Next Stop: Copenhagen and Århus.

We were certainly excited to arrive at our next destination, Copenhagen. We had never seen Denmark before and some of Mark's ancestors are from there. So the day after Kiel, we boarded the train again to go to the city of bicycles.

This was somewhere near the border of Germany and Denmark. Forgive the bad picture, turns out it's really hard to get a good picture on a bridge between all the beams, especially when you are moving fast!

Denmark had a lot of wind turbines. I love them!

After we arrived in Copenhagen, we got to work finding our hostel. It was quite a walk from the train station, but the sights were lovely.

I loved all the bicycles. The bike lanes in Copenhagen are amazing. Tons of room on a separate shoulder on the road, right next to the sidewalk. The smaller streets don't usually have a separate shoulder, but bikers still ride on the road anyway and it is safe. Bikes definitely seem to rule the streets there.

After we found our hostel, we went out exploring. Copenhagen was such a nice change from Germany. The architecture there is so much different, and things still look old. Germany can look pretty modern sometimes, especially with all the building that took place after WWII because so many of the buildings were destroyed.

A square close to the middle of the city.

Right in the middle of the city, pretty close to the harbor.

We had been searching for Nyhavn (New Harbor--but really it's an old harbor) forever, and we finally found it just as the sun was setting. How beautiful!

All the different colors of the buildings mix together so well. I also love all the windows on the buildings.

We were so lucky to see it before the sun set that day. After we saw Nyhavn, we walked through the shopping district and back to our hostel for the night. Our feet were pretty weary, especially from all the walking we had done so far on the trip.

Walking back to our hostel.

Needless to say, Denmark was pretty expensive. Not very welcoming to tourists, that's for sure! So to survive, we went to the market and loaded up on food there. That certainly helped us survive the high food costs. The only dower was that we weren't able to taste a lot of the local cuisine.

The next day, we decided to rent some bikes to see the city. Almost every person we talked to recommended it. We were excited and found a bike place with a reasonable price.

Todd and Mark with their bikes by a church.

Our first stop was to check out this star-shaped park that was near The Little Mermaid statue. It was really nice, kind of hard to navigate with a bike though. So we decided to find the statue instead.

We saw the statue of Triton and figured we must be getting close!

Then, we finally found where the statue should have been. We were so disappointed it wasn't there! I guess it has been moved to Shanghai for half of the year for the expo there. Whatever that means! We wondered why they would ever choose to move a statue across the world for any reason. I guess she has a good home there, or at least that's what it appeared like on the screen.

Even though The Little Mermaid was missing, we did find this fountain that was pretty amazing. That partly made up for the disappointment. :)

We biked up along the harbor and enjoyed being by the water. We also ran into another fountain that was pretty cool.

Me with my bike! So much fun!

We made our way to Christianshavn, a smaller part of the city that is supposed to be pretty as well. We weren't disappointed, and even found a church to visit.

The top of this church was pretty cool--it was spiraly and reminded me of a nautilus. I didn't get a picture of it though, sadly.

Along a canal in Christianshavn.

We went to a local grocery store and stocked up on some food for lunch. Then we sat along this canal and enjoyed it on a bench. After lunch, we did more biking around and decided that we wanted to find the grave of Hans Christian Andersen.

You can't see it in my picture, but someone had placed a top hat next to his grave. I was expecting a bigger memorial or tombstone for him, but it was still cool to see it nonetheless. After that, it was time to turn our bikes in for the day. Then we went back to the shopping center to see more shops.

Crazy live statue!

