So, pacing ourselves more carefully, doing only two things today. Thing one is to climb the spire of Our Savior Church.
As seen from the canal tour boat on 4 July. The guide told us all to have our cameras ready as the boat came out from under a bridge on the Christiana Canal.
Click to verify there really
are people on those steps.
Rick Steve's guide calls it the best view in Copenhagen. Also mentions that it's a 400-step climb. Marian opted to stay below for this one, enjoy the pretty green churchyard. David paid 40Kr. to make the climb, along with a lot of other people. There was quite a bit of traffic on the stairways, lots of "excuse me" and "thanks" in various languages.
First stage is a fairly ordinary wooden staircase.
Then you pass the room with the clockwork for the hour-striker.
Things get steeper then, up to...
...the bells themselves...
...where the wooden spiral stairs begin.
After a steep ladder-like section you are outside...
Where you can look down. In the hi-res version you might just make out Marian near the fence.
On the other side you can see the shadow of the spire.
An adult can't quite get to the top. In the last about 270° of the spiral the steps are less than a foot wide and the roof comes down to about a meter above the floor.
Below that, however, the view over the city is very fine indeed. Here David completely blew the photography somehow. He took the overlapping pictures for a panorama, something we've done many times, but that evening the geometry of the images was such that they just could not be merged. Woulda been a great panorama. Here are three individual shots to give a bit of the feeling.
North-west: the Black Diamond is in the center.
North: the blue dome in the upper right is the "Marble Church" which close up reminds us of San Francisco's city hall dome.
North-east: upper right you can see the two white cruise ships docked. The Little Mermaid is just beyond them.
Safely down, we walked a block or so to the edge of Christiana Canal.
Tour boats wait patiently behind kayakers.
Had a lemonade at a sidewalk café. Don't know if this is unique to that café or a Danish thing, but a glass of lemonade had several mint leaves and a big slice of ginger root in it. It was delicious!
So that was the morning thing. The afternoon thing was music. The Copenhagen Jazz Festival is on, and we'd meant to catch at least one concert. Something that sounded interesting was a vocal group on this Sunday afternoon, performing at a church in the north east corner of town. Magic of Google Maps tells us the 1A bus takes us just there. So about 3pm we caught that out to St. Jacob's.
Touché does a capella versions of swing standards.
They performed some inventive arrangements of big-band era songs, with one or two singing lyrics and the others filling in instrumental lines and harmonies with scat syllables. The one bass voice was actually vocalizing the part of a jazz bass, and very well. It was a fun performance.
So back to the hotel for supper and a quiet evening.
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