Rådhus

On Saturday Jared was able to come with us for our sight-seeing and we decided to have the first stop be the Rådhus (Copenhagen's City Hall). Jared was most interested in seeing Jens Olsen's world clock which tells local, solar time, sidereal time, sunrise, sunset, pole migrations, planet revolutions, the gregorian calendar, and even changing holidays such as Easter.

I thought that this stained glass window of the city's crest was pretty cool...

The highlight of the trip for me was climbing the clock tower which is 105m high and 300 steps! Some of those spiral staircases were so tight I was a bit dizzy by the time we reached the top.

Here is some of the clock tower mechanism. I'm not sure if this was keeping time on the clock or in charge of ringing the bells--probably the clock I guess.
Here's the view from the top--well, in one direction anyway! From the other side of the tower there was a view of Tivoli and the rest of the downtown area.

Indoor Adventures

Our shopping day was sooo windy and cold that we were forced indoors the next day...

The first stop of the day was Vor Frelsers Kirke (Church of Our Savior). This 300 year old Baroque church has an elegant twisted spire and amazing Botzen Brothers organ (1698) inside.
We were originally drawn to the church by the chance of climbing the spire, but found that it is closed during the winter months. It was well worth the visit though with lots of marble statues, an elaborate baptistry and beautiful carving. Even the pew boxes were interesting with their little numbered doors.

After a side trip to the mall we headed to the Zoological Museum next door to Jared's building. The most interesting part of the museum was their compulsion include nisse as part of Denmark's natural history. They even pieced together a skeleton of one of the little elves!

Here are some of the nisse in their "natural habitats"! They also had them interspersed throughout all of the displays including a cave man nisse with the wooly mammoth--pretty funny!

Here's Rachel posing with a seal! It was a great day made even better by the fact that Ruby was sooo good and slept much of the day away. (I think she was exhausted from all the cold weather the day before.)

Strøget

My good friend and Wheaton roommate, Rachel Arriola came to visit us for a week before Christmas. On our first sightseeing day we went to see Strøget, the famous walking street shopping area. Everything was decorated and lots of people were busy doing last minute Christmas shopping!

While Ruby and I were in Magasin (Denmark's biggest department store) looking for a bathroom for an emergency diaper change, Rachel was serenaded by this marching band. Too bad we missed it!

Ruby's Robe

Ruby's Aunt Amy knitted this adorable robe for her when she was born. It's still pretty roomy on her, but I couldn't resist trying it on for size recently-too cute!!

Tivoli Sausages!

Two weeks before Christmas we went to Tivoli for the second time--this time with Julie and Stefan. Julie is Jared's coworker and Stefan is her boyfriend. Since I've already shown you several pictures of Tivoli I'll just leave you with this shot of us stuffing our faces with delectable Tivoli sausages--yummy! Of course we also saved room for æbleskiver and glögg!