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!
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