Svendborg, Denmark to Copenhagen, Denmark
14 July
On the last full day of the trip, Stephannie and I decided to take the train to Copenhagen rather than ride. She still wasn't feeling well, and I was starting to feel sick. We took the train from Svendborg to Odense (which train station we visited for the fourth time this trip). Then, after an hour and a half and some difficulty getting ourselves and our bikes onto another train, we got a train to Copenhagen. Once there, we dumped our bikes in the yard behind the hotel, waited for the rain to clear, and then went out to take a look at the city.
It was nice to be back in a large city, to have a day to re-acclimate myself before going back home to New York. Copenhagen is a city of 3 million people, and seems to have everything that you would expect in a city that size, except for minorities. Our hotel was near the train station, which was on the edge of the central district of Copenhagen, featuring Tivoli Gardens, a huge pedestrian mall, and neon advertising covering beautiful old buildings.
After a little wandering, we got away from the central district into a residential area, and then into a gorgeous old university, with a spectacular library garden. In the garden was a statue of Soren Kierkegaard, memorializing the spot upon which, after a lifetime of alternating limitless light and limitless dark, he determined that anxiety is the "dizziness of freedom."
After our wander, the whole group got back together for our last unspectacular dinner in Denmark, which we had at a tourist restaurant in the train station. The next morning, we took the fifteen minute train ride to the airport. Had we stayed on the train for another fifteen minutes, we would have crossed the newly opened tunnel/bridge to Mamlo, Sweden. Instead, we got off and started the nightmare of international flight all over again, with a brief layover in Zurich, and a late arrival at Newark.