Holla from Copenhagen!

Welcome to my first blog post ever! I have no idea how this works but we will see how we go. The blog title is a reference to a scene from an episode of The Big Bang Theory. Anyone who is up to date with the show will hopefully get the joke. This first post will be really long but I will try to keep it succinct. It will be a really general intro to Copenhagen.

After 30 hours travelling time I finally arrived at my destination here in Copenhagen, Denmark. It was -6C when I arrived so quite a rude awakening. My first impressions of the city are that it is very clean, and with very few tall buildings. It turns out the Danes have a dislike for anything approaching a skyscraper. The architecture is very traditional. I later learned that the whole city was rebuilt in the late 1800s after Nelson bombarded it so the building styles reflect that era. There are also lots of churches around but I don’t think many of them are regularly used.

Food

Food here is quite expensive, a Big Mac combo will set you back over NZ$15 and that is just for a regular sized one. Other fast food outlets are equally expensive; I found a Domino’s Pizza the other day and they were charging $30 for a large pizza, which is three times what I have paid in NZ. Supermarkets prices vary from chain to chain but are either the same or more expensive than in NZ. Some budget chains are a little bit cheaper. Meat is particularly expensive, often going for around $20 a kg for basic stuff and over $40 for more premium cuts. That said you can score some sweet deals if you shop around.  I found some quite healthy frozen pizzas for $2.50 each the other day.

There are so many supermarket chains here. I have counted 11 so far and I am not sure that’s all of them. They range from really basic and poorly merchandised (Netto, Aldi as examples) through to more premium chains that have a focus on organic food (Irma, Super Brugsen). The ones I have found so far are: Netto, Aldi, Rema 1000, Lidl, Bilka, Super Brugsen, Irma, Fotex, Kvickly, Fakta, and Super Best. I prefer the last one most of all.

In addition there are lots of little Turkish food stores and so on scattered around the city with more specialized goods.

Most fruits and veges are pre-packed in the main supermarkets so if you just want a couple of individual bits you have to go to the little food stores around the place.

Beer

Beer is so ridiculously cheap here. It ranges from 50c a bottle for the cheap stuff to $2 for the middle of the range ones put out by Carlsberg Breweries. You can get it cheaper if you buy it on special. When you buy it, you get charged a small fee of 25c a bottle/can that you get back when you bring the empties back to the supermarket for recycling. You can use the refund towards your next purchase of beer/food or ask for cash back. They have special machines where you put the bottle/can into it, the machine scans the item and works out how much to give you back then you push a button when you are done and take the receipt to the checkout.

Transport

The public transport network is awesome. You can take the train, bus or subway and they run very regularly. You can expect to wait 2-5 minutes during rush hour, up to about 20 minutes at night. What is even better is that there is a common ticket system between the three networks so you can just buy one ticket and use it on any of the networks. Trains also service most of the main towns and cities in Denmark so you can get around the country very easily. The one interesting thing about the subway is that it is fully automated, no driver at all.

The network is divided into zones with zone 1 being the City Centre and zone 8 being the very outskirts of town. You have to buy a ticket that will take you the right number of zones to get to your final destination. The cost increases the more zones you buy (from $5 to $25). Conductors run ticket spot checks on the train and subway, and will fine you $180 of you don’t have one at all or if your ticket is not the right number of zones. I see them dishing out fines all the time.

The other way to get around town that is super popular is by bike. They are everywhere, filling bike racks, in front of shops, on the roads. Bikes have priority over all other traffic and there are special bike lanes on nearly every road. They also have their own system of rules for signaling and so on.  There are bike shops everywhere and new ones are really expensive but you can pick up second hand one for reasonable prices.

Cars are around but not in such great numbers. I read that buying a car here is excruciatingly expensive as the government charges a 200% import tax or something crazy like that.

I will finish on that. Rest assured my future posts will, hopefully, be shorter!!!