How to Not (Cope in)hagen

Our third and last stop on our week trip was Copenhagen, Denmark! We had heard great things about Copenhagen from numerous people. It is also spelled København by the Danish people.

We got in early Saturday morning and left Sunday. We forgot that we had to carry our heavy bags around all day. To top it off, one of my straps broke at the airport, so my backpack was really heavy and barely holding on.

While exploring, I noticed that Copenhagen in a great mixture of Amsterdam and Gothenburg. It has a lot of bikes and buildings along canals. The shops remind me of the side streets of Amsterdam and it has the city rush of the Netherlands, unlike Gothenburg. But the older buildings remind me of Gothenburg and the Nordic nature of the people and language.

One of my favorite stores that I've found out about is called Flying Tiger. It's like IKEA's little sister of small items. It's a teacher's dream store. I'd call it a mix of Five Below, Target Dollar Spot, and stocking stuffer's galore. Everything is color coded, organized, etc. The layout of the stores is wrapped around like IKEA where you enter at one end, maze around the store, and end up at the register. I'm tempted to open a location in America since it has great prices and I want to buy everything to bring home.

Here is a link to the stores' website: https://flyingtiger.com/

In addition to this store, we found a great discount store called Normal. We wanted to get snacks for our long bus ride the following day. However, the snacks at 7-11 were expensive, so we found this store. It looked like a CVS at first but it had more things than medicines and toiletries. It's basically a fancier dollar store. Here's my shopping bag from the store, which I had to pay 50 cents for to carry my stuff.

I thought this bag was the funniest thing! The guy on the bag is holding a bag with the exact same image and speech bubble. The speech bubble reads, "Why are these bags always so heavy?" His shirt says, "I am Unik." I realized how similar Danish is to Norwegian because I knew some Norwegian and could translate it since some words crossover both languages.

Aside from shopping, we also had to get dinner at Burger King because our airport hot dogs were $10 and we didn't want to spend so much money on food anymore.

Unfortunately, Copenhagen was kind of a fail in terms of getting to experience things while there.

First, we tried to find Nyhavn, an area where the buildings along the port were beautifully colored. We looked for them and couldn't find them. However, we did find Tivoli Gardens which is an amusement park.

Second, we couldn't check into our hotel, so our backs were hurting very much by 12, let alone 3. We had to take frequent breaks to just sit on benches. When we finally left and found the hotel, it was in the middle of no where. It was out of the city, a 20 minute walk from the train stop, and past a mini highway. Plus, it was a hostel, so it was a small room with a shared bathroom. The place, called Danshostel, physically looked like camp cabins and felt like them too. Luckily we checked in about 30 minutes early and our linens were included in the price.

Third, while checking our bus tickets for the following day, Madilyne and I realized we booked the wrong date, February 24 instead of February 17. The time we booked it for was at 5pm to 9pm. So we had to order new tickets. We did not want to have to carry our bags with us from check out at 11am to 5pm at night, so we booked an earlier train for 9:05. That meant, we saw Copenhagen for less than 5 hours.

Fourth, the following day, Madilyne and I were ready for our bus ride! We got to the stop early, we were lucky we got the 24 hour tram pass since they actually checked it, and we had our tickets and stuff prepared. Our ticket said Netbuss 600 to Gothenburg from Copenhagen. We saw a Netbuss but it said Oslo on it, so we figured it wasn't ours. We stared at the bus for about 20 minutes wondering where our bus was and why it wasn't behind the Oslo bus. We looked for the number 600 on the Oslo bus but it wasn't identified. The Oslo bus took off at 9:05 which was our take off time for our Gothenburg bus, so we were getting nervous. It was about 30 minutes later that we realized that the Oslo bus was our bus. I thought our Gothenburg bus was late or something. But we looked it up and the Oslo bus makes a stop in Gothenburg. However, nothing on the bus said Gothenburg and nothing no the ticket said Oslo. So we were stressed and upset.

We walked to a coffee shop where we sat for 3 hours until the next bus. We weren't missing it and we had to basically each pay for 3 bus tickets since the first 2 didn't get refunded. At this point, we were not a fan of Copenhagen anymore and just wanted to get to Gothenburg. Our week was long and we were tired.

Fifth, on the bus ride back, we had to go through customs in Sweden. When in the airports, it's easy to walk through and not declare anything. There was no guards, detectors, paperwork, etc. However, when the bus stopped, officers came on the bus and asked for our passports. They proceeded to ask us questions and Madilyne and I got very flustered and confused. He asked if it was our first time to Sweden and we didn't know if he meant in general as a whole since it is our first time to Sweden, or if we were in Sweden before and were re-entering. I showed him the Gothenburg stamp and he said why we were in Copenhagen. Then we said we were traveling. He asked us how much money we had on us. We only had our credit and debit cards. Then he said that we need a certain amount of money on us per day. We said we were told we don't need cash and that our cards were working. He proceeded to interrogate us by asking how much was on our cards. At this point, everyone on the bus was looking at us and we felt uncomfortable talking about the thousands of dollars we had in our bank accounts in public. Then he asked where we were staying and we said University of Gothenburg. We said we are students studying abroad. After that, he left. To make things easier, we should've said from the beginning that we were students studying abroad...

A dog came on the bus and sniffed up and down the isles, in between the seats, our bags, and us. For some reason, they made us all get off the bus and bring our luggage for another check. Someone said that they don't normally do that, so it was suspicious. Then we all got back on. I can't imagine what American immigration is like at the borders.

On the bright side, here are the pictures that I did take while exploring for about 2 hours on Saturday. Despite our bad luck, Copenhagen itself is beautiful! I really wish we could have had more time without worrying about how far our hotel was or how heavy our backpacks were. I would've loved to see the Little Mermaid Statue.