On Wednesday, July 15, 2015, we were picked up at our house at 11:55 a.m. by Fred, the very courteous and capable driver for a company recommended by Mary Joy's brother. We have been leery of taking taxis to the airport since the time that one had simply not shown up, despite repeated reassurances, when we called, that he was "on his way." We drove ourselves, parked in MSP's pricey long-term parking, and managed to catch our plane.But Fred was actually a little early, with his luxury SUV, and though we paid a little more, we got to the airport. When we were getting into line for security, we were told that since our boarding passes said "TSA PRE-CHK," we could get into a different line altogether, where, wonder of wonders, there was no such thing as taking off your shoes or belt, or pulling out your laptop or 3-1-1 baggie for inspection, or going through the full-body scan. Delta had said to be at the airport three hours ahead of an international flight, but we were through security in less than fifteen minutes, so, as planned, we had lunch at the French Meadow Bakery.
Our plane was an Airbus A-300, with cramped seats in a 2-4-2 configuration, the two aisles being barely wide enough for one person to walk down. The overhead wasn't big enough for my standard-sized (according to Delta's own website) carry-on to fit end-on, so I had to put it in sideways. Our seats were right next to the toilet--one extra source of noise working against our plan to sleep on this flight. But I have never been able to sleep on a plane, and this trip was no exception, though I tried, using the earplugs and mask that Delta gave us. Mary Joy, as usual, had better success, once we had our meal (called "lunch," though it was around 4 p.m. CDT) of chicken stuffed with broccoli, salad, bread, cheese, crackers and a brownie. One loud guy in line for the WC told the others in line that he had been on a tour where the bus had made a restroom stop at an outbuilding with a single toilet. As the others had gone in, one by one, he had conducted a scientific experiment, timing each visit. He said that the men usually took 70 or 80 seconds, but the women, on average, took 2.3 times as long. Well, travel is supposed to be educational.
We landed in Amsterdam about 20 minutes early and had to walk what seemed like forever in order to get to passport control, then another ten minutes to our gate, D74. Amsterdam Schiphol is a big airport. They gate-checked our main, large carry-ons, because the flight was full and the plane was small. We travel with bags that we can normally carry on--each of us with one full-sized carry-on in the overhead bin and one daypack under the seat in front. We don't usually check luggage except for the European budget airlines, like EasyJet or Ryanair, which are tight on luggage.
The KLM flight to Copenhagen left on time. An oddity of airline pricing, but not unusual: it would have cost us substantially more to take our flight to Amsterdam without going onwards than it is costing us to take that flight and then go on to Copenhagen. Which is why we were going on to Copenhagen.
We were astonished when, on this one-hour flight, the flight attendants handed out little boxes with egg salad sandwiches! Very good egg salad sandwiches on dark bread. That is much more than we got from Icelandair on the flight from Minneapolis to Reykjavik three years ago! The boxes informed us that the bread was organic, and the following:
Have a nice day
Ready to enjoy Rondeel chicken/egg, products with a unique story? At Rondeel they care for their chickens. They care for the environment and for their health. The farms meet the natural requirements of chickens. The chickens have access to night quarters, day quarters and a wooded area. Rondeel was therefore awarded 3 better life stars by the Dutch society for the protection of animals.
We care for our chickens
The farmers take really good care of their chickens. They make sure they have a nice day every single day. Transparency is a key feature, which means that the farms are open to visitors on a daily basis. So visit one of our farms or go to the webcam via the website and see for yourself how they live the good life. www.rondeeleieren.nl/webcam
We had a long layover at Copenhagen, so we went into the city. First, we had to stow our bags. There are baggage lockers in one of the parking ramps across from Terminal 2, not a long walk from Terminal 3, where we had come in. There are large lockers and (many more) small lockers. We needed a large locker. You hold the locker shut until it clicks and a big green dot turns red. Then a computer screen on the wall beeps at you, so you rush over to see that it shows the number of your locker and asks you for payment, either in kroner coins (Denmark isn't on the euro) or by credit card. The large lockers cost 75 kroner (about $12.50--not cheap); the small ones 50). As on our last Copenhagen layover, three years ago, when we stayed overnight and flew out in the morning, we didn't bother getting any Danish money, but relied entirely on our Visa card. The first locker we tried wouldn't click over from green to red. With the second, we tried twice unsuccessfully to get it to accept our card: it would think awhile, then give up and pop our locker back open. If we couldn't store our luggage, we would have to sit around at the airport for seven-and-a-half hours! Meanwhile, someone else was having a worse problem. The way you retrieve your luggage is that when you come back from wherever you've been, you stick the same card into the machine and your locker pops open. Theoretically, at least. This other guy kept sticking his card in, but his locker wouldn't open. So he flagged down one of the parking ramp employees and was soon speaking Danish with a voice from the machine. Our third try with our Visa card was a success, however, so we didn't stay to see if the voice could get the locker open (so far, it didn't seem to be working out).
We went back to Terminal 3, where the train and Metro stations are. We had already bought our Metro tickets from a ticket machine for 36 kroner (about six dollars) apiece, so we got aboard the next train. For most of the day, the airport Metro line (M2) runs trains everY four minutes. You can also take a railroad train downtown to the Central station, which we had done in 2012. Which you choose depends on where you are going: three years ago, our hotel was near the railway station and Tivoli Gardens; now we were heading for the waterfront.
