Skyr and Copenhagen

Monday, August 6th and we're off to Europe again. Our friend Mary Kay took us to the Humphrey Terminal (now Terminal 2), and from there we took the 7:30 p.m. Icelandair flight to Reykjavik. The flight was uneventful except for one annoyance. I have never before been on a transatlantic flight where dinner wasn't provided gratis. We paid around $6 apiece for a large ham-and-cheese baguette sandwich, warmed up. Just before landing, we were provided with a free cup of berry-flavored skyr, which is something like yogurt. They had to hand out slips explaining it:

Skyr - for over a thousand years
Skyr (pronounced skeer) is a dairy product that is unique to Iceland. It is a deliciously healthy snack that has been a large part of the Icelandic diet since the first settlers brought it with them around the year 1000, as mentioned in the Icelandic Sagas.
Skyr is a creamy delicacy that is both fat-free and protein-rich, giving you a great sense of fullness. A convenient and healthy food that is loved by both Icelanders and visitors alike.
We hope you enjoy it,
Icelandair and Icelandic Dairy Farmers

So now I've had skyr and you probably haven't. You'll just have to settle for yogurt. I must admit that if I hadn't been told it was skyr, I'd have thought it was yogurt.

We had about a seven-hour layover in Keflavik Airport: "The Best Airport in Europe," according to one survey, as signs there proudly proclaim. It is certainly more pleasant than I remember it to have been on our earlier, shorter visits. We could have reserved the 8:45 flight to Copenhagen, instead of the 1:15 flight, but the price was substantially higher. Certainly, seven hours at Keflavik is very much preferable to the six hours plus that I once spent at the airport in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, on hard plastic chairs, with no food.

We did have food at Keflavik, first some banana bread with coffee at a coffee place called Kaffitar. Later we had open-faced sandwiches for lunch at Nord, a self-styled "Health-Seafood Bar": Mary Joy had gravlax and hard-boiled egg, while I had "deep-sea shrimp and hard-boiled egg. Not bad, not great, a little pricey. In other words, airport food.

We caught our 1:15 plane, and less than three hours later we were in Denmark, a place where neither I nor Mary Joy has ever been before. We caught one of the frequent trains downtown and came out of the Central Station across from the famous Tivoli Gardens amusement park. We walked the few blocks to our hotel, checked in, and then walked to a restaurant we had found ranked number two of all the city's restaurants on Tripadvisor: Brasserie Degas. This is, as someone pointed out, a restaurant with Danish atmosphere but very French food. There Mary Joy and I celebrated our fourteenth wedding anniversary with a very nice meal. She had fried duck breast with various styles of potato, while I had sirloin steak in a wine sauce, along with fancily prepared vegetables. The waiter (a Frenchman from Albi) knocked Mary Joy's champagne glass over onto her duck, so he brought her a new duck and brought us two more glasses of champagne each. The dessert, a collection of different little desserts, was one of the best desserts I ever had. And so to bed.