Blog 17 Copenhagen

We arrived at Copenhagen yesterday along with three or four cruise liners and today did a tour of all our old haunts. The cobbled waterfront was sparkling in the sunshine and the Little Mermaid as graceful and subtle as ever - still swarming with admiring Japanese tourists photographing each other, then along to our all time favourite the Gefion Fountain. She is in my view an outstanding example of 1910 art sculpture, a huge bronze work of the Goddess Gefion driving on her four sons which she has turned into oxen. Gefion was a daughter of Odin and was given the chance to keep as much land as she could plough in a day - hence she turned her sons into huge oxen and ploughed out from Sweden the land which is now the Danish island of Zealand - the missing piece which then remained in Sweden became Lake Vernen. The composition and power of the sculpture is astonishing and surprises most tourists who have only ever heard of the Little Mermaid.

The waterfront leads into the very heart of the city at Nyhavn, a canal harbour lined with wonderful old buildings and full of character vessels, the roads and bridges around thronging with the young and beautiful. If those days are gone for you then there is no better place to be reminded of that sad fact. Across the water lies Christianhavn a series of old canals which ran around the old city. Where the bridges allow, these are filled with yachts and boats of every size lying alongside the stone quays with cobbled streets and grandly converted brick warehouses yet dotted here and there with beautiful cottages painted in the almost mandatory range of Scandinavian colours, peach, mustard, powder blue, cream, terracotta and white. We moored up here for three days to meet up with friends joining us for a week. I think our friends enjoyed it.

This is a wonderful city of fountains, delightful buildings, expanses of water, bridges, churches and modern architecture bravely mixing it with grand classical buildings and succeeding. A great deal of public infrastructure projects continually in progress to provide a first class an excellent integrated public transport system and public buildings the envy of any city - a new theatre, a new opera house, a new Royal Library etc. and at the same time constantly reducing the access of cars and traffic in the city. There is so much I can only give you a flavour with a few photographs and leave you to re-read the superbly crafted story of the Little Mermaid.