Baltic Cruise: Copenhagen, Denmark

We left our hotel at 8:30, had them hold our luggage and ventured out into the city. Copenhagen is just beautiful. Colorful houses by harbors with a variety of cool ships and sail boats everywhere. We saw the Little Mermaid Statue (along with a thousand other tourists), and then wandered through the Queen’s Palace Courtyard.

Hans Christian Anderson, who wrote the original Little Mermaid, spent a lot of his life here in Copenhagen….

Chris, Ryan and Katie by the Gefion Fountain…

Amalienborg Palace and Square. Denmark royalty… Queen Margrethe II and her husband live in the mansion.

We continued walking down along the coast seeing all kinds of cool boats and ships docked along the way.

Copenhagen Sandcastle Festival. Copenhagen hosts a huge sandcastle exhibit each summer. The sand sculptures were quite amazing. It was fun to walk around and check out all the details.

Then we headed over to Nyhaven, a picturesque straight of water lined with colored buildings and boats. My favorite street, for sure.

It was AMAZING how good this guy was with his bottle music (above). AMAZING. Oh, and he was blindfolded. He played classical pieces. It was so fun to watch!

The people on the ship below were having some sort of Engagement party or something and it was beautiful. Can’t believe some people live like that.

We grabbed some water for Katie who kept saying… “must have water” and remained on the lookout for an ‘on the go’ breakfast… which was now turning into lunch. We were actually thrilled to see a 7-11. We haven’t seen one of those for a while. We grabbed exotic Fanta (really good) and dark berry Mt. Dew (pretty good), chicken kabobs and a pizza. As soon as we were done, Ryan wanted more. He’s a growing boy. I can’t wait to get him aboard the cruise ship so he can eat whatever he wants.

The BEST kind of Fanta – so good!

Peeked in the Lego store…amazing stuff in there.

Katie and I will take one in every color…

At noon we were sitting in the pews of the ‘CATHEDRAL OF OUR LADY’ for an organ concert. It’s a gorgeous light church filled with white pillars and arches and actually quite comfortable cushioned benches set up so that worshipers can look to the front for speakers and sit on the opposing bench to hear the organ. There were quite a few people enjoying the concert but Ryan noticed that he and Katie were the only youth there. It felt good to sit down after such a lot of walking. We enjoyed to the organ music and took turns reading our scriptures with Ryan’s iTouch.

The highlights of the church are the Christus and 12 apostles, sculpted by the great Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen. This Christus has been duplicated for LDS visitor’s centers around the world. Lining the pews on either side are the statues of the 12 apostles. They are breathtaking. The LDS church will be reproducing the 12 apostle statues along with the Christus for the ROME Temple Visitors Center. It was very cool seeing the originals in person. In our Rick Steves book it says…”Mormons will recognize this statue…” Yes, indeed.