ToDo: Invent Brilliant Title

Last weekend, after a few glancing attempts, I finally made it to Rosenborg Slot to check out the castle and inspect the crown jewels

Rosenborg is a funny skinny little castle in the centre of a park in the centre of the city.  It’s a bit strange to look down a street and see the thing.  It’s really far more royal than the four identical palaces a few blocks away that the Queen beds down in.

This is what I learned on my visit:

• Danes are ridiculously trusting.  I had suspected this due to the baby carriages (complete with occupants) left on footpaths outside shops and cafes while mums are busy inside.  I had it confirmed when the ticket dude told me I needed to check my bag during my visit.  (Apparently it’s not to prevent me making off with the jewels – it’s to protect the door frames.)  When I didn’t have the 20kr ($4) coin for the locker, he offered one.
• The Danish aesthetic has improved.  I’m an enormous fan of the whole minimalist sleek beautiful Scandinavian thing going on around here, but it would seem it was a somewhat recent development.  As far as I can tell, prior design goals aimed for ugly or creepy.  There’s a lot of stuff in Rosenborg that gets the double word score, including a significant portion of the crown jewels.
• The Danish royal family has gotten a lot better looking.  The current head of state looked alright before time and forty Greek cigarettes a day took their toll.  Half of her children are pretty cute and half of his kids are totally adorable.  Frederick III and Christian V were scary, and their wives were worse.  I figured that their painters needed to upgrade their version of Photoshop, before the terrible thought occurred to me that maybe they already had.

And then we went to Tivoli and went on all the rides.

Last night, we went to see a symfonikoncert at Operaen.

Operaen is Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller‘s 500 million dollar gift to the Danish people and sits fairly spectacularly on the Copenhagen harbour across from the queen’s house.  It’s not quite the most famous Danish-designed opera house, but it’s commanding from the outside, impressive on the inside and has an amazing view on a beautiful summer evening.

The program was Wagner, Wagner, Strauss.  The middle Wagner had a wailing woman.  She was disappointingly not a fat German in a horned helmet, but instead a hot blonde with an apricot satin dress and insecure body language.  The Strauss was Ein Heldenleben which, rather embarrassingly, I’m familiar with thanks to a Jilly Cooper novel.  The conductor was very exciting, cavorting about in a most entertaining manner, but I wish they’d given him a little platform that didn’t squeak.

During the slow bits (rare, as Strauss and Wagner seem to do really loud and really strident really well), I played High School Politics with the Orchestra members, picking the brain, the princess, the criminal and such-like.  The trumpeters who wandered off in the middle of the third piece and popped back for the end were totally the stoners.  My favourite was the emo percussionist who sat folded in on himself in the middle up the back, hating the world and being all "fuck this orchestra shit" right up until he got to crash his cymbals, when he became master of all he surveyed and more than a little over-dramatic with his flourishes.

This is my new favourite Danish word.

I’m envisioning great fountains of promiscuity.

Copenhagen is the most amazing place under good weather.

Knowing Saturday was going to be nice, Bridget and I made some plans.  We briefly considered tackling the crowds and smell out at the Roskilde Festival, but decided instead to head up to Humlebæk and go to Louisiana.

Louisiana is named, not because it aspires to be murky and Southern, but because the original owner of the property apparently had three wives…all named Louise.  (Far worse than too many Alexs.)  It’s a museum of modern art ("museum for moderne kunst") and has a fairly nice collection including some Picassos, Pollack, Lichtenstien, Warhol, as well as many Scandinavian artists. It currently has an exhibition on the architecture of museums which, while a little recursive, was still totally fascinating.

The real star of Louisiana, however, is its location.  It’s right on the shore of the Øresund and when the weather is good, it’s spectacular.  The view even distracted me from the Rothko.

We rounded out the day with some splashing about in the Baltic, a bicycle ride to an excellent local sushi place, and some good white wine.  It’s days like this when I wonder why anyone would live anywhere else.