We woke up reasonably early on Saturday and walked around before getting some breakfast (cream puffs at a local bakery) and heading to a few museums. We went to three different art museums on Saturday: Davids Samling (an impressive collection of Islamic art), the Hirschsprungske Samling (a collection of art from the Danish Golden Age + a special exhibit on P. S. Krøyer), and then finished the afternoon at the Statens Museum (the National Gallery). We had a pretty typical Danish smørrebrød for lunch where Andrew was able to get his fix of pickled herring - yuck! The weather was VERY cold this weekend (we even got some snow), but we bundled up and had a great time anyway.
Saturday night we went to Relæ for dinner, a small but amazing restaurant that has been getting some very good press (it is run by a few alumni of Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant that's been named the best restaurant in the world two years in a row now). The style of the restaurant is Nordic cuisine with an emphasis on locally-produced ingredients and there were just two meal options: meat or vegetarian (Andrew ordered the former and I got the latter), both consisting of five set courses. The courses were all interesting, but not all to my liking. Andrew, for example, had a course of veal tongue, which I could barely stomach one bite of, but I had a really delicious beet, apple, & seaweed salad which was amazing, and my main course was even better: kale, walnuts, and salted pears. Dessert was a bit of a letdown, though, as I'm always craving chocolate or cake of some kind - instead, we were basically served a deconstructed ice cream: mandarin orange slices, frozen buttermilk (almost like dippin' dots), and a raw egg yolk on top. We were both very happy with the meal overall, and we're certainly glad we got to eat there while we're living here.
On Sunday we did a little more wandering, but spent several hours at two more museums: the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek and then the Danish Design Museum. The latter wasn't that great, but the Carlsberg museum was probably the best place we went all weekend - I suppose being a beer baron gives one the luxury of buying a lot of very nice art! They house a fantastic collection of French Impressionists and one of the few complete collections of Degas' bronzes, a personal favorite.
We didn't leave until this morning, catching a 7:30am flight back to Aalborg before Andrew had to go in to work. Luckily, I don't work at all on Mondays, so I just get to nap and unpack today! If you want to see more pictures of our weekend, they're on our flickr page, and all of our stops are tagged on the map below.
