August 18th - Day 22 Copenhagen, Denmark

I know - I'm such a liar! I said, one picture per day, but it's too difficult. So many pictures so little time! Anyway, we're still in Cork - minutes after my last post, but I'm determined to get two in today. So here we go...Copenhagen. I took a ton of pictures in Copenhagen - there were a ton of sculptures in the first 10 minutes of our walking (and walking and walking) tour of the city - but I won't post all of them here. I promise.
As I mentioned, we walked and walked and walked in Copenhagen. We must have walked at least 4 hours in total. Our first stop was to be the sculpture of Hans Christen Anderson's Little Mermaid but we couldn't find her! Instead we found this:

A video screen with an image of the Little Mermaid in Shanghai! She is apparently on loan for the World Expo 2010 until November and this is an art installation by a Chinese artist named Ai Weiwei...

Thankfully, there were many other sculpures to take our picture with...

It's terrible, I know, but I don't remember what either of these sculputres are! Bad bad tourist.

What I do remember are the couple of art pieces we just happened upon during our aimless meandering around the city -

The first was this series of photographs taken by a photographer named Anders Ryman called Rites of Life...

They depict those decisive moments in a person's life as they pass from one stage to another...he spent several years capturing such moments in photos from all over the world.

Another random beautiful thing we were lucky enough to happen upon was this building framed with colorful plants and flowers...

The project was called Europe in Bloom and apparently included over 5000 plants meant to "draw a map of European plant diversity". I just love that there's woman on a bicycle in this photo too...

You can't tell it from any of my photos, but the plants are meant to literally be a map of Europe.

One of the last things we saw on our walking tour of Copenhagen was the Amalienborg Palace - it consists of four (FOUR!) rococo palaces set in this giant square from 1750-1758 and is the prime residence of the Danish royal family.

A guard...standing guard...

...there were a ton of people hanging around and we eventually realized why - a changing of the guard was about to take place!

Constance...walking...this is actually at the beginning of our day - notice the spring in her step? This was, no kidding, one LONG day of walking. Did I mention that we walked for at least four (FOUR!) hours? Granted it was a slow walk, but still...we walked!