26 Oct 2000
Fredericksberg Castle

No, you're not seeing double. Fredericksberg Castle is not the same as Fredericksborg Castle. The one we already wrote about is out A large expanse of lawn dotted with yellow leaves from the surrounding autumn trees Park near the castle of town and surrounded by a moat. That's spelled with an o. Fredericksberg Castle is about twenty blocks from our hotel. Fredericksberg is a neighborhood that never joined up with expanding Copenhagen.

Going away from the tourist district, we found ourselves in a residential area. There were fewer hotels and more apartment houses. And small groceries and bakeries; one market displayed all kinds of fish and hare and pheasant and some meats we couldn't guess. And babies and toddlers everywhere. Always plenty of bicycles. The bicycles in Copenhagen have traffic jams, lining up at traffic lights with some turning right, some left, some going straight. Everyone coordinates, and they all whizz off in the right directions. A large lake in the foreground, surrounded by paths and green lawn, with geese and other birds and young boys running around Boys and geese

Fredericksberg Castle is backed up by a most lovely park -- one that Frederick Law Olmsted would have admired. We entered through a large stone gate, and then headed towards the large winding lake, criss-crossed with bridges and full of waterfowl. We followed a group of four tow-headed boys through the park; they enjoyed chasing the geese. The trees were huge and beautiful, and the wet autumn leaves speckled the ground, glistening in a few flashes of sunshine.

We heard a faint calling sound like a big bird, and followed it as it grew louder. We could locate it pretty accurately -- up a long hill towards the side of the castle and behind a row of high hedges. The calls were getting quite loud. What could it be? We figured out the answer about the same time we saw the source of the sound. The Copenhagen Zoo is located in one corner of the A three story tan stone castle with a light blue roof and the Danish flag flying high above the center, with terraces leading down to a long sloping lawn flanked by trees Fredericksberg Castle Fredericksberg park, and we were approaching the large compound with howler monkeys!

Then we remembered where we had heard of Fredericksberg Castle previously -- it is the home of the Danish Military Academy, and some of our Danish Reserve Officer friends had mentioned it. The castle is beautifully situated on a hill with a row of two-hundred-year-old linden trees stretching down to the park and lakes.

On a street next to the city museum there was a display of odd city structures from the last hundred years or so, including posts to tie up carriages, pumps, park benches, and, most unusual, a bunch of fire hydrants, with different sculptured decorations on each one.

After lunch the rain stopped again, so we went to a bookstore which had a Built in the shape of a truncated cylinder with a slanting roof and large zig zag lines, with subordinate parts of the structure in dark brown bracing up the cylinder, the planetarium is a commanding Copenhagen landmark Tycho Brahe Planetarium very nice, somewhat academic collection of English language books; we bought some and wrote others down on our list for later. Included amoung our haul was a Danish novel which looks intriguing: it was written in 1928, has been translated by a professor in Iowa, was banned by the Nazis and later by the British. The English language fiction section had special rather large sections for Canadian, Australian, British and Indian fiction.

We never did take a picture of Tivoli Gardens (closed for the winter). The special flavor of Copenhagen comes from the neighborhoods, the intriguing aromas from food stalls, the sidewalk displays of flowers and fruits in front of their stores, the chaotic arrays of parked bicycles. But most charming of all are the Danes themselves: pleasant, confident, cheerful, patriotic and optimistic. Copenhagen is in no way spectacular, but it gives you a warm, comfortable feeling.