Sightseeing in Copenhagen

In addition to the conference, the trip as officially planned by not-me had about a day and a half of free time in Copenhagen in it, which I took advantage of.

I was a bit underwhelmed by Copenhagen. It's a nice enough city, but I found that neon signs on older architecture was more of a visual turnoff than a cool old-meets-new thing, and that style was everywhere.  When Lee and I visited Vienna, we felt like we had to go back and see the rest of it.  That's just not the case for Copenhagen.  I wouldn't say no to another free trip by any means, but I have no particular need to see it again.

One fun thing Copenhagen had going on while I was there was an Elephant Parade, composed of fiberglass elephants painted by artists to raise funds for an Asian Elephant conservation organization. Buffalo had a similar one once called Herd About Buffalo (no website I could find), and I've heard of other cities doing similar things with various different animals and causes. I got pictures of quite a few that were around so check out Flickr for the rest of the elephants.

There were a lot of street performers out and about - people painted and standing like statues, instrumentalists, and other assorted individuals trying to make some money with their art.  Most were pretty good at what they did and not too far out of what you'd expect to see in their genres.

This, however, was not universally the case...

...And a few seemed to be a long way from home.

I did a lot of my sightseeing with a fellow conference goer from Chile, and we went together to the cute little waterfront area questing for the famous Little Mermaid statue. The waterfront has expensive restaurants, probably really expensive apartments, and not-so-expensive boat rides which we passed on because the weather wasn't very good. It's a very colorful area:

The statue was a bit past the lively part of the waterfront area, so we kept going and found ourselves passing the Queen's residence, which was near near a nice little garden:

We eventually found the Little Mermaid statue, with some emphasis on "little".  She's roughly the size of a 13 - 15 year old girl, rather true to life, but the most common remark made by tourists at the conference was, "That's it?" It's also difficult to photograph because of the dark color of the aged copper.

After seeing the statue we opted for a bicycle taxi back to find dinner in the more populated areas. I snagged a few pictures along the way, but they turned out mostly blurry! Here's one view:

One item of mixed blessing was the daylight in Denmark during the conference.  There was light at 4AM and it stuck around until nearly 10PM. It was surprising to look at my watch and realize it was much later than I thought.  After this day of sightseeing, there was one more morning of conference events, after which we had an additional sightseeing adventure.  Emphasis on "adventure" this time! Stay tuned, and check out the Flickr set for additional pictures of Copenhagen.