Copenhagen

From Malmo our plan was to travel Around the Sound, which is an official tourist route around Oresund, the body of water that separates Danish Zealand and Sweden. Our journey began on the long train bridge connecting Malmo and Copenhagen. However although the bridge looks great from satellite there wasn't much to see from the train itself, just a huge expanse of grey sea and sky for 20 minutes. Arriving in Copenhagen was quite a shock from the relative tranquillity of Oslo and Bergen. Copenhagen is a messy and frenetic city more like London and Rome. The unmistakable image that immediately repeats itself here are bicycles. Bicycles are everywhere, streets are busy with them weaving between traffic and across the many pedestrianised zones, columns of them drift along dedicated cycle lanes beside buses and heavy trucks, bicycles shaped like wheelbarrows carry children and tourists in the barrow, and thousands of them are locked up in collosal untidy heaps, many rusted, twisted and wheel-less. The city is both a celebration and a graveyard to pedal power. Apart from bicycles, the most immediate image was building work; for a few blocks from the central station there was no view that didn't include some sort of construction machinery. But, after finding our way to the city hall, we got our next image of Copenhagen: towers. Like Bologna, this city is dotted with towers of all shapes and sizes: fat round ones, slender square ones and even a tower shaped like a corkscrew.