Copenhagen walk

As we walked around Copen- hagen off and on last Thursday and Friday between interviews, we found that we had unintentionally recreated a guided walking tour that we found later, building on what Sandy remembered from her big Scandinavian walkabout in 1975 and what we had both heard of since.

Not far from our hotel, we passed these famous lur players (a pre-Viking era curved horn), who supposedly play every time a virgin walks by. Not really an issue for the parents of three kids.

This next interesting building is the Danish stock exchange. It predates Wall Street by a bit. It has a quote from a 17th century Danish king exhorting commerce to do its bit for the kingdom.

The furtherest end of our walk across town was to go the see the statue of the little mermaid from Hans Christian Anderson's story. In the pre-Disney version, she does not dance happily with talking lobsters or end up happy with the prince, who dumps her for a regular princess, but sits looking out at the sea, regretting the fact that she cannot return to her old life.

Seeing the statue is a little like trying to look at the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, you have to work around the crowd, who in this case are busy climbing on it to have their pictures taken.

The little mermaid is near a series of 17th century forts built by the Danes to hold off the Swedes, who did besiege the city a couple of times. A series of artificial islands were designed as huge earthen ramparts to resist canon fire from ships and shield cannon to fire back. The main fort still has a garrison but mostly it looks like a striking set of islands with low hills and canals, with lots of paths which are great for hikers, dog walkers and joggers. (Seeing a lot of happy dogs being walked made me a bit homesick for ours back in Austin.)

The canals around the forts also showed off the autumn foliage to its best, as the next photo shows.


After we walked inland away from the mermaid, the goddess Gefjon, which we talked about yesterday, the forts and canals, we came across a museum about the Nazi occupation of Denmark in WW II and the Danish resistance. The Nazis overwhelmed Denmark and Norway fast on the same day in 1940. Their militaries on the seas or abroad joined the allies, but the rest was complicated. The government officially surrendered and had to cooperate, but many started a resistance. After the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, some Danes actually joined an SS division to fight there, whose survivors had a very complicated homecoming after the war. The resistance ramped up as the war tilted against Germany and the next photo shows Sandy with a homemade armored car that resistance fighters used to fight against some Danes that were supporting the Germans at the end.

As we were hiking toward my last appointment of the day, at the Danish broadcast oversight commission, sort of like their version of the FCC, we passed the King's Park, which was quite impressive (and also full of happy dogs being walked.)

It is interesting to me how much the very modern and cosmopolitan Danes are still very interested in and supportive of their monarchy. Maybe it is because the monarchs have been a bit more restrained than some others. The queen is by all accounts a very smart lady, who illustrates books (including an earlier edition of the Lord of the Rings). They are also a bit more down to earth, just walking around. But the monarchy is very important to their sense of continuity and identity, almost a replacement for the state church that they pretty much ignore these days.