København

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FOOD:

Five different Smørrebrød, in the Meatpacking District. From left to right: roast beef with remoulade, pickles, fried onions, horseradish, and sprouts; chicken salad with bacon, pickled mushrooms, and celery; beef tartar with capers, cornichons, red onions, and egg yolk; fried fish with remoulade, lemon, and dill; curry herring with hard boiled egg, red onions, fried capers, and dill.

From a place called Grød (there are a few around the city) which literally means porridge. They expanded the traditional “porridge” to various renditions on grains with accessories. This is a kind of risotto thing with peas and pea shoots, ricotta, and remarkably good olive oil.

Pictured below was the best meal I had in the city, at a bakery called Lille. It’s in a unique neighborhood called Refshaleøn, technically an island, raw and industrial, an old shipyard. A great area.

The cake thing is like a scone, with rich marzipan and gooseberries. In-house brewed kombucha was also big in Copenhagen, and really delicious.

Pastries I consumed: almond croissant; cardamom bun; pistachio cube; pistachio cube dissected; and the Supreme Almond Croissant.

At the Assistens Cemetery:

Kierkegaard

Since this post is following my Scotland saga, to retain my readers I feel I must share my most action film-y experience from my days in Copenhagen. It started with a 5pm beer at a bar, where I intended to have an uneventful drink. However, a guy also sitting at the bar decided to try to befriend me, and I had no reason to actively resist that, so we got to talking. I didn’t really consider the volume which he had successively drunk until we stood to go walk and I felt that comparably I could ace a balancing act. It became clear that he was an angry guy, but I was finding it all somewhat interesting.

As a Copenhagen familiar, he took me to Freetown Christiania (if you know, you know; if you don’t, look it up) where he got into a drunken argument with a vendor, and I had to extract him from the situation. His intentions emerged and were not of my liking, but then when his anger started to mingle with his drunkenness and then got frightening, I decided I should certainly extract myself for (reasonable) fear of being physically targeted. So, while he went to relieve himself behind a bush, I took off, sprinting in my long dress through Christiania and out, for an unnecessarily long time. I really was frightened at the time, though. Only later did I learn that there is an implicit law against running in the village (to maintain a sense of calmness in the midst of the illegal exchanges.) I got out of it all unscathed, and the rest of my time was quite uneventful.