Hey there! Mid terms are approaching fast, so I decided to go traveling during the weekend to get rid of some stress(:
I went to Copenhagen with a new friend I met during this exchange from NTU, and it was definitely a worthwhile trip! After some rushed planning early last week, we took a plane to Copenhagen on Friday. Arriving in Copenhagen, we found out that it was warmer in Copenhagen than it was in Helsinki but the wind was stronger and more consistent, which made it feel almost as cold.
Generally, most of our pre-trip and upon-arrival administrative matters such as online bookings for certain attractions went pretty smoothly, but we faced some issues paying using our debit cards in the city. Our cards seemed to always be rejected at places that could not make use of PayWave but required the pin number instead (even at the ticket machines in the central railway station when we were trying it out!). Thankfully, we had decided to get the Copenhagen Card before the trip which covers all transport in the Copenhagen region, so traveling around was rather smooth. There was also a slight bit of difficulty getting our prepaid SIM cards to work as it required entering in the APN details, but there was no mention of that requirement anywhere. We found out later that there were other providers that worked more seamlessly; it would have been wiser to look up the different prepaid offerings by different telcos before the trip.
Regardless, these issues were quickly resolved within the first hour or so, and the rest of the trip went very smoothly. Some of the more notable things we did/places we went to include Frederiksborg Castle and Møns Klint. We pretty much had a rather chill first day just exploring the city and taking in the sights and sounds.
The highlight of our second day was the Frederiksborg Castle, which was about an hour or so from the city center. We reached there really late, close to closing time, and hence had to rush through the exhibitions. It was a pretty fun experience though feeling like rebels as we were brought to the main exhibitions by the security guards as they closed the exhibition doors behind us as we went through the different exhibitions. While the castle had no lack of exhibitions inside for those interested in the culture and history of the place, we were more interested in the huge garden behind the castle, what with us being suckers for scenic places (and it does not have a closing time!). We were there at around the golden hour, hence it also made for really nice pictures with the castle as the backdrop.
On our last day of activities in Copenhagen, we decided to go further out from the city center to explore the kind of nature that Denmark has to offer, and hence we decided to go down south towards the chalk cliffs, Møns Klint. It took a rather long 3-4 hours of traveling by public transport, then another 1.5 hours of walking to get to the cliffs. The journey was absolutely worth it though, as the sights were beautiful. The white cliffs were gorgeous, though there were some parts along the top that were a safety hazard as there were no fences along the edge. Only the parts of the cliff edge that were nearer to the Geocenter (a museum of sorts where most people who drive in park at) were fenced up. We easily spent a couple of hours just walking along the edge of the cliffs, admiring the scenery and taking photos before reaching the Geocenter, where there were stairs located which led down to the base of the cliffs. It was a long descent heading down the stairs that covered 120m in height to get to the bottom (and a really tiring one climbing up after that). The base of the cliffs were really different from what you would expect to see at a beach as the “beach” was covered almost entirely in black pebbles, where we could hear the sounds of pebbles clashing against each other with each wave that struck the coast.
This trip was a very memorable one and was definitely well worth the money and time. We are definitely looking forward to more trips around Europe in the coming months!
