kept saying, “I could live here!” After Frederiksborg, we headed to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, a world-famous museum with some very cool exhibits (especially “Generation Wealth”) and a spectacular view over the water. That evening, we ate dinner at Mother (the 11th best pizza in Europe) in the meatpacking district in Vesterbro, and then we came home and watched Frozen and drank hot chocolate and ate chokoflager. It was one of my favorite nights!

On Thursday (Halloween!), we traveled to Roskilde to visit the Viking Ship Museum and the Roskilde Cathedral (the official royal burial church of the Danish monarchs and a UNESCO World Heritage Site). It was cool to go to the cathedral after learning all about the royal family’s history at Frederiksborg the day before. My dad loved the Viking Ship Museum – there were reconstructed ships that had been on the bottom of the ocean for 900 years, and we got to dress up like vikings (which made my mom really happy). That evening, we went to dessert at my host family’s house. Trick-or-treaters came to the door while we were inside enjoying our kaffe and æbleskiver (a Danish Christmas dessert and the pastry about which I wrote my study abroad application essay!) It was the perfect hyggelig night and definitely one of my top highlights of the week. 🙂

Friday (my family’s last day 😦 ) was my favorite day – we stayed in and around Copenhagen but explored it from a new lens. We hopped on our bikes (my family was expert cyclists by that point) and headed to Jægersborggade, a cute street in Nørrebro, where we enjoyed a delicious breakfast of porridge at GRØD, discovered a new amazing cinnamon pastry called a kanelsnurrer at Meyer’s (a super famous bakery!), and enjoyed a coffee at Coffee Collective (apparently the best coffee in Copenhagen). We hopped back on our bikes and headed to Superkilen Park, a modern urban playground where we took some fun pictures (and boomerangs). We continued biking through Nørrebro and stumbled upon the cemetery where Hans Christian Andersen (famous fairy tale writer) and Søren Kierkegaard (famous philosopher) are buried (probably some of the most well-known Danes!), so we hopped off our bikes to check it out.

We then biked back into the city center to visit Rosenborg, a “pleasure palace” that King Christian IV built on the royal gardens, where we saw the crown jewels (one of Bridget’s highlights of the trip)! After that, we had Danish street hot dogs for lunch, shopped on Strøget for some Danish design souvenirs, and climbed to the top of Round Tower (King Christian IV’s old astrological observatory) for an aerial view of Copenhagen. We were able to point out all the places we had visited this week! We ended the evening at Tivoli, the charming amusement park right in the center of Copenhagen that inspired Walt Disney to build Disneyland. It was all decorated for Halloween – Bridget and my dad did the scary “Hospitalet” maze while my mom and I enjoyed some warm hot chocolate inside the Tivoli kaffebar. We enjoyed dinner at the Tivoli food hall, where my dad tried smørrebrod and my mom got some delicious Gorm’s pizza. That evening, we came home for one last hyggelig night with koldskål and hot chocolate around the candlelit family table.

My family experienced all of the joys of Copenhagen this week – Carlsberg, S-trains, biking, Netto, pastries, rain, short daylight hours, the surrounding neighborhoods (“bros”), my visiting host family, and hygge. We probably went to Lagkagehuset (a popular Danish bakery) for breakfast almost every morning – my family was obsessed with the hot chocolate and all the baked goods there (I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree). Throughout their visit, I made sure they tried all the Danish desserts and pastries that I love – flødeboller, kanelgifler, hindbærsnitter, frøsnapper, direktørsnegl (AKA chocolate snail or “boss snail”), and kanelsnegl (on Wednesday morning, of course, from Skt. Peder’s Bageri). Here’s an important list in case anyone needs to see the best pastries to try in Copenhagen.

This was such a special week for me – I was able to show my family around a city that really feels like home. It made me even more sentimental about only having six weeks left in Denmark. I already know that it’s going to be impossible for me to leave, but I’m determined to soak up every last moment that I have here. Stay tuned to read about winter and Christmastime in Denmark!