I love when travel tales come together. Do you remember Pil, the Danish girl I met in Otavalo, Ecuador? Well when I was preparing for my July 2014 Europe and Japan trek I was working out how to get to my first destination, Budapest, in the most economical way possible. I found a flight with an 8.5 hour layover in Copenhagen and I asked Pil whether she thought it was worth coming for such a short period of time. And even though she said the city would be dead because everybody and their mother would be heading out to the ginormous Roskilde music festivaI, she said I should totally come. That's all you gots to tell me. My flight headed out at 7:15am from Newark and had a stopover in Stockholm, Sweden before ending up in Copenhagen. And the only thing that broke my little traveling heart was that I got no passport stamp for Denmark, in spite of leaving the airport and wandering around Copenhagen for the day. Oh well. I put my luggage in a locker and Pil and I rolled out (which reminds me, this is a really helpful site for how to make layovers work with lockers, things to do, transpo, etc. -The Layover Guide). I was so damn tired but my primary short-term goal was to enjoy Copenhagen and make it to nightfall in Budapest without sleeping so I could get caught up to Euro-time.
The Little Mermaid in Danish
I've said it before, I LOVE being abroad with someone from the country I'm visiting. Besides just getting to experience things I would probably never without local folks, shit is just more efficient. All the time I would've taken to figure things out was eliminated as Pil and I combed through Copenhagen and in a matter of hours and I felt like I had a nice little sense of the city. This is going to seem like an overly simple description but I was just taken aback by how nice Copenhagen was. Like that's all I kept thinking, "man, this place is so...nice." All picturesque and clean and functional. Ya know, nice.
Nyhavn, Copenhagen, Denmark
The bike game there was off the chain. Get it? The chain. Yuk yuk yuk.
Copenhagen: Taking bike racks to all new heights
Bicycles in Copenhagen
And ya gotta love the African Diaspora.
(But peep the irony of the first shot below)
A coke and a smile. Thanks, Pil!