The start of the next day could have been better. Our intent was to visit the National Art Museum, and we studied our map to figure out which bus or buses would get us there the quickest. We found a route that headed northward, parallel to the shoreline and in the direction of Amalienborg, but turned left and inland before getting there, with an apparent stop near the museum. We boarded this bus and headed north, but at the point where it was supposed to turn left, it went straight instead. Continuing northward, we passed between Amalienborg and the Marble Church, and continued straight. Totally confused, we thought there might be something wrong with the expected route (like maybe road construction), and that maybe the bus was going to turn left later instead. The bus eventually did turn, but it turned right, which had us headed in the opposite of our desired direction. We hit the stop button and got off at the next bus stop to reconnoiter.

The street we were on, as it turned out, was a viable alternate route to the museum, but only if the bus had turned left instead of right. We scratched our heads and moved across the street, hoping that the next bus headed in the opposite direction would take the alternate route to the museum. We waited a few minutes and eventually thought to look at this alternate route. We immediately noticed two unobtrusive wooden barricades which were blocking both of the lanes of the alternate route. Then we looked for the scale of miles on the map and calculated that the museum was less than a mile away along this alternate route. Deciding that the hypothetical bus would be reluctant to run over the barricades, we struck out for the museum on foot.

Beyond the barricades the street was eerily deserted. There were no cars, and no examples of human life besides ourselves. Eventually we noticed a prominent, temporary-looking sign at the curbside that said simply "6 km". After an additional hundred yards or so a light bulb went on in our heads, and we unveiled a theory to each other that some sort of long-distance (or at least 6 km) footrace was about to take place along this route. This would explain the absence of cars (and buses). It didn’t explain the absence of people, but maybe this sort of thing isn’t much of a spectator sport in Denmark. Our theory would have to be put to the test later, though, as we shortly reached the museum.

On entering the museum (known locally as the Statens Museum for Kunst), we were to find access to a collection of beautiful artistic creations, a collection begun centuries earlier by the Danish royal family. And also access to our second disappointment of the morning: the museum is split into two principal divisions, one for the older masterpieces, and another for the newer ones, and for reasons we didn’t quite understand, the older section was closed. However, we didn’t notice any reduction in the entrance fee, and under other circumstances we may have left in a huff, grumbling about being charged full price for half a museum. But entry to the museum was already included in our Copenhagen Cards, so the net result was that we wouldn’t see some things we would like to have seen, but we also wouldn’t spend as much time in the museum as we otherwise might, giving us more time to go do something else. So we stayed for a while and looked at the half-museum that was open.

In this half of the museum we weren’t to see anything older than the middle of the 19th Century. Included in the collection were some works by artists from other countries, some of whom were familiar to us.


Also included were works by Danish artists (actually, rather a lot of works by Danish artists), none of whose names rang any bells with us (perhaps Danish artists had been unjustly neglected in most of the other museums we’d visited). We found many of the works to be attractive and/or otherwise interesting.


There were also a few works whose sources or subjects we weren’t able to immediately record (they were no doubt posted, but we figured incorrectly that we’d be able to look them up later).


We left the museum and immediately found confirmation of the theory we’d formulated earlier, as people wearing numbers were running past us on the streets that had been purged of motor vehicles.

We threaded our way through a gap in the steady stream of runners and headed toward the waterfront, in search of lunch. We passed through Amalienborg and turned right, keeping an eye out for anything appetizing. We eventually found some food places, but they were fabulously expensive, even by Copenhagen standards. This is because we were approaching the Nyhavn area, which is a mecca for tourists (more on this place later). But among the pricey establishments and the vendors of souvenirs, we found carts that were selling less expensive fare, such as sausages and pizza.

We filled up and headed back toward Amalienborg. We were interested in visiting a Medical History Museum we’d seen from the bus earlier, located a little to the north of Amalienborg. This museum, called the Medical Museion, is also a research unit of the University of Copenhagen, and was founded in 1907. Part of it occupies the former Royal Academy of Surgeons, and includes the operating theater that was commonly used for instructional dissections (often of condemned criminals, fresh from the gallows) in the early 19th Century. The museum is best seen through a guided tour – tours are given on a regular schedule, and are occasionally in English. We were lucky enough to join such a tour, but had to leave most of our belongings in a locker for its duration (lest we try to smuggle out a bone saw or something, I guess). Our tour guide was a friendly and knowledgeable young woman who told us a great deal about the facility and showed us many of the locations and frightening-looking instruments that were once used for treatments there. We weren’t able to get much in the way of photos until the end of the tour.


Also at the end of the tour was a comical display of many useful medicines, several of which looked like they could save their users a great deal of time and money.


After the tour we talked with our tour guide for several minutes – she was very interested in things American, and we learned much about living in Copenhagen at the same time. Among other things, we learned why bicycles and public transit are in such common use by the natives. It seems taxes on automobile ownership are extremely high, sometimes exceeding the cost of the car itself. This makes the case for alternatives very persuasive.

We eventually took our leave of the young lady and headed back towards Nyhavn. Earlier we had noted that Nyhavn is a common departure point for boat tours of the harbor, and such a tour seemed like it would be both fun and educational. As the crowd levels and the prices on the restaurant menus went up, we knew we were getting closer, and finally we arrived at the canal that was our destination.