Here's a funny story that must be told. On the way to Copenhagen on the train, we boarded to find a guy sitting in one of our seats. Mark had reserved us a table with four seats around it so that we could still talk easily on our ride, because usually on the ICE trains you don't have seats that face each other. So we boarded to find two guys sitting around our table that we had reserved, and one was taking up two of our seats that we had reserved. The other guy was in the extra seat that we wouldn't be sitting in because there was only three of us (we ended up chatting with him most of the way to Copenhagen--he was a fellow American who lived in Hamburg. A really nice guy!). Anyway, this had happened to us several times on the trip already because people like to sit in the table seats because you have more room. The guy that was sitting in our seats was asleep, with a beanie over his eyes. Mark was annoyed and didn't want to wake him up, but we had to anyway. So Mark patted his shoulder and said to him in German that he was sitting in our seats. After taking several minutes to get up and move all his stuff, we were finally able to sit down. He went and sat across the aisle at another table where two other guys were sitting. We looked under the table and saw that there was a large boom box of some sort. Todd asked what in the world they were doing with something like that, and Mark said they were probably street performers. Then we laughed about it.

Anyway, the day that we got to Copenhagen and were walking through the shopping district, we saw some people just as they finished up a performance and people were running up to them giving them money. Then we realized they were the guys from the train, and they WERE street performers like Mark said! Then we laughed even harder! What are the odds? Then, the next day as we went back to the shopping center, we saw them again. Although this time, another group had set up shop and was performing. I don't think they were too happy about it, because they seemed to be mocking the group for a little while. I couldn't resist taking a picture so I would always remember. Ha! So the guys that were by us on the train are in the picture below, the three guys wearing the hats. So hilarious!

The next day, it was time to leave for Århus. As we were waiting in the train station, we found some treats that we discovered the day before: little mini cinnamon rolls. I had to memorialize them in a photo because they were seriously one of the best things ever. Oh yum.

That bag was pretty much gone in seconds.

We made it to Århus! This is the tallest and the longest church in Denmark.

Oh boy. Århus was a little chilly. We spent most of the first day walking around and seeing the old buildings and trying to keep warm.

Lovely little streets.

A different view of the church.

Århus is smaller and more quaint than Copenhagen. It is mostly a college town, and quite a few students go there. Which also means a lot of bikes!

We noticed that there were tons of semis loading this ferry. Pretty amazing to think of all that weight being able to float on the sea. And I mean, there were tons of semis loading that thing.

The next day, we tried to go to an area of the town where they have relocated a bunch of old houses from around the country called "The Old Town." I was really excited to see it until we got there and realized it was going to be about $20 a person to get in, then we were disappointed. We scrapped the idea and went back to the middle of the city and went to the Viking museum. It was free! There they have a bunch of replicas of things that were used in that era. I guess there is a bigger collection in another museum outside of the city, but we didn't make it to that one.

In this picture you can see what they used for a loom, combs, and needles.

What a house used to look like in that era.

Our train was supposed to leave at 7 p.m. that night, so we tried to spend the day sightseeing. It started raining though, so that was a downer. We just went shopping instead. Mark found some smokin' dress shoes for a steal of a deal, even for Denmark. I won't post pictures so I won't ruin it for everyone. It is better to see them in real person, and I'm sure Mark will be more than happy to show you when we get back!

So after hours of avoiding the cold rain, we boarded our overnight train back to Stuttgart. Inside the train, we ended up next to a Danish kid and a girl from Austria. We were in a pretty small little compartment of chairs, so we talked to them pretty much the whole time. We learned quite a bit about Denmark from the Danish kid. They were so much fun to talk to. The sad part was that in Hamburg, the Austrian girl got kicked off the train because even though she had a ticket, she didn't actually reserve a seat. We felt bad for her, because she would have to wait for a train in the middle of the night at a cold train station. About an hour after that, we got held up in Hannover for almost three hours! The controller said that the train wasn't able to move because of another one on the tracks, so we transferred over to another train that took us straight to Stuttgart. Not a bad deal, especially since we would have had to transfer another time if we would have stayed on the overnight train. It was sad to say goodbye to our newfound friend though. Once we boarded the ICE train to Stuttgart, we found our own little compartment and fell asleep almost instantly. We arrived in Waiblingen around 10 a.m., and were pretty exhausted.

It didn't change the fact that we had a pretty amazing trip though. I'll never forget the amazing sights and the fun times that we had in Northern Germany and Denmark!