Canal touring through urban Denmark and Sweden

Goteborg reflected

We toured three cities: Copenhagan in Denmark; Malmo and (shown in photos above and below) Goteborg, Sweden. These tours are inexpensive, multi-lingual, take about an hour and are the best way to see the architecture and layout of these seaside cities, even when, as in Goteborg the weather is cold and rainy. They just pass out plastic ponchos or blankets like this one Miranda is displaying. Each of the tours, we found, features gliding under bridges built so close to the water's surface passengers are required to hunch over in their seats or even sit on the floor. These low bridges all seemed to be called "Cheese Grater" or "Head banger."

Danish day care scene

Tivoli Gardens

I was thrilled to find that Tivoli Gardens is directly across from the Central Train station and headed there from the airport as my first tourist stop.

Did you know it's an amusement park? I was thinking flowers and trees in bud and instead found this old-world carnival. Tivoli inspired Disney but is no match for its high-powered rides, costumed characters and size. Disney seems to have inspired Tivoli officials about pricing, however.

Miranda insisted on going into the park because she'd never been on a roller coaster. I thought I'd done my duty with the boys on hellish rides but how could I say no to someone seeking a new experience? The Demon has two loops and a set up where your feet hang down dangling from the seat, but it's pretty tame compared to the amusement parks my kids led me to. So I was fairly complacent as Miranda howled and clutched at the safety harness.

Bikes are popular way of getting around Copenhagen

People leave their bikes anywhere, in front of restaurants or work, unlocked or with wheel locks only, without fear of thefts. For a 20 kroner (about $4) deposit you can take a bike from racks around the city, get where you want to go, then leave the bike and get your money back.

Hans Christian Anderson's lesson on love

Hans Christian Anderson is everywhere in Copenhagen from this statue in front of City Hall (He's gazing at Tivoli Gardens across the say) and this manhole cover

Miranda bought a book while here that included the original Hans Christian Anderson story of the The Little Mermaid and reading this has made me resolve to look at all his work in the original again.

His version is a LOT different from that Walt Disney remake.

In the original, the beautiful Mermaid falls in love with a handsome prince on her 15th birthday, the time mermaids are allowed their first trip above the water. She ends up saving the prince from a shipwreck, bringing him to dry land and then hiding her fishiness behind a rock as she watches him slowly come back to consciousness. A young girl finds him lying on the ground and helps him.

She is now so utterly in love she makes a bargain with a seawitch worse than the deal Faust got from the devil. The monster agrees to transform her from a fish to a beautiful woman but with some catches. First the witch wants her voice -- not in the cute gone-mute way of the Disney movie -- and so hacks out her tongue. And the legs the mermaid gets are like two swords cutting into her at every step. And if she loses the gamble -- then on the day after the prince marries she will die and her immortal soul will wither.

After all this, the prince decides he just wants to be friends and he marries the girl who found him on the ground. Some kind of air-angels take pity on the Mermaid as she is about to die and turn her into vapor or something so that after 300 years of floating on air currents she can have her soul back.

So, the moral of the real story is: you can give it your all, suffer pain and angst in soul-deadening silence and it will still all be for nothing.

Everyone's a critic

A restauranteur with a place near the spot where the Little Mermaid sits on her rock figured he could do better -- his offering:

Visiting a Danish National Treasure is not as exciting for Danes and for Tourists

There were just two things I really wanted to do when visiting Denmark -- eat a Danish pastry and visit the Little Mermaid statue.

Marlene -- a journalist who stayed at my condo while doing a fellowship in Fort Lauderdale a few years ago -- resisted. It's overrated, she said, it's little, it's boring.

But I could not to to Copenhagen and not see it, so she compiled, not too graciously. She said her revenge will be visiting Albany and forcing me to tour the Egg, the oddly shaped downtown concert hall that I identified as the goofiest symbol of my hometown.