Stuff I Missed . . .

Jael took pictures and left them with me.  Unfortunately, she deleted all of the really funny pictures of her before she did that.  But, in any case, I just looked through those pictures and found out there are some of them that relevant to stuff I already put up.

So, here, and with proper photography credits to Jael are pictures of St. Alban's Anglican Church.  Somehow, Jael, who took a total of about three non-food-related pictures the entire trip, ended up with more pictures of the church than I.

This a back-view of the church (with its steeple cut off).  It is from over the moat that
surrounds the Kastilette.  You can also see the very famous Gifeon Fountain.
Also, notice the swan sitting on its nest under the edge of the bridge.

St. Alban's Anglican Church

And, finally, a picture of me, in our hotel, on my side of the room which had a closet and the exit.  I would totally have won the "get out alive" race in the case of a fire.  Jael's side of the room only had a window with no fire escape.  I really did not remember Jael taking this picture.  I think that I have blocked it from my memory.

The Amber Museum

The first thing that Jael and I did, when we were in Copenhagen, after dropping our stuff off at the hotel, was to go to the House of Amber Museum.  I hadn't even heard of it before but Jael found it in the book of "things you can get into for free with the Copenhagen Card".  It turned out to be a lot of fun.  If you click here, you can see the pretty little building where the museum is located.  All of  rest of the buildings behind the museum, running along the canal, are restaurants and, when we walked through the area, the outdoor tables were pretty full despite the fact that it was really cold out.  All the folks at those tables were wearing their winter jackets and hats as well as blankets that were provided by the restaurants.  I still couldn't convince Jael that it was a good idea to eat outside, though.

The museum was in a little house on the edge of one of the main tourist-type canals.  The ground floor was a showroom and sales room.  The actual museum was on the first and second floors up lovely little spiral staircases.

Jael standing in the little  stairway.

Jael reading educational material near the stairway.

The museum is kind of a combination of artist's studio--art museum--science exhibit--trade museum.  It is really well done and interesting.  They also have a pretty interesting website which is easy to look through and which has a lot of information about the science, trade, and art of amber plus lots and lots of pictures of their amber jewelry.

If you'll notice, there is a tree in the picture above.  This tree, and others like it in various sizes from 5 or 6 inches high to 3 or 4 feet tall, are all over the museum and the shop.  The trees are made out of thousands of pieces of amber individually wired onto the drift-wood tree shapes.  Most of them were with different shades of yellow and brown amber in varying degrees of opacity.  Some of the smaller ones are made with different shades of amber but they are rarer and, so, more expensive.  This tree, if I remember correctly, was around $17,000 if you wanted to take it home with you.











The trees are actually really beautiful.  The trees that were near windows, especially, looked really spectacular in the sunlight, with all of the different shades and pieces.  I am not usually a big fan of giant art pieces but if I had an extra 17-grand lying around, I might be tempted.



The Museum had a pretty big science section.  There was a whole row of tables with microscopes so that you could look and see the bugs ("inclusions") which had been trapped in amber ages ago.

This is a picture of a cockroach from ages ago.  I think that Danish name, "Kakerlak" is way cuter than the English word.  If you notice, the label is also written in Chinese, below the glass.  There is, apparently, a really large Chinese audience for the museum (the House of Amber also has a branch in China).  When we went into the museum there were a whole bunch of Chinese folks who had been through just before we got there (and who were buying some of the really expensive jewelry) and one of the clerks was Chinese, as well.

They had big educational plaques around with information about Amber.  The biggest disappointment of the whole trip was that they said that you can't make dinosaurs out of amber.




They had charts showing the kinds of bugs and other materials that are found in amber and what percentage of inclusions they make up.  They also had much clearer pictures of some of the bugs in the amber in posters on the wall.

Apparently, the color and transparency of amber is related to its age and its area of origin.  Green amber, for instance, is most common in tropical areas.  Baltic amber (amber coming from the Baltic sea area, such as near Denmark) tends to be yellow and more opaque.

The museum has the largest piece of Baltic amber ever found (or a replica of it).  This piece of amber was pulled out of the ocean in a fishing net.  The guy who pulled it out was an amber hunter, as well as a fisherman, so hopefully he wasn't too disappointed about getting the amber instead of dinner.


This is a collection of some of the kinds and colors of amber that are found in the Baltic Sea area.  You can see a lot of different colors and opacities. 

