Welcome to Copenhagen... home of Hans Christian Andersen and of course yummy danishes. Copenhagen ended up being the perfect meeting place for our travel group. Jila and Aaron were out on a short stint in Oslo and Denmark is to the north of Germany...so we said Copenhagen why not.


I worked with Jila (aka jj chica) and Aaron out at Microsoft and was really looking forward to seeing them since they are out of the Seattle office and I hadn't seen them since I left Microsoft.







After Jila and Aaron arrived by ferry, which was apparently quite the experience, we spent a little while swapping what I call our European adjustment stories also known as our nutty European adventures. After catching up it was time to hit the streets or in our case the stores. I was a little shopping deprived and we were actually able to make it into a store during opening hours, that would be anytime before 5 pm.





We did manage to get some sight seeing in and this picture is of a fountain is on the royal castle grounds. Copenhagen, from what we saw of it, is a very interesting city, it has a pretty large population but the buildings have a height restriction limit, so a small town feel is kept...a cute, quaint and old seaside town is probably the best description of this city.







...and of course I had to see the statue of the Little Mermaid, I'm a pretty big fan of this fairy tale since the main character's name is Arial (a favorite name)...I'm not sure how long the statue has been out there but it just sits there quietly in the harbor. We were actually just annoyed with the little girl that was sitting on the rock slurping down her ice cream pop...you know causing photo op interference.




These pictures, including the banner up above, were taken at the Tivoli Gardens, my favorite place on the trip, well it's an amusement park and I'm pretty easily amused. Supposedly Walt Disney got the idea of building Disneyland from the Gardens. The park is in the middle of the city center and within it there are a bunch of restaurants, souvenir shops, games and rides. At midnight they shoot off fireworks and we finished the night off by dancing to some swing music...we had to be careful though because there were of course those individuals who while in their attempt to dance were putting others in harms way of losing life and limb, the usual arms flailing, legs kicking in every direction.

It was once again another great European trip and was really glad that I got make it with some good buddies.