Copenhagen day 2, part 2

 Looking at tons of priceless treasures made me really hungry.  Or maybe it was not having eaten anything yet that day but whatever.

I knew what I wanted for lunch: a quintessential Scandinavian dish, their equivalent of an everyday sandwich.

In English we have the word "smorgasbord" which comes from the Scandinavian languages (they're all related) and it means a buffet-style spread of a wide variety of foods.  It comes from the word (in Danish) smørrebrød, which is an open-faced sandwich, essentially, that has a lot of stuff on it.  Often they're smallish so people can eat two or three different ones. 

 I just got one big one (really big) and here it is!

From the bottom up: very thick bread, tzatziki (not traditional but this was a fusion-y type of place), arugula mixed with some seaweed type of thing, giant pile of smoked salmon, pile of raw cucumber, tomato, onion, and lemon wedges.  With fried potato wedges on the side.  Danish food is hearty, to say the least - I had this at about 1pm and wasn't hungry at all until about midnight.

You see tons of shops there - from high end restaurants to fast food places - offering smørrebrød.

 I decided to try to walk off some of that food so my next stop was this place, the Round Tower, and the oldest observatory still in use in Europe.  It's tall.

The nice thing about this place, as opposed to most other towers tourists like to climb, is that there are just two short-ish flights of stairs in the whole thing.  Most of it is like this, supposedly to allow horse-drawn carts to go up but I'm not sure that's true:

There isn't a whole lot to see apart from the view at the top, but they have a couple of rooms preserved.  It used to be a part of the astronomy department at the University of Copenhagen.

And there is a spectacular view of the city!

My last destination for the day was the other palace in the city, Christiansborg Palace.  It's on the other side of town so I had another nice walk.  I have no idea what this tent was.

The queen doesn't really use this palace now except for official occasions where she receives guests or hangs out with the government for whatever reason.  Now it houses the country's Parliament and Supreme Court, so it's much more of an official government building than a palace really.

As evidenced by this thing outside - some sort of speech or rally in support of Syria (the people obviously, not the current government).  The guy speaking [shouting] was VERY LOUD - so loud I could hear him pretty clearly in the ruins underneath the palace.  They never spoke in any language I knew, so I can't tell you what exactly was going on.

So the palace you see in the above picture was built in the early 20th century, and is the 3rd "Christiansborg Palace" and 5th palace/castle on this spot.  It seems to me if my government had gone through that many on that exact spot I might have thought it was unlucky and moved my palace, but no matter.

The first one was more a castle, a fortress, built by Bishop Absalom, who I mentioned before founded the city in the early 11th century or so.  This little island area of the city appears to have been his stronghold.

His didn't last all that long, and a couple of hundred years later Copenhagen Castle was built essentially on top of Absalom's, which by that time was mostly destroyed.

This picture shows the ruined walls of Copenhagen Castle.

And in this one you can see the walls of Copenhagen Castle in the foreground, and the walls of Absalom's castle in the background.  Despite the latter being brick and therefore looking much more modern it's actually older.  Weird.

Copenhagen Castle did last quite a while, but it wasn't really used by the monarchy as a residence, it was more a military thing.  There were dungeons and stuff, but I think a couple of kings did live there sometime during the Renaissance.  The museum had a large number of foreign travelers talking about that castle and making fun of it, saying it was an ugly, unfashionable backwater.  Here is a Renaissance-era floor tile from the castle:

Sometime in the 18th century the royal family decided it wanted a new palace on this spot, so the first Christiansborg Palace was completed by 1750.  It was the most expensive palace to date in Denmark and the firsthand accounts make it seem very nice indeed.

They cleverly did not put in any fire barriers, and included a ton of little known secret passageways underneath, and it burned down in 1794.

It had been the royal family's main home so it was at this point that they moved to Amalienborg, described in my 2nd post on the city.  However, they still wanted a palace at Christiansborg so a new one was built but...by the time it was done the monarch decided he didn't want to live there, so it was just for entertaining and whatnot.

It was done by 1830 but oops! burned down in 1884.

By the 1930's the final palace was built, intending to be used more as a central government building than a royal residence, although they included rooms for the family.  That is the palace you see above.

Enough with the palaces, right?

I wanted to end my day in a leisurely fashion so I headed back to the dock area to take a canal tour.  Before I got there, though, I stopped for some hot chocolate, and ended up with a rather bizarre one.  I ordered and received what appeared to be, and tasted like, very hot milk.  But it had these two sticks in it, and upon inspection I realized they had hunks of chocolate at the bottom.  You're supposed to stir it in yourself I guess.  Not sure if this is common practice in Denmark.

 

 Here are some pictures from my canal tour:

 

 The Danish are renowned for their modern architecture, and here is a nice example, the newest theater:

This battleship has never gone to war, but was retired because at some point it accidentally fired a missile.

 

The sculpture next to this guy's head is called the Eye of Truth, and it stands in front of the central tax building!

 

Houseboats are popular in Copenhagen.

The gold spirals on this church tower are the railings of a huge staircase - you can go up to the very top.

This is another example of the Danish modern architecture - it's part of the national library complex, a building called the Black Diamond.  It's called this because it's positioned in such a way that when the sun rises over the canal its reflection in the water is in turn reflected off of the black granite of the building, make it shine like diamonds.

The canals being quite narrow, you see a lot of tires hung on their sides to protect the boat coming around turns.

Sitting on the docks and canals is a popular activity amongst the youngfolk.

The two following pictures are the same building: the first side faces the king's residence so was made to be lovely and eye-pleasing; the second is the opposite side, designed to save the builder's money.

 And that's it for my second day in Copenhagen!  I wandered around some that evening but didn't do too much of note.  Next up, my final half-day, featuring a tour of the Carlsberg beer brewery, a nice park, and an area of town I had not visited before.