There was a room on the second floor which was either actually a studio for making amber art pieces or is just set up that way.  For some reason, I ended up without any pictures of that room but it was pretty nifty.

There was also a huge collection of amber art.  Besides the trees, ships made out of amber mosaics were really popular.  They were also really, really expensive.

I really, really like the chess sets.  The big one was over $7,000 and the little one was almost $3,000.

I think that the little white legs and handles on the little box are ivory, although I am not sure.  The little blue knit cap is Jael.  That is how I kept track of her on the whole trip.  When it got warmer and she took the hat off, I couldn't ever find her in the crowds.

There were also a lot of sculptures (some small and some quite large) made out of single pieces of amber.  The blurry, out-of-focus sculpture in the foreground is the Little Mermaid, which makes complete sense.  If you notice the sculpture in the rear, however, it is piles of rats swarming over a piece of wood.  I have no idea why someone would spend all that time carving something like that.

And then, below, you can see a little nativity scene.  And Jael's little blue cap.

We had hoped to talk a canal cruise (which we could do for free with our cards and which left from the canal right in front of the museum) but it really was pretty cold, the had just stopped using the boats that were heated and covered, and though they ended up being open later, we thought that we had missed the last cruise of the day.

The Saga Hotel

Jael and I stayed at the Saga Hotel when we were in Copenhagen.  (I kept forgetting to take a picture of the hotel until the morning we left and then, inconveniently, there was a giant moving truck in front of it.)

 It was super-convenient because it was only a block and a half from the back entrance of Copenhagen Central Station (which you see here).  It was just a couple of minutes away, past a bunch of Asian groceries.

When we arrived, we got checked in with no problem but when we returned to the hotel after wandering around Copenhagen and having supper, there was a large group of French high-school students blocking the doorway which did not make us happy.  It turned out that they were on a school trip looking at Danish architecture.  The walls of the rooms were very, very thin and you could easily here the kids speaking in both of the neighboring rooms.  Fortunately, however, the kids were pretty considerate and we didn't have too much trouble sleeping.

The biggest problem we had was that we had to share the bathroom with all of those kids.  We saved a lot of money by getting a room without an en suite bathroom and, for the most part, it wasn't too big a problem but we did try to time things so we wouldn't have to wait in line.  The picture on the left is Jael by our sink (which was in our room).

And on the right is Jael, waiting down one of the many long, narrow hallways, waiting for the bathroom before we head out to sight-see. 

This little map (which shows the emergency exits), gives you an idea about the number of little of hallways there are but it really can't express it fully.  I was still turning down hallways in the wrong direction when we were trying to check out on Monday.

We were on the second floor.  The dining room, where they served an amazing breakfast, was on the first floor (the second floor by American counting).  Jael, who photographed almost all of the food we ate on the entire trip, did not take any pictures at breakfast but it was wonderful.  

This was our room key.  The little
Danish flag on it meant that our
breakfast was included.

They had three or four different kinds of really lovely bread and three or four different kinds of rolls--the kinds that are all hard and crusty on the outside and soft and smushy and flavorful on the inside.  After nine months of wishing for bread like we had in Germany, I can say that the Danes have done it pretty well.  They also had a bunch of different desert pastries, three different kinds of meat, really excellent butter, and two or three different cheeses.  They had some pretty fascinating (and complicated) cheese cutters as well--the cutting wires are on an arm that screws down as it cuts.  (I was looking for a picture of it to put here and found one here.  The picture is a ways down the post but you also get a chance to see what it is like flying into Copenhagen if you take a lot of pictures.)

Our room actually wasn't too bad.  We got it for a bit less than $45 per night (each), counting breakfast, which is pretty cheap, for Copenhagen and for the Scandinavian countries, generally.  Food and lodging are notoriously expensive up north, some of the highest in Europe just for staples, like bread. 

 This was the view out of our bedroom window.  People liked to dump their trash, loudly, into those garbage cans late at night and early in the morning.




This is the much cuter view out of one of the hallway windows.  There were painted cows and elephants all over the place and, at the Copenhagen Airport, when we were waiting for the plane, they had a whole shop that sold nothing but painted horses, cows, and elephants.


The sign said that it was a "national art expression exercise" or something like that.  All I know is that Brainerd had painted oxen up all over the place five or six years ago so we were totally on the avant garde, fashion-forward, cutting edge of art installations.  (Also, Rotterdam had painted horses up last summer, which may or may not be related.)