July 10 Day 27 Copenhagen

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Having stayed up so late the night before either playing in the band or being enthusiastic fans, we were all exhausted so decided to spend the morning “chilling.” We were all just tired and it was so nice to lay around and get a few errands done, work on some photos and read. The follow-up of a successful concert.

After a light lunch, we attended one of the really fine concerts of the Jazz Festival. This one was celebrating a jazz icon, “Master Fatman,” who had died this year. This concert was held in a large garden and there were maybe a couple thousand people gathered to pay tribute to this wonderful musician. We spread out blankets and stood and swayed with the audience. The music was fantastic, the sun was shining. The Danes had their beer. A lot was right with the world. Lots of fun people watching and great music to listen to.

Friends from the band, Niels and his wife, Henrietta, joined us at the concert. And then the six of us went off to get some traditional Spanish tapas at a local restaurant. Great, great food and company. Patti was surprised that the waitress didn’t speak any Danish. She spoke English and Spanish. Lars explained that it wasn’t unusual for some people living in Denmark to not speak any Danish, especially immigrants. Danish is very difficult language to learn. As we have been finding trying to learn how to pronounce some basic words. Lots of silent letters and different shapes with your mouth and guttural sounds than we do in English. HARD!

After dinner, the four of them went on to another concert in the large concert hall. Meanwhile, Dick and Patti attempted to buy a train ticket to get back to the apartment. Buying train tickets turned out to be one of the biggest challenges in a very wonderful public transportation system and company. If you are local, you just download an app with your credit card in it you are good to go. Since we decided not to put our phone on international roaming, but use it only with Wi-Fi, this was not possible. There are no longer many machines that really work to sell train tickets. We did find a couple machines but they would not take credit cards from the UK or the US. They also sell tickets in the local 7-Eleven‘s. We went inside and tried to use the machine. No luck. We asked a couple of different employees to help us. It looks like it was going to work, then it wouldn’t take a credit card, or even in the local currency bills. The employee who had worked hard to help us finally said, “never mind. I’ll pay for it with my own credit card.” And he did and wouldn’t accept payment in return.  He said he was embarrassed that the system worked so poorly for people from other countries. For some reason, although there are many tourists in Copenhagen, buying tickets seems to be incredibly hard. But due to the kindness of strangers, we got our tickets, hopped on the train and found our way back home. 

Time enough for some laundry and to work on the blog. Also, a little social media. Another very nice day.