Today is a travel day, and we need to get an early morning start. It turns out that the only decent breakfast we could find this morning is in Christiania, so we went back there one last time. The Moon Fisher is closed on Mondays, so we ended up at a more generic place closer to Pusher Street.

We met a guy named Pierre, who chastised us for not seeing anything else in Copenhagen. We chastised ourselves a little bit, as we’d wanted to dash to the Little Mermaid and back before our train left, but it was not to be.

Two relaxing days in Christiania was what we needed, and hysterically scampering around the city did not appeal to us at this point. One day we will come back to this city for a much more extended and proper visit.

From what we saw in Copenhagen, the Danes are the most bike-happy people we’ve ever met. We’d already read about how taxes, registration fees, and insurance make car ownership obscenely expensive. What we found was a city overrun with bicycles of all shapes and sizes, and a street system that gives the bicycles a lot of space.

Most major streets have two curbs on each side: one to separate the motorized lane from the bike lane, and one to separate the bike lane from the sidewalk. Bicycles and pedestrians are given generous amounts of space on both sides of the street.

Our biggest problem with traffic was that the cars were all driven very aggressively, but then we found this to be the case all over Europe. It seems that the rich and arrogant drive that way everywhere, and in Denmark the rich and arrogant are the only people who can afford to drive at all.

After our breakfast in Christiania, Pierre rode the bus with us to the train station, occasionally puffing on a bowl of cannabis as he went. We bid a fond farewell to Pierre, Christiania, and Copenhagen from the train station; and we boarded a train back to Hamburg.

Today we’re retracing our steps on a train/ferry trip from Copenhagen back to Hamburg. This is the first day of a two-day trip from Copenhagen to Haarlem, Holland. Hamburg is a “been there, done that” kind of destination, so we pressed on to Bremen.

Just as Hamburg merited a whistle stop for its place in Beatles history, Bremen merited a whistle stop for its place in Obbie’s family history. In 1909, the ship carrying Obbie’s great-grandmother and her two small children – one of them was his grandmother – sailed for New York from Bremen. They were catching up with her husband who had already gone to America some time before.

So we wanted to go to where emigrants boarded ships for America in the early 20th century. At the tourist information office outside the station (which, like Hamburg, was a very crazy station), we learned that the docks are actually at a place called Bremerhaven, about 50 km to the north. It would cost us another day to make that trip, so it will have to wait until we come back.

We got booked into a fairly decent room about a 10-minute walk from the station for 110 marks (about $50) including breakfast. We took a walk around the neighborhood and found some decent Chinese food.

On the way back we stumbled onto a cyber cafe where they said we could plug in. We uploaded a lot of stuff that was prepared earlier; and the good, fast connection gave us a chance to do some maintenance which should exorcise the connection demons once and for all.