This was a day when things didn't go as smoothly as usual. For starters, we headed to our preferred bakery/coffee shop, the better of the two we've tried, and although it was supposed to be open at 7am, it wasn't. So we had to go to choice #2, pastry as good but the capuccinos distinctly not as. Oh well.
After uploading yesterday's blog, we headed out at 9:30 to visit the Danish Design Center. This was something Marian had been especially looking forward to. Alas when we got there we learned that the part we came for, the museum of Danish Design, no longer existed. It had been closed up a year and a half ago. Now they just have a café and host special events.
Plan B was to walk a block down the street and visit the Glyptotek, a famed art museum, but when we got there we found it was closed Mondays.
Ur: Danish for clock
Next on the agenda was to visit Jens Olsen's World Clock. In brief, Olsen was a skilled machinist and clockmaker who spent decades designing a clock that would show everything about time worth knowing: not just hour minute second month day year, but the positions of the planets, the Julian date, and more. The final design has 14,000 beautifully-machined parts. It even has a dial that shows the position of the stars around the North Pole. You probably realize that this cycle takes some 24,000 years to complete, and there is a gear in the clock that rotates at that speed: 1 revolution in 24,000 years. In fact they didn't make the whole gear, just a sector big enough to cover the first 3,000 years of rotation. Somebody then will have to make a bigger gear.
Olsen didn't live to see the clock realized. It was built in the 1940s and installed in the Radhus where it sits today.
Front with all the dials.
Back with all the gears.
The OCD Linkage.
The detail above shows two tiny gears linked by a delicate strap and internal gearing. These are the year gears. One turns in sync with the Anomalistic Year of 365.259636 days, and the other, with the Tropical Year of 365.24219 days (Wikipedia explains). That Olsen insisted on both shows he was a real OCD type; that he actually designed a mechanism to do it shows he was a genius.
Buying a Map
Starting tomorrow and for the following two days, we'll be driving around Denmark. Marian is not satisfied with the idea of relying on the iPhone as our only map, so we went to the big Politiko Book Store near our hotel to buy a real highway map of Denmark. But the nice young clerk searched and decided they were sold out. But she directed us to a map store just around the corner where we did get a road map.
Parenthesis here: we find bilingual people so impressive. Just about everyone in Denmark who deals with the public speaks English, but the young clerk in the bookstore was switching so effortlessly, sentence by sentence between idiomatic unaccented English with David and (presumably good) Danish with her co-worker.
Shopping
So let's go down the Stroget ("stroyet", the original and still claimed to be largest pedestrianized shopping precinct in Europe) and look at Illums Bolighus, a department store we remember from a couple of decades back visiting Gothenburg. Went back to the hotel to plan this expedition and eat lunch (seed-covered buns from the bakery and fresh cherries and cheese from a grocery store).
We'd impulsively paid extra to have a room on the front of the hotel, overlooking the big Radhus plaza, and we've enjoyed that view. There's always something happening. Today, out of the blue, a group of Koreans appeared and put on a dance exhibition.
After lunch we took the little 11A bus around to the other end of downtown, planning to walk back to the hotel along the Stroget. Saw a big sign ILLUMS and assumed that was the nice furniture and homewares place we knew, and went in. It was hot, it was crowded, and it had only clothes and sporting goods. After a fretful and disappointing 40 minutes we headed on down the street and found in the next block: Illums Bolighus. So Illums is not Illums Bolighus. Anyway.
The Stroget was mobbed on this overcast Monday afternoon. We stopped for some cooling drink.
On the menu at this Mexican-style restaurant was "Raspberry Smoothie" which was excellent, made with real raspberries and delicious. On down the street to the Amagertov plaza, home to the famous Stork Fountain.
Despite the gloomy light we took the obligatory picture.
OK, then it rained. Had we brought our umbrellas we'd have felt smug, but we hadn't so we just felt wet. We ducked into Our Lady Cathedral because it has a full set of Thorvaldsen statues of twelve apostles and the Risen Christ.
The identical 13 figures are in a small gallery at the Thorvaldsen museum. Here they are in better light, at least. We were impressed by the remarkable way he reproduced fabric drapery.
Back to the hotel to chill; then out for a good supper at an Italian restaurant we noticed this morning while looking for the map store. So that ended the day on a positive note.
About Copenhagen
Tomorrow we pack up and leave this town. How do we feel about it? On the plus side, it has excellent public transport, splendid architecture (the new and the old co-existing harmoniously) and lots of good museums and other touristy things to look at (we hit maybe half of our list of possible "things", and there are many more that would appeal to people different from us). And mobs of cheerful people, drinking and eating at the many sidewalk cafés.
On the minus side, there is a grungy, tacky feel to the place. Graffiti and stickers on every lamp post and surface. Some homeless drunks hanging out on the Radhus plaza every morning. The sidewalks are mostly cobbles, which are not only uncomfortable for walking, but which trap dirt and cigarette butts (of which there are a lot (seems like there are more smokers here than in other European cities we've seen)). And that's at its best, in warm summer sunlight. In the cold damp North Sea fall and winter, when the sidewalk tables are gone and the sky is gray, and they make a skating rink on Amagertorv plaza... it wouldn't be so fun.
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