Last weekend, after a few glancing attempts, I finally made it to Rosenborg Slot to check out the castle and inspect the crown jewels

Rosenborg is a funny skinny little castle in the centre of a park in the centre of the city.  It's a bit strange to look down a street and see the thing.  It's really far more royal than the four identical palaces a few blocks away that the Queen beds down in.

This is what I learned on my visit:

• Danes are ridiculously trusting.  I had suspected this due to the baby carriages (complete with occupants) left on footpaths outside shops and cafes while mums are busy inside.  I had it confirmed when the ticket dude told me I needed to check my bag during my visit.  (Apparently it's not to prevent me making off with the jewels - it's to protect the door frames.)  When I didn't have the 20kr ($4) coin for the locker, he offered one.
• The Danish aesthetic has improved.  I'm an enormous fan of the whole minimalist sleek beautiful Scandinavian thing going on around here, but it would seem it was a somewhat recent development.  As far as I can tell, prior design goals aimed for ugly or creepy.  There's a lot of stuff in Rosenborg that gets the double word score, including a significant portion of the crown jewels.
• The Danish royal family has gotten a lot better looking.  The current head of state looked alright before time and forty Greek cigarettes a day took their toll.  Half of her children are pretty cute and half of his kids are totally adorable.  Frederick III and Christian V were scary, and their wives were worse.  I figured that their painters needed to upgrade their version of Photoshop, before the terrible thought occurred to me that maybe they already had.

And then we went to Tivoli and went on all the rides.

From Helsinki, we caught the ferry across to Tallinn, in Estonia.  We spent most of the trip giggling about the sign that had directed us toward the gangway by saying in Swedish "Til Fartyget".

Tallinn has an adorable little walled old town.  We wandered around, and indulged in commerce.  Cindy scored the best Russian nesting dolls ever.  Yammy bought some gorgeous red pottery goblets that he insists on referring to as "chalices" or "grails".  I find that uncomfortably messianic.  Yammy also chickened out of the Medieval Torture Museum at the door once he realised that they'd be showing how the equipment was actually used.

We caught a bus from Tallinn to Riga, Latvia.  It left from the main bus station in Tallinn, which seemed to be called the "autobussijaam".  Someone, who shall remain nameless for soon-to-be-revealed reasons, became overly fond of saying this name.  Our bus had Wifi and Jammi spent most of the trip exclaiming about this fact on various internet sites.  Not the Soviet Union anymore, Toto.

If Tallin is Dubrovnik-y, then Riga is more Paris-y.  Broad avenues and such-like.  We discovered that most of the old and notable buildings had been pretty much rebuilt post-war, which de-notabled them in our books.

Finally, we ventured into northern Lithuania to visit the Hill of Crosses.  I can't do that place justice with words, but behold the photos.

Last night, we went to see a symfonikoncert at Operaen.

Operaen is Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller's 500 million dollar gift to the Danish people and sits fairly spectacularly on the Copenhagen harbour across from the queen's house.  It's not quite the most famous Danish-designed opera house, but it's commanding from the outside, impressive on the inside and has an amazing view on a beautiful summer evening.

The program was Wagner, Wagner, Strauss.  The middle Wagner had a wailing woman.  She was disappointingly not a fat German in a horned helmet, but instead a hot blonde with an apricot satin dress and insecure body language.  The Strauss was Ein Heldenleben which, rather embarrassingly, I'm familiar with thanks to a Jilly Cooper novel.  The conductor was very exciting, cavorting about in a most entertaining manner, but I wish they'd given him a little platform that didn't squeak.

During the slow bits (rare, as Strauss and Wagner seem to do really loud and really strident really well), I played High School Politics with the Orchestra members, picking the brain, the princess, the criminal and such-like.  The trumpeters who wandered off in the middle of the third piece and popped back for the end were totally the stoners.  My favourite was the emo percussionist who sat folded in on himself in the middle up the back, hating the world and being all "fuck this orchestra shit" right up until he got to crash his cymbals, when he became master of all he surveyed and more than a little over-dramatic with his flourishes.

This is my new favourite Danish word.

I'm envisioning great fountains of promiscuity.