Copenhagen, Denmark

Copenhagen: city of ice cream, churros and bakeries. Like London has Prets, Copenhagen has bakeries. So many bakeries. All full of Danish pastries, which, hilariously enough, I hadn’t realised originated in Denmark.

Like Stockholm, Copenhagen was cold and grey and mainly built in ice cream pastels. The loveliest of these pastel-coloured houses lined a little harbour street called Nyhavn, where we hopped on a canal tour.

First stop was the Little Mermaid statue, which is nestled up against a dock. She's even more of a tart than Ariel.

The surrounding area was appropriately reminiscent of a magic kingdom, with a canal twisting around a castle in the shape of a star.

The canal tour then took us under a series of low bridges and back to the start, from whence we walked down to the palace where Queen Margrethe lives. Pretty flash. This is where you’d expect a Disney princess to live; forget Buckingham (‘Ugly’) Palace. We managed to arrive right in time for the changing of the guard, which was fairly amusing. One of the guards had a fit of the giggles mid-march.

Kiss! Kiss! No, but seriously, look at those tassels.

Voltaire considered Denmark one of the most liberal countries in the world, did you know? Apparently it was way ahead of the pack in terms of freedom of the press. Another interesting fact is that Denmark was occupied by the Nazis during WWII, something I hadn’t realised. And the Danish kings have been named Frederick or Christian since the 1600s. I learnt all this and more at the Danish History Museum, which was, importantly, free.

On Wednesday, we took on the Prince of Denmark at his famous castle, Kronborg. Who else but Hamlet? Shakespeare based his play in a castle town called Helsingor (Elsinore in the English text). The castle’s within spitting distance of Sweden and is basically there to keep the Swedes at bay. No two countries have been at war for as many cumulative years as Sweden and Denmark.

Kenneth Branagh, eat your platinum blond heart out.

The history of Kronborg was really interesting. Basically, it was built as a naval fortress so the king could keep an eye on Sweden while taxing the life out of any ship that sailed in the sound between the countries. This tax basically paid for every castle, monument and shiny thing in Denmark. It’s unclear whether Shakespeare ever actually visited Helsingor, but the castle was getting quite a rep as a party palace in the early 1600s, hence providing the perfect location for a crazy fictional prince.

I suppose I can see what Princess Mary saw in it.

We took a tour of the casemeet – the underground dungeon – during which Mum got left behind in the dark. Silly Mum. Earlier, we’d lost Dad somewhere in the Maritime Museum. What am I meant to do with these parents?

On our last full day in Copenhagen, we failed to break the habit of walking billions of kilometres. Among other things, we climbed the biggest and shiniest spiral tower you can possibly imagine, and each confronted imminent death atop the tilted viewing platform. The floor sloped downwards to flimsy wooden vertiginous effect.

Mel, you would have loved it.

Admittedly, the views were fairly all right, Copenhagen being a beautiful fairytale city and all. There were pastel colours and onion domes and oxygenated copper as far as the eye could see. Which was far.

Once we’d stumbled back to ground level, Mum promptly led us at an adventurous pace through the local drug den. No, really. I have never seen so many pre-teens lighting up a joint. Not even on Skins. That’ll teach Mum to lead us to off-map places.

But the mini-adventures weren’t quite over, as Dad insisted that we find the sea. The sea was not as close as he’d imagined. The sea was actually a good train and metro ride away, and we spent a grand total of ten minutes on the cold grey beach staring (or grumbling, in Dad’s case) at the cold grey windmills before heading back to town for delicious Vietnamese curry.

Mum decided to test the water temperature. Her fingers sued for negligence.