Norwegian Getaway Review: Part 2 – London to Copenhagenfeatured
We almost missed our flight. I never say that. That never happens to us. We’re the ones at the gate 45 minutes before boarding watching the people who are late run for it. We’re not the people doing the running.
((Well, we were speed walking to be more accurate, but we came closer than any of us ever want to))
You may be sitting at your computer thinking to yourself “Nicole, how do you almost miss a flight when you spend the entire night at the airport?” Funny thing…
So Heathrow is like, really big. And we’ve only been there once, so we’re not entirely used to the spacing of the terminals, the layout of the gates or the policies and procedures of traveling through. We left Caffe Nero around 4:30 am – the Heathrow staff who accompanied us to the arrivals area the night before had told us that the Heathrow Express (a complimentary train service that will take you from terminal to terminal) begins between 4:30 am and 5:00 am. It definitely begins just before 5:00 am, but that’s not to say the first train of the day is there at 5:00 am. In fact, the trains don’t go to all of the terminals, either. There’s a T4 train and a T5 train. And they only run sporadically. Ours was on the arrival board for 5:27 am, which set us into a frenzy – our flight began boarding at 5:45 am and we had to go through security and find our gate.
We didn’t know Heathrow well but we knew it well enough to know that it can take up to 20 minutes to walk to your gate. Our tickets had time frames for us – we had to be through security by 6:00 am and boarded by 6:15 am. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to us to think that taking the train to our terminal an hour and a half before our flight would cut things close, but I guess we’re just so used to fast tracking it through O’Hare. Thankfully, the arrivals board was wrong and there was an announcement that a train would arrive at 5:12 am, right after a train that wasn’t boardable and a train to T4.
The train arrives at precisely at 5:12 am. I guess the Brits have train arrivals down to a science. The ride only takes four minutes, a relief because I was under the impression it would take 15. We have to take an elevator up – you can’t take the escalator, has to be the elevator. We have our tickets from the agent at O’Hare, but I want a new ticket so we can get our gate information. The kiosk can’t find our reservation, but that’s fine because we already have paper tickets. We proceed to security with our original tickets and are turned away because they’re too busy. At 5:30 in the morning. That never bodes well. They send us across the departures area to the South security gate. We enter the queue and are immediately flagged – we can’t proceed through security with the tickets the gate agent gave us in Chicago. We need new tickets after we pass through the border agent (…even though we definitely passed through customs when we arrived a few hours earlier). The border agent prints us new tickets and we go into security at the South gate, which, thankfully was not nearly as busy as the North security gate was. I get flagged for random testing on my shoes. Mom gets flagged for random testing on her bag. We keep trekking until we meet the sign that says a walk to our gate would take 20-30 minutes, because we’re near the A gates and, of course, our plane is at a gate at the end of the C gates. There’s rail service to the B and C gates and thankfully it comes quickly – but they then do a surprise security check, where a single agent goes through every car of the shuttle. That takes a bit. Our flight boards in seven minutes. We make our way onto the rail and through the B gates, finally to the C gates. We haul up two escalators and power walk to the second to last gate in the terminal, and we arrive exactly at 5:45 am.
…and we arrive only to find out the flight attendants were running late and boarding would begin about ten minutes late. So a few action items here: if you come in the night before and have a flight first thing the next morning in another terminal, find a way to that terminal the night before. And two, always check in at Border Patrol before you go through security. Oh, and also give yourself an extra half hour to navigate your way through the iron and crystal maze that is the Heathrow departures area.
We boarded our flight to Copenhagen and found ourselves in a row of seats with no air nozzles. Why do a few rows of BA planes not have air nozzles? It’s a mystery, but we were all overheated from our relay race through Heathrow. We were also too tired to care at that point and I passed out sometime in between the captain announcing our flying time (a brief 1 hour, 20 minutes) and the flight attendants coming through the cabin to present the items you could buy duty free onboard (side note: it’s amazing how much time they have for things like this now that British Airways doesn’t serve so much as a free glass of water anymore. Two years ago, we got a full meal, complete with complimentary libations. Now, you have to pay for water). I woke up as we began our descent into Copenhagen, re-energized from my hour-long power nap.
Copenhagen Kastrup is a fairly simple airport. It’s not huge and it’s not that complicated. It’s bright and airy and easy to navigate, all things I appreciated after our morning at Heathrow. We were quickly off the plane, made a stop at 7-Eleven for bottled water (there are 7-Eleven’s everywhere in Copenhagen) and quickly passed through border patrol before making our way down to baggage claim, where our bags quickly made their way off the belt and onto our luggage carts.
We had pre-ordered the Copenhagen Card, which comes with full access to the public transit system, as well as complimentary access to dozens of sights and attractions and discounts to even more, and picked up our cards at the departures area of the airport. I wanted to take the train to our hotel (the Tivoli Hotel, located about a ten minute walk from Copenhagen Central Station), Stephanie wanted to take a cab and I let her win the argument because we were too tired to weigh the pros and cons of public transit. We made a quick stop at the airport Starbucks for some (more) caffeine and my first cappuccino freddo of the trip and then made our way outside, where we were quickly picked up by a cab and on our way to our hotel.
The Tivoli Hotel is centrally located – there is plenty of transit nearby – and it was a 15 minute drive from the airport. Taxi’s are pretty expensive in Copenhagen (much like…basically everything else in Copenhagen except, apparently, the airfare) and our ride made out to around $44 USD.
