Copenhagen castle day

We got the Copenhagen Card, which is a real deal if you can put on the hussle. It includes public transit around Copenhagen and many surrounding areas and free admission to more than 50 attractions. We picked them up in terminal 3 at the airport and used them immediately to take the train to our hotel. At the end of October, they will get rid of the physical card, and everything will be on an app. We got physical cards, which is a nice thing to keep as a memory.

We walk a lot on our travels. But this morning, we took the Metro to our first destination. It was straightforward to use, and the transfer that we needed to make to get to Rosenborg Slot was totally well-labeled and easy to figure out.

Rosenborg Castle needed reservations even with the Copenhagen Card. Which was no trouble to get online the night before. Even at the opening, there was a crowd. It was the usual fancy palace stuff. Also known as all the stuff rich people hoard that has way more gold on it than you can afford.

Each room represents one of the many kings and queens that lived there. But, like many castles, it is more of a museum. I don’t imagine the current reigning monarch would love to keep around all the now unfashionable stuff from the earlier ones. I can just imagine most of this stuff gathering dust in the attic or shoved down in the basement. It might only be recently that someone thought this might be a suitable tourist venue.

The gardens outside Rosenborg are a wonderful place to relax and get a little food. But right across the road is the SMK State Museum of Art. An impressive blending of an old and a new building. The collection features Danish artists, and it’s surprisingly large.

After SMK, we enjoyed a snack in the nature area behind the museum. So we just started walking back toward the general direction of the hotel. We walked by NyHavn. Nope. Way too crowded. But in the process, we came up on Christianborg Palace.

The Palace is a functional building, meaning that it’s still used by the Danish Royal family and for state functions. You can get in free with the Copenhagen Card. There are four areas you can go into, each has a separate entrance. This is one site that you should not expect to have to yourselves. But when we visited the ruins under the palace, it wasn’t that crowded at all. Pleasant surpise.