On Fire

My world’s on fire. I’ve been hoppin and poppin over the last few weeks. My trip to Copenhagen was outstanding depsite having to spend most of it in the rain. We arrived Thursday and had originally planned to stay in a hostel just to the north of the city. But on arrival we thought we’d try for something more in the center of the city. We payed a visit to the Information Centre to find out what was on offer in the way of cheap accomadation. We settled on the Public City Hostel located in the Vesterbro area of the city, which we later found out was the heart of the red light district.

The hostel was basic, like most hostel are, and it was relatively cheap at 300 DKK per person per night to include breakfast. We checked into the hostel late afternoon and then decided to do the obilgatory boat ride around the canal to get a feel for the layout of the city. We found an all you can eat pizza joint for dinner followed by a movie in Danish subtitles. Up until this point we were thinking Copenhagen is not as expensive as people say…and then we went into the pub and found out how the Danes make their money. A pint of lager and a Bacardi Breezer costed me £10!!!! We decided it was going to be a dry holiday.

I discovered something I’d never had a problem with before. I didn’t like the youth hostel mainly because I wanted to have my own space to kick of my shoes spread out and make the place my temporary home without having to share it with 15 – 20 other people. We decided we’d find another place to stay on the next day.

We were greeted with an unusual wake up call on Friday. The guy on duty got into an verbal altercation with some vagrant who tried to get into the hostel. A lot of yelling ensued followed by a bunch of blokes ganging up beating on the vagrant. Of the vagrant didn’t take to kindly to this and decided to show his appreciation by throwing a brick through the lobby window. It was definately time to leave.

We tried going hotel lobby to hotel lobby to see if we could get a good rate…no such luck. Then we discovered the best way to get a deal is to book the hotel through the Tourist Information Centre. The hotel was asking 849 DKK at the door, we managed to get for 650 DKK at the tourist info center…of course they took their 70 DKK booking fee.

We covered a lot of ground on Saturday visiting all of the major cultural attractions. I won’t go into the details of those, you can read about them in any good tour book. The highlight for me was the visit to Christiania, the hippie commune free city-state that governs its ownself.

Saturday we toot a train over to Sweden to spend the day in Malmoa. We found this to be a very nice quiet town. Definately worth a visit to get a taste of Sweden.

Sunday was a chilled day…mopped up the things we hadn’t seen yet, but mostly lazed around.

Monday returned back to the UK…on Tuesday found out my job was made redundant which means I’m in a redundacy situation which is good news because I want to take the money and run and get my own training and development company…something I’ve been threatening to do forever…now the time is ripe. More to follow….

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