Castles, Towers & Brown Sauce
Trip Start
Unknown
1
100
109
Trip End
Ongoing
Copenhagen, Zealand, Denmark
Friday, October 29, 2010
From the castle I walked around the city centre and met up with Karin at the Round Tower. As we walked in Karin spoke to the young guy at the counter, in Danish of course, and then walked off without paying and I just stood there as I was wrestling through my bag trying find my wallet and I’m like "But, we didn’t . . ." and Karin just motioned for me to go so I went and asked her, “What did you say?” I thought she had used her stunning good looks and smile to get us in for free but she knows a guy who also works there and called to ask if we could get in for free and he said sure and Karin was actually offering the guy left over banana cake, so she was still working for it a little. This tower is really unique in that to get to the top there is a flat spiral walkway for most of the way. The man who designed it wanted you to be able to take a horse and cart up and down if you so wished. The views over Copenhagen are really pretty, there is industrial sights far out in the distance but as it was overcast you could barely see them. There are numerous towers that poke up and dominant the landscape as most buildings are no more than four stories high. Karin and I both agreed that the view was extra special because it was free.
We then walked around the city going down a pretty street that has a canal running through it that has old boats parked along the sides and the buildings are all different bright colours. We then walked along the main channel and Karin pointed out the new Opera house which she explained some of the people have not warmed to very well. I was expecting a Fed Square type disaster (an ugly modern building in the beautiful old centre of Melbourne) but it actually looked quite good in my opinion. We kept walking to where the Little Mermaid statue normally is but at the moment is at some expo in Asia somewhere. As we were approaching the site we could see bright lights and it wasn’t until we were in front of it we could see it was giant screen with an image of the statue with the words on it 'video stopped’. At first I think we both thought they had replaced it with a video of the statue as it would have been if it were there but then I realised it was a webcam supposed to give a live stream of where the statue is now, either way it was a little weird. We kept walking to a place called Kastellet which is a man-made fort island that has the oldest still operational military base in Europe. There are quite a number of things that are the oldest in Europe here in Denmark. We didn’t get that far when we asked to halt by a soldier who informed us the place was closing and that we had to make our way to the nearest exit. From there we headed back to Karin’s apartment.
For dinner Karin was going to make me a traditional Danish meal. I was super excited, Karin was less so as she thought it was a boring dish but it had a special brown sauce that intrigued me. Traditional it was made with minced beef but could be done with steaks if you wished but I wanted traditional so chose the mince. I’m now going to proceed to record what she did so I can try and recreate it as it was super easy and the absolute bomb, it was soooo good, my mouth is watering a little just recalling the taste. Okay so first thing was to fry up the onions and then when they were done put them aside as a side dish. Shape the mince into like a thick hamburger with nothing, just the meat, this is where Karin thinks it’s boring but the simplicity was right up my alley. Cook the meat in the same pan the onions were in. Then when the meat is ready take it out of the pan and pour in cream into the pan and add in some brown colouring stuff (it doesn’t have to be brown Karin just thinks white sauce is not right). Then you have to add the secret ingredient which I will remember and I will keep it a secret as it comes from Karin’s grandmother so I feel very honored to being let in on the secret. So that’s it, served it up with veggies and you’re done – oh man I am so hungry now.
After dinner AK came over and it was so great to see her again, she was even taller than I remembered. We then tried to go out for a drink but every place we went to was over crowded and really noisy. We eventually found a place that was still noisy but at least we could get somewhere to sit. I had my first Danish beer and really liked it. Whenever I am with these two girls I always end up laughing and even though we were all so tired we still had a great laugh.