We were at the hotel by 11:00 am, hoping that our room would be ready, but no such luck. They did offer to check our bags, though, which allowed us to venture out for some brunch while we waited for our room.
Over the past decade, Copenhagen has really blossomed into this foodie mecca, where food is not only delicious and good for you, but organic and locally produced, and really an art form. Stephanie found a restaurant called Neighbourhood on Instagram, where it’s famous for the pizza and the brunch plates. It was a quick walk from Copenhagen Central and we walked right in.
I’ve never had a brunch like what we had at Neighbourhood. An entire wooden board of goodness was served in front of me. A mini breakfast pizza that was out of this world. Cheese and charcuterie and the sweetest grapefruit I’ve ever tasted. A pot of yogurt topped with fig and thyme infused granola and some of those dark rye breads Denmark is famous for. The piece de resistance, though? The pesto and lavender infused honey served in small pots on the side. It was all so good.
After brunch, we headed back to the hotel, hoping that our room would be ready now that we’d given it another hour and a half. Still no luck. At this point, Mom and Stephanie were running on fumes and I was falling asleep standing up. We ended up taking a walk along the water across the street. The fresh air helped a little. We kept walking, ultimately coming to Fisktorvet – one of the area’s shopping malls. And it was exactly like a shopping mall in the US, except prettier, brighter and with better shopping. We found one store called Normal that sold every day goods and groceries. It was an interesting experience, though, because instead of aisles, the store was like a maze with one start and one end and you had to walk all the way through to get out. It was a fascinating sales strategy.
Once we were stocked up on shampoo and liquid soap for our cruise, we headed back to the hotel at exactly 3:00 pm, the designated check in time, and found our room was finally ready. I headed upstairs with my bags while Mom and Stephanie waited for the rest of theirs, and I thought I’d found myself in the wrong room. We’d booked a triple room (which I thought was a bit bigger than a standard room) and found a room that was smaller than an Oceanview cabin on most cruise ships. Hotels in Copenhagen aren’t known to be particularly spacious and it was a bit of an adjustment. The room was modern and decently appointed, though. The largest tick standing out in the minus column was that the beds were super soft and you just kind of sunk into them. Mom took the pull out couch because it was a little firmer and as soon as we called downstairs for some extra linens, we all passed out. We woke up to housekeeping knocking two hours later, startling Mom so much that she literally fell out of bed!
It was the early evening by this point, but I really wanted to do or see something in Copenhagen before we called it a day because there was just so much on our list, and the sun doesn’t set until well past 9:00 pm in this part of the world in the late spring time anyways. Mom opted to stay in the hotel and relax and Stephanie and I freshened up and headed out to Nyhavn, a waterfront neighborhood famous for it’s bright, colorful buildings that line the canal with restaurants and bars. And lucky for us, there was a bus that picked up a couple of blocks from our hotel and would drop us right at Nyhavn.
The public busses in Copenhagen couldn’t be cleaner or easier to access. The stops are clearly marked and the busses run almost exactly on time. We were traveling on the Copenhagen Card and all we had to do was flash it at the driver as we boarded and we were on our way.
Nyhavn is like the life of the party neighborhood. It’s noisy and boisterous and everyone just seems jovial and happy. That could be the whole Danish hygge thing, but I like to think that it’s just the general vibe of the neighborhood. Local musicians play loudly on the waterfront, tourists and locals alike sit on the waters edge with cones of ice cream and crepes while others flock to the patios of the dozens of restaurants that line the street. It’s a feel good place. I was still trying to figure out how I felt about Copenhagen — it felt most similar to Zurich but was so unique to any place we’d ever been — but whatever thoughts I was working through, I knew I liked it here.
We strolled through Nyhavn for an hour before hopping on the same bus that had dropped us off, this time headed to Tivoli. One of Copenhagen’s most famous attractions, Tivoli is a large amusement park in the middle of the city, and it was towards the top of my must-visit list for this trip. Tivoli was built in 1843 and is the second oldest amusement park in the world. It’s also one of the top visited amusement parks in the world, and while the Copenhagen Card didn’t cover rides, it did cover entrance and we just wanted to walk around.
Tivoli has been modernized, but still feels super retro. Old school games line the sidewalks, ride queues are short and orderly and food kiosks are plentiful in options. Stephanie had mentioned that Walt Disney was inspired by Tivoli when he was planning the Disney parks and it was funny to me how many of the rides I could immediately correlate to a Disney ride.
We just walked around, snapping pictures and enjoying the brisk spring air. The park is immaculately upkept and it was refreshing to walk through an amusement park that wasn’t crammed in beyond what the park could comfortably accommodate (sorry, Disney, I’m still bitter). We found our way to the gardens and they were absolutely stunning. We just sat and admired them before deciding we had to come back with Mom before we left Copenhagen.
Tivoli was open until midnight and had a fireworks display at 11:45 pm, but there was no way we could make it that long after the two days of travel we’d had. We grabbed some dinner to bring back to the hotel and settled in for the rest of the night with CNN — the only television channel broadcast in English — and planning for the next two days. There was so much to do and see and I knew we probably wouldn’t get it all in, but I was just excited to see what other treasures we’d find in this country we were already enjoying so much.
