Scandinavia has always been a part of the world that we've wanted to visit but never thought we'd actually get to. After our few days in Iceland, though, (which is technically Nordic and not Scandinavian) we decided that we would fit at least one Scandinavian country in and Denmark was the most accessible from Netherlands.

Getting there from Rotterdam was actually quite simple. Take a local high speed train to Eindhoven - 45 min. Change to an overnight train and 20 hours later you're in Copenhagen. Deciding how to travel around Europe becomes quite a simple process. You start by checking flights on skyscanner or edreams. Then you Google to see what busses and trains exist for the routes you're taking. You can also Google things like "Best way to get from city X to city Y" and you'll usually find some helpful info - blogs and actual people commentary is generally the best source of information for this. Once you've got your available options you compare costs and times to see which is the best option for you. Just remember to look at the cost as a door-to-door cost e.g. a flight to an out of town airport may seem cheaper but you still have to get into town which can make the cost a lot more expensive. Another thing to consider is that night trains save on a night of accommodation so you can factor that in as well. The last thing that a lot of people have asked us is why we're not using EuroRail. Well, from what we can tell, EuroRail is economical if you're doing your trips over short distances - so going to neighboring countries. But if you start adding longer distances then you start adding costs to your tickets (like reserving seats or sleeper beds etc). The actual EuroRail ticket itself is also expensive. So all this taken into account, we decided that for our purposes, and with all the low-cost airlines available, EuroRail was not best for us.

We arrived at Copenhagen Station and decided to take a walk to our hostel. A good idea at the time. But half way through our 2 km walk with nearly 40kgs of backpack on each of us in the Copenhagen summer heat, you start to question if you've done the right thing. Once we got to our holy grail of hostels, though, all of that was forgotten as we had entered our first experience of the new hotel-style hostel. And it was great. Modern, funky, great amenities and great staff. But more on this in another post.

Copenhagen is once again small and easy to get around on foot. The city centre is a mix up of massive old churches, government offices, palaces and cultural places scattered through the streets of restaurants, bars and shops. We were staying quite close to the longest pedestrian street in the world, Strøget, and what seemed to be tourist central, but turned out to be pretty local. We didn't do too much touristy stuff here and rather decided to chill out and take the city in at our own pace. We were also lucky enough to meet a walking tour guide at our hostel who highlighted the best things for us to see in the city like the palace, the picturesque canal street Nyhavn, Tivoli Gardens (though we didn't actually pay to go into the funfair) and a chill in the gardens outside the old palace.

The nightlife here is really good. After eating a basic pizza for R130 or burger for R150, you can easily get caught up hopping from bar to bar in Sværtegade Street (which happened to be around the corner from our hostel) until the sun comes up at around 3:30 am. Best advice is to drink before you go out cause prices of drinks in bars are steep. In fact everything in this city is very expensive. We were in town over a Friday night and decided to invite ourselves to the local Chabbad (Jewish Church group for our non-Jewish readers) for some kitkah and chicken soup. Ironically, their shul is in a building that was used as headquarters by the Nazis during WW2…how's that for getting your own back. It was great to have a home cooked Shabbos meal again and to meet some other travelers and locals. Thank you very much to Rabbi and Rebbetzin Loewenthal for their hospitality.

Our first trip into real Scandinavia was as cool as we could hope for and after 3 days in Copenhagen we decided that we were going to get more of it in by heading out to Stockholm.

Trek on…Brett and Darren