After visiting the palace, we went back to for the canal cruise at 5pm.
The guide on board the boat spoke in both Danish and English, and at every bridge that we went under, he would say “Mind your heads!”.
Canal Tours Copenhagen is a wonderful way of seeing Copenhagen, which presents an opportunity to see the capital from a different perspective.
The picture below is that of a Danish warship, code named F352 and full name HDMS Peder Skram. Once fully functional serving Danish Navy, F352 was decommissioned in 1990, after 25 years in service. Today it is retired and serves as a museum in Copenhagen, Denmark. The interesting part is that on September 6, 1982, the above mentioned ship was carrying live missiles, McDonnell Douglas made Harpoon missiles. And a missile went off just like that, cruised few kms in air, hit a row of empty cottages in a island resort nearby. The cottages and several property in the area were burnt to ashes. Fortunately there was no casualty in the misfire. Next morning the country woke up to the news of their own warship firing a missile at them. Since then, the ship F352 is nicknamed "Oops Ship" and the missile, "Oops Missile" (locally known as Hovsa Missil, Hovsa being danish equivalent of Oops!).
A man-made ski slope built on Copenhagen's waterfront adds a new clean energy feature to the Denmark capital's skyline. The ski slope rests atop a $389 million (500 million euro), 60-megawatt power station fueled entirely by the city's garbage. The Amager Bakke incinerator, will contribute to Copenhagen's ambitious goal of becoming carbon-neutral by 2025.
The next must-see in Copenhagen is the Little Mermaid statue, inspired by the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale.
We leisurely sailed passed the Amalienborg Palace, which is the winter residence of Denmark’s royals since the 1700s.
We also cruised around the pretty canals of Christianshavn, with its cobbled streets, pastel-colored houses and old warehouses.
We passed by the Church of Our Saviour. The Church has a black and golden spire that reaches a height of 90metres and an external staircase that turns four times anticlockwise around it. The spire is topped by a vase-like structure, carrying a gilded globe with a 4-meter-tall figure of Christ Triumphant carrying a banner. It has an infamous reputation for being the ugliest sculpture in Copenhagen but is intentionally made with exaggerated proportions because it is only meant to be seen from long distances. There is a long-lived myth stating that the architect killed himself by jumping from the top of the spire, when he realised that the spiral turns the wrong way – anticlockwise around.
The Copenhagen Opera House (in Danish usually called Operaen, literally The opera) is the national opera house of Denmark, and among the most modern opera houses in the world. It is also one of the most expensive opera houses ever built with construction costs well over US$500 million. It is located on the island of Holmen in central Copenhagen.
At the end of the cruise, we noticed there are actually statues erected at the bottom of the canal. Beneath Denmark's Højbro bridge, a bronze merman and his seven sons forever mourn for the mother and wife who left them for land. This underwater sculpture is known as Agnete and the Merman
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