COPE-enhagen, Part the Second

Not only did we manage to make it to almost everything on the list, but we were greeted with smiles and open arms wherever we went.  As a new mom, I carry around this slightly irrational fear of THE PUBLIC SCENE, a nightmare scenario in which I take the baby out, he starts crying his fool head off, and I incur the wrath of dirty looks or worse from strangers who jab their steely gazes right down to the heart of my deepest insecurity, which is that I don't know what I'm doing most of the time.  In all honesty, Little P is a gem for the most part, but you just never know when the screaming will start.

But instead of fleeing in horror at my potentially peace-disrupting bundle of cuteness, complete strangers actually made a beeline for him, tugging on his delicious baby feet and cooing at him in Danish.  Even grown men would bend down with gooey eyes and high-pitched voices to offer him a finger, which he was only too happy to repay with one of his pure-joy-radiating, gummy smiles.  If it's one thing that makes my heart melt it's grown men making goo goo noises.  Gets me every time.

The tensest moment for me came on our visit to Rosenborg Castle, home of the Danish crown jewels,  because there are serious museum-goers out there, people.  Museum-goers who buy the audio guides and actually want to listen to the muffled voice coming out of the plastic box telling them in excruciating detail about the mathematical phenomenon of the stained glass windows.  Museum-goers who linger for inordinate amounts of time over cases of ancient Roman lead tablets in a vain attempt to put their four years of high school Latin to good use uninterrupted.  I know, I used to be one of those museum-goers.

So it was with a little trepidation that we entered the heavily fortified portals of the treasury room.

COPE-enhagen, Part the First

Usually, I'm pretty well prepared as a traveller. I've looked up things to see, noted seasonal opening hours, mastered relevant phrases for locating toilets, mapped a route from the airport to the hotel, sandwich bagged my unmentionables, making sure to pack some in my carry-on lest I'm eternally separated from my check-in luggage. But this trip was different. This trip was post single girl on the go. This was international travel with an infant. With not much time for browsing through travel guides (does Rick Steves recommend this?) I packed as best as I could, anticipating colds, colic, and croup, and headed off for Denmark, husband and child in tow, not knowing a lick of Danish or even exactly where Copenhagen was on the map. Turns out it's on the east side, not the north like I had envisioned. Also Denmark is above Germany, not Belgium where I had placed it in my mental map. My mental map has a lot to answer for, particularly when I get lost anywhere in Philadelphia and wind up in New Jersey. But I digress.

Little did I know that away to the west, my sister, she of the usually cafe-hopping/people-watching bent, was furiously scribbling out two pages of A5 size paper of important sights to be seen in Copenhagen (there was definitely underlining on there, I saw it) while the husband slogged through two days of conference.  I was dubious and skeptical.  We'd be lucky to cross off the first thing on the list before we'd be scrambling the cobblestone streets, desperately searching for the baby changing facilities I had failed to locate beforehand with an ever-dampening and furious five-month-old, I thought to myself.

Oh Copenhagen, did I ever underestimate you!