Copenhagen

Last weekend we had another mini-adventure.  We spent Saturday in Copenhagen.  The main purpose for our trip was to serve in the temple there with our church congregation (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) but we decided to also do some sight-seeing in the afternoon.

The first question was whether to travel by train or car. Strangely, train tickets for our family of four to travel the whole way were slightly less expensive than the toll to drive one car over the Oresund Bridge (can you say they don't want you to drive). The advantages to driving-- we could leave a good 45 minutes later and it was also easier to bring clothes, food, etc. with a car to stash them in. Leaving the house at 7 am instead of 6:15 am was probably the deciding factor and we took the car. It was a two hour drive. 

Oresund Bridge between Denmark and Sweden

We have driven across the Oresund Bridge once before but it was at night.  It was fun to do it during daylight. In the morning fog, you couldn't see the top.  It looked like it just kept going up forever! The GPS led us through Copenhagen without difficulty.

Turn left for flowers?

If you look closely, the yellow button has a picture of a baby buggy.
It's on the side of a city bus and must lower some type of ramp.

The Copenhagen temple (http://www.lds.org/church/temples/copenhagen-denmark?lang=eng#) is right in the city.  It is quite different from a "typical" LDS temple in the U.S. The building was originally a regular meetinghouse that was expanded, remodeled and rededicated as a temple. And it surprises you because it is so packed in among other buildings. I wasn't quite expecting that.

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints temple in Copenhagen, Denmark

 If you look at the picture, what you see is ALL the grounds. Those cars you see on the right are across a street.  The sidewalk runs right down the right side of the building. 

The light colored building in the center is the LDS meeting house.
The opening on the right is the front door.  The one on the left is a
passageway to parking behind the building.

Around the corner is the current meeting house for the area , we parked there and would have never realized it was a meeting house. It is a multistory building literally attached to its neighbors. You had to drive through a little tunnel to get to the parking lot behind. The meetinghouse also has a small visitor's center and a guest house you can arrange to stay in.

Language in Scandanavia is interesting. The temple president spoke to our group before the baptisms and asked if the group would prefer he speak in English or Danish. Everyone voted for English (which we found funny since Swedish and Danish are quite similar). Then since a few of the youth don't understand English well, he asked if someone could translate his words into Swedish for them. It was funny to see that no one volunteered-- even though there were 6-7 men from our congregation  (not to mention most of the teens) there that we routinely speak English with and we are very impressed with how well they can speak it! I guess translating is just scarier.  We certainly couldn't help. We would understand the English fine but no one would understand our attept to put it into Swedish! The person who did finally volunteer is actually from Denmark and is therefore less confident in his Swedish. But maybe that was a good thing because every once in a while the temple president slipped into Danish and then he would translate that into English instead of Swedish. So it was quite the mishmash of languages.  We are continuously grateful that Scandanavians are so bilingual (or even more languages) and so flexible with those of us who aren't.

Park where we ate lunch

After the temple, we went sightseeing with another family for a few hours. We drove down to the harbor by the Little Mermaid statue. We'd packed lunches and we found a little park with some picnic tables and ate there, looking out over the water. Then we walked around the Kastellet, the fortress area that is there, for quite a while.

One of the bridges across the moat.

Military buildings inside the fortress.  It is still used by the Danish military.

A beautiful fountain in the area

This church stood just outside the fortress. You can
see some of the earthworks in front of it.

An old windmill

 We briefly looked at the mermaid but there were always so many people crowded around it was hard to get a good picture.

Little Mermaid statue

Copenhagen has a cool thing where they have free bikes you can borrow. You just put in a Danish 20 Kr coin deposit to remove one from the rack. (Looks just like an Aldi's grocery cart if you've experienced that). We'd thought about doing that.but never did because #1) we'd have to get some Danish coins and #2) though we saw lots of bikes being ridden, it looked like it would be hard to find 2-3 of them available at once, let alone 8.  So we drove the cars over to the center of town to see a few things in that area, mostly we wanted to visit the Church of our Lady (Vor Frue Kirke).

Copenhagen is definitely a biking city.  There were nearly as many
bikes as Amsterdam.  We saw lots of the shovel bikes and covered wagon bikes
for carting kids around.

Parking in that area turned out to be a big problem-- so many people. We found a parking garage and pulled up to it-- trying to decide what the Danish word on the LED sign meant. Danish has a lot of similarities to Swedish but this particular word we didn't know.  A lady knocked on our window and politely told us that the "cue" for the parking garage was back there-- people were sitting in their cars, waiting in line for a spot in the full garage! Yikes. We wandered a bit more and thought we'd found a spot on the road-- when another nice Dane warned us that you could get a ticket if you parked past the tiny yellow triangle drawn on the curb.  Our friend was having the same problem.  He dropped his family off with us and said he'd meet us at the church after he found a spot.  We didn't have a paper map of Copenhagen. We had our GPS and once we got it to behave (can take a minute in the high walled buildings of a city) we had it lead us to the address I'd gotten off the web. Trouble was-- I had the wrong address. It was a church but not the right one. Curse you Google maps AND Trip Advisor! (In fairness, I've gotten many addresses from them before and this is the first time they've steered me wrong).

A different church

Our friends had been to this church before and vaguely knew what direction to head so we started that way and while walking managed to find the church (by its Danish name) in the points of interest in the GPS. We finally made it there!. I felt terrible  that it had taken more confusion and walking than necessary but the kids had fun visiting and window-shopping so it wasn't so bad. We wondered what our friend would think, waiting all that timeat the church while we wandered lost, but he wasn't there yet, which made us wonder what had become of him.  We were relieved when he arrived a bit after we did. He'd had to park a long way away. 

The reason we wanted to visit this particular church was to see the statues of Christ and his apostles by the sculptor, Bertel Thorvaldsen.  Our church has a copy of the Christus statue in their visitor's center at Temple Square in Salt Lake City and we've always thought it was beautiful. We wanted to see the original.

Christus by Bertel Thorvaldsen

The center aislle of the church-- Christ in the center and the twelve
apostles along the walls.

The organ-- it's hard to see but both churches had some pipes in the center
that stuck out like horns. Hadn't seen that before.

The apostle statues were fun to examine as each one had "accessories" specific to them. It was also fun to see the Danish version of their names.

We laughed that John looked like he was
using his Ipad.

Several, like this one, had items representing
their martyrdom-- like the saw in this one. Scary thought.

We like how Thomas had a square-- showing
how he wanted to see and measure everything out.

We'd had a few other things we'd thought of looking at, but nothing anyone was dying to see. Our kids were running out of steam after a busy week and then the early morning, so we decided we'd call it a day. 

An obelisk in a square

Fountain just outside the church.

We window shopped a little as we walked towards our car. We checked out a fun store with lots of models and a funny,really skinny and crooked road. Copenhagen is a busy city.  It was simply bustling with people! Then we headed for home.

Fun store

We stopped just over the bridge in Malmö for an early Pizza Hut dinner and then drove home, getting home around 6 so that we had time to unwind. It was a nice day. 

Oresund Bridge-- you could actually see it from a distance now the fog had cleared.

Wind farm in the sound