cheeky weekend

one of the nicer things about being based in london is how scandinavia is a short hop away. the mister surprised with a spontaneous 48 hour trip to copenhagen and having last been in summer 2006, i jumped at the chance to visit in winter. also, summer 2006 was a special time just before starting freshman year. a month before i met the mister, and a year before we started going out. in a funny way, almost spent third year of law school on exchange in copenhagen but forfeited it to hold out for a LLM place at NYU, then ended up on exchange in stockholm in final year. funny how things work out :)

however, R and L, our friends who did go on exchange to copenhagen, and M, my danish flatmate from stockholm were kind to share their respective copenhagen lists. having learnt the importance of data triangulation (haha) during a research paper last year, where these three precious sources overlapped was where we wanted to be. and thanks to their generosity, it felt like we max-ed out the city in the short time we'd there. in addition to the restaurants the mister booked months ago (he's the type who has restaurant reservations locked in before booking the flights...) we really enjoyed the canal tour from nyhavn. it even took us to the little mermaid! funny story there - it's possibly the most disappointing statue on earth. remember being underwhelmed when we saw it in 2006 and refused to make a special trip all the way this time, much to the mister's chargrin. but i got the last laugh when our little boat pulled up alongside it and we got to take in the sight of the little mermaid, and the disappointed faces of the hordes of tourists who were on the bank. felt particularly sorry for the japanese troupe with their telephoto lens. no amount of zooming in could make the little mermaid any more impressive... had lots of coffee, fresh danish pastries and the most delicious hot dog by the round tower. 

we'd dinner at era*ora by the canals and were impressed by the food and service. el*vis, the sicillian waiter (yet another one!) was a complete charmer and had the driest wit. he first arrived in copenhagen 10 years ago as a languages student and speaks italian, danish, english, portugese and spanish. wertttt... he had us in fits of laughter through the night and told us at the end that we were only allowed to have salad the next day. and that's when it hit us that we went straight from a 3h degustation lunch to a 3h degustation dinner. oops. so that was saturday! 

and on sunday we explored some neighbourhoods before going to on the canal tour, a christmas market, another christmas market, christmas shopping (helloo georg jensen!) and uhh the tivoli christmas market. we also didn't stick to our salad promise, eating and drinking our way through the markets. double ooops.