We took the Metro for eight stops, to Kongens Nytorv. It took about fifteen minutes. From there it was a short walk to Nyhavn. Nyhavn is a little harbor with sailing ships and tour boats, faced by cute, pastel-colored old buildings fronted by millions of sidewalk cafes frequented by billions of humans. Mary Joy had, based on reviews, picked a restaurant there for lunch. We had an hour before it opened at 11:30. I hadn't done any research on things to see in Copenhagen, so we wandered around, looking for the Amalienborg Palace. We knew that it was somewhere near the Marble Church, which, after visiting the Garrison Church (beautiful organ!), we soon found. While this impressive, circular, domed building was apparently begun in the eighteenth century, it wasn't finished until 1894, and the interior decoration is very much of that time, except for a wonderful organ, smothered in wooden cherubs, that looks much older. The palace is just down the street, four buildings on four sides of a square, at the center of which is a greened bronze equestrian statue of an early-eighteenth-century Danish king, dressed as a Roman. Each of the doors of the palace was flanked by two sentry boxes. Near two of those boxes, on the northeastern and northwestern blocks, stood one Guardsman apiece, dressed in Napoleonic--era blue uniforms and tall, black bearskin hats and carrying submachineguns. While the British queen's guards are known for their imperturbability in the face of tourist provocation, the Amalienborg guard on the northwest block at one point marched down to another guardhouse to shoo away some kids who were playing with it. If you got too close to him while taking his picture, he would shake his finger at you.
We then continued down the street to a nice park on the waterfront, right across from the modern opera house. We went looking for the Little Mermaid statue, but gave up when it became clear that it would be too far away, on the other side of the big Kastellet fortress. So we went to lunch.
Told og Snaps is a Victorian-looking restaurant several steps down from the street. As you go in the door and down more steps you are met immediately by the large, wooden bar. The walls of the rest of the room are covered by photograph portraits of Danish royalty, who no doubt were alive a century ago, or maybe a century-and-a quarter ago, but who are presumably now defunct. The restaurant serves only smoerrebroed, Danish open-faced sandwiches, along with beverages. Their specialty drink is the eponymous "snaps," which, I assume is cognate to the German "schnapps," i.e., a flavored liqueur. We decided that in our situation it would be too dangerous to try one of their house versions. I had a local India pale ale, Mary Joy had water and we both had smoerrebroed involving pickled herring, mine with a sauce containing apples and horseradish. Very good. Our waitress, whose father is American, was very helpful. She even told Mary Joy where to find an Ecco store, to replace the sandals she had left on the plane to Amsterdam. Next to us was a couple who talked to each other in Chinese but spoke to the waitress in nearly unaccented American English. It turned out that they had grown up and gone to university in China, but had gotten graduate degrees in the U.S. and now lived in Connecticut. One of their Chinese college classmates had gotten his graduate degree in Denmark and now lived in Norway. They had just been to a reunion he had held for 43 of his classmates there.
We had the only dessert on the menu: berries in sweetened milk, if memory serves, then said goodbye to everyone and headed for the Ecco store on the Stroeget, the pedestrianized shopping street that leads from downtown to Nyhavn--we had walked it three years ago. Mary Joy got her new sandals and we took the Metro back to the airport. At first, we went to the wrong baggage-locker area--I hadn't paid close enough attention to my research sources to realize that there were two, in the two adjoining entrances to the P4 parking ramp. Mary Joy, however, was sharp enough to notice immediately that the locker I thought was ours was numbered "2-6" and not "3-6." We went to the correct machine, inserted our Visa card and, after an anxious moment, the locker popped open with a click.
Since it was now two hours until our flight, EasyJet was accepting luggage checked for it. They no longer do personal check-ins at the airport. You have to check yourselves in from home, online, but, unlike most other airlines, rather than only allowing online check-ins within 24 hours of the flight, EasyJet allows you to check in and print your boarding passes up to 30 days in advance, which I had done back home. When I had bought the tickets, knowing that we were going to check bags, I had paid for that at the same time (cheaper).
After handing in our bags, we went to the desk for VAT refunds, to turn in the form that we had been given at the Ecco store, in order to get a refund of the Value Added Tax, since we were giving these Danish sandals a new home in America. Then we went through security, passed the gauntlet of duty-free temptations and walked to EasyJet's F concourse at the far, far end of the Terminal 2 gates. The way is so far and so desolate that toward the end they start putting remaining walking times on the floor, so you can count down the half-minutes to your arrival in the promised land of concourse F, or even compare whether your walking speed is faster than their prediction.
EasyJet has changed its boarding and seating procedures. It used to be that there was no assigned seating and you grabbed whatever available seat you wanted when you boarded the plane, but EasyJet has now come to the realization that they can charge passengers for choosing particular seats, holding over them the threat that if they allow the airline to choose their seats for them, something dreadful might happen--maybe John Smith in 1A and Jane Smith in 29F. We were willing to risk that rather than pay extra, and while we didn't get our preferred setup (we were aisle-middle instead of middle-window), that was okay.
The one-and-three-quarter hour flight to Basel went well, though nothing on EasyJet is free, not even water, so since Mary Joy was very thirsty, she bought a little bottle of water for two euros.
Toward the end of the flight I noticed that the young woman sitting in front of Mary Joy was sketching a portrait of a young, bearded man across the aisle, who, oblivious to everything, was engrossed in his German news magazine.
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