Copenhagen, Denmark

Copenhagen got off to a great start when my train from Sweden was delayed about one and a half hours, which really meant that I purchased too much junk food in the train station. It was really just the beginning of the poor dietary choices on this trip.
 I met a really nice Finnish woman on the train who was also an linguist studying Slavic languages. Her concentration was Czech and Bulgarian. We chatted/geeked out for a good hour before trying to sleep. She was also traveling on an Interrail pass (the European variant of the Eurail pass) so she was able to answer some questions for me.

One of the things one has to deal with with when arriving in a city for the first time with just a poorly scaled google map is getting lost. A lot. From the rail station I managed to find the major downtown shopping street just fine, but after that, everything I saw was really just happy, dumb luck. When I was looking for the palace, I managed to accidentally Kastellet and The Little Mermaid (actually really little, who knew?). Either way, I managed to find everything I wanted to and then some.
Denmark is another one of those countries with just absolutely horrible exchange rates to the dollar and everything is ridiculously expensive. I had wanted to spend no more than $20 that day; I ended up spending closer to $30 or $35. Whoops. Thankfully, Denmark was the last in the string of 3 hellishly expensive countries.

Back to getting lost. Copenhagen doesn't have that big of a city center but the for half of it the streets are on a grid, and the other half the streets are all sorts of crooked. Transitioning between the two sections makes for confusing times. Copenhagen is really just a nice city to walk around. Beautiful buildings, surrounded by water/canals, nice people.

One of the interesting things I saw in Copenhagen was Christiana. Christiana is a breakaway neighborhood which was established by a group of squatters. What it's known for is the free dealing of marijuana and hash. Because of this, and the legal status of such substances in Copenhagen, photography inside the community is forbidden. There are only a couple of walking streets lined with kiosks, but the 'compound' is larger than I thought. You wouldn't believe the amount of pot these people have. First, almost everybody in there is smoking something. Second, there were some kiosks with probably pounds of marijuana stacked in piles. Because it was a community with lots of druggies, there was plenty of drug-induced graffiti. Awesome.

So what if I only ate pastries today?