Getting to Copenhagen

Vacation time has come again, and this time it is going to be  a cruise around the Baltic. Nine days aboard a ship, visiting Germany, Estonia, Russia, Finland and Sweden. And the best part is, I get Katrina and four other friends coming with me!  The cruise departs from Copenhagen. I've never been there before, so Katrina and I decided to leave a few days earlier to spend some time exploring the town.

Katrina and Alex, ready for the trip

The direct flight from San Francisco to Copenhagen was long but uneventful. The plane was an Airbus 340, something I've never flown in before, so that was fun. The food was good, as far as airline food goes, and the available entertainment was limited, but that's not a problem. Why else do we carry a Kindle, a crossword puzzle book and an iPad with us when we travel? The Kindle won this time around, though, and when I was not trying to nap, or looking through the plane's downward-facing camera, I was following Stephanie Plum's latest misadventures: easy reading, entertaining and thoroughly enjoyable. Managed to go through half the book during the flight, and enjoyed a few chuckles plus double the usual number of cars exploding that Ms. Evanovitch normally provides in her books.

Eventually we did land in Copenhagen and that's when things started going bad. First, there was the line through customs, which apparently had only two agents for about 500 people (two flights arrived at the same time), resulting in us spending a lot of time in line. But they were courteous and efficient and half an hour later we had our luggage, exchanged some money and proceeded to the visitor information center to get our cOPENhagen cards, only to be told they did not have them, they knew nothing about them and were unable to call the number I provided in order to figure out what was going on. The best they could do, they said, was direct me to the visitor center downtown.

So off to the trains we went,  waited in line for 20 minutes for the ticket vending machine, only to learn my first Danish expression, "fungere ikke," which apparently means "out of order." Oh well, not to worry, there was the even bigger line we could get into to buy tickets from an actual person. We did, waited another 30 minutes and finally we had our tickets in hand to go downtown. The irony, of course, is that if we had had our cOPENhagen card we would not have needed to get the tickets at all!

The Central Train Station in Copenhagen

The trains were nice and clean, but the 12 minute ride to Copenhagen's central station turned out to be another half hour adventure. Apparently the twelve minute they mentioned did not include all the time the train spent waiting for permission to continue. But make it to the central station we did, hauled our luggage to the hotel, checked in, and then I proceeded to the downtown visitor center to get the card issues resolved.

The visitor center was about four blocks away from the hotel, brightly lit and easy to find. The people there were helpful, friendly  and once I explained my problem and heard the young lady reply, "the people at the airport are idiots! They don't know how to do anything!" I knew I was in good hands.  Five minutes later I left the tourist center with my two cards, went back to the hotel, took a shower, and Katrina and I were ready to explore Copenhagen.

Alex happy to have his cOPENhagen card

But that's another blog.