I’m back in London for a few days after a very pleasant New Year break in Copenhagen.
I’d love to share pictures of a glorious wintry sunset over the harbour*, but it ended up raining pretty much the whole time.
NYE itself was a fun experience: a dinner party at a semi-bougie apartment near the urban lakes. Responsible for starters, we served up a chilled leek soup and then smoked salmon pate and melba toast with, of course, mango salsa.
At 23:59 everyone got up on the sofas ready to “jump into the New Year”. Apparently I was the weird one for asking what we were all doing.
Outside of that night, the seven hours of daily sunlight were largely spent cycling through the city and wandering around Louisiana, a revered museum in the country.
A quick note on pricing (as everyone always wants to know)
- Trip on the metro: £3
- Pint of craft beer in a hipster bar: ~£8
- Can of coconut milk: £1.20
- An aubergine: £1
Hygge (that vogue word for Danish cosiness) is also a legit thing! One evening as the candles in the living room were blown out it was collectively agreed “great hygge everyone” and there was a bank advert promoting that their app would “give you more time for hygge”.
On more than one occasion I was corrected from saying “hih-gee” to “hew-guh”, but in any case, the Danes seem to have nailed down this remedy to the cold outside.
*it turns out that Copenhagen literally translates to “by a harbour”. You can imagine how over time it’s gone from “that place by a harbour” to “that place: byaharbour”.
** EDIT ** This is Sam writing two years on from the original post.
Now that I live in Copenhagen and am learning Danish, it turns out that I got the translation slightly wrong.
Copenhagen in Danish is København [kurb-en-hown] which, today means: bUy (køb) a (en) harbour (havn).
After Googling it, the etymology appears to come from “Købmænds havn” [kurb-mens-hown] which means merchants’ (i.e. “buy-men’s”) harbour
In other news…
Now that I’m back in the UK I’m doing a few meetings before flying back out to Nairobi next week. The warm weather is very appealing right now.
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