Part II - Finding the Den Lille Havfrue and Kastellet

The server keeps dying on me, which is really frustrating, and the courtyard is undergoing weekly maintenance, which is almost even worse. I miss being abroad. London is noisy and hot and overpopulated. I miss Poland. This heat is unbearable. At least we had air conditioning back in Taiwan.

I was looking at wordpress just now, and tried uploading one of my entries onto my newly created wordpress blog, but the problem I have now is that wordpress compresses and makes my images blurry. Apparently there’s some sort of CSS setting that I have to write/tweak in order for my images to show up as normal, but for heaven’s sake, I JUST WANT TO WRITE. I don’t want to be bothered with all this nonsense. Is that so hard? I’m throwing my hands up in despair facepalming here. I really don’t want to migrate to a new site, but blog.com has been down ever since last week, and it’s really very tiresome.

(A/N: 7 hours since blog.com has been down. I guess I will have to look into wordpress’ image tweaking after all, since this is driving me nuts. Goodbye, blog.com. We had a good run. Barely two weeks and I’m already running for the hills.)

(A/N: Half an hour later. All that CSS is driving me nuts, and it’s not getting me anywhere. I guess I’ll just have to wait for the blog.com people to sort out their act. This is tremendously frustrating.)

(A/N: About 12 hours later. OK, I’m switching to blogspot. Argh. My eyes hurt.)

Picking up where we left off, around 8pm, and me on my way to Den Lille Havfrue. According to google maps, it was a 40 minute walk from the hostel, and everyone had been saying that it wasn’t really worth the walk. Even funnier was that they admitted to not having gone there themselves, and that the mermaid being disappointing was all just hearsay “oh, a friend of my friend’s colleague said so.” I was adamant that I would see it, however, and it turned out to be one of my favourite destinations in Copenhagen. It certainly beat Christiania hands down.

The walk itself was very pleasant. What a difference blue skies can make. This was the Gammeltorv, about 5 minutes from the hostel.

About 10 minutes on, the Islands Brygge. To be honest, I’ve seen so many canals and Flemish buildings recently that they’re all starting to look the same.

I don’t know if this is a compliment to Bucharest or an insult to Copenhagen, but Copenhagen actually kind of reminded me of the Romanian capital. Bucharest is like the evil crossover-universe version of Copenhagen.

Nearing the Den Lille Havfrue now, but first let me see the Kastellet, a star-shaped fortress complete with moat and bridge, currently used by the Danish military. Dating back to the mid 17th century, it was partially demolished and rebuilt in the 19th century.

The chapel, located upon the moat and resplendent in the evening sun.

Inside the Kastellet.

The chapel from the other side.

And the Kastellet has its own windmill.

Then it was to the Little Mermaid herself. It was signposted very clearly. I always appreciate clear and concise directions.

I wonder why it's a picture of a mother and a child, rather than a mermaid with a fish tail?

After lots and lots of walking, I finally reached the pier. My friends had warned me that it would be swarming with tourists, but there weren’t that many people around. Of course, that was probably because it was past nine at this point, and all the tourists had gone back to their hotels.

the Den Lille Havfrue

I wonder why, out of all of Andersen’s fairy tales, the Little Mermaid and the Ugly Duckling are the ones most well known? I suppose it’s because we’ve all loved someone we shouldn’t have, and because each one of us yearns to be more than we seem to be. My favourite Andersen tale is The Rose Elf, which you can read here. It’s quite short and very readable. For some reason, the seven year old me LOVED it, which I actually find to be quite disturbing now. You'll see what I mean once you've read it.

Walked slowly back to the hostel, and took another picture of the lovely citadel chapel, this time from within the fortress. It looked just like an oil painting.

And this was actually taken the day after, but the Hans C. Andersen Boulevard, right outside the Tivoli theme park.

The next entry: speeding across the Danish-Swedish strait via the 8km-long Øresund Bridge and flying from Malmo to the other side of the Baltic Sea. And I shall continue to figure out blogspot’s layout and CSS. I don’t think I’m allowed to add tags here, and I have to do all the categories manually. How very annoying.