Vesterbro tour

We followed a suggested walking tour from the travel guide we found in our apartment, and explored the Vesterbro neighborhood on our bikes.

Our first stop was Carlsberg. It is the place where Carlsberg beer was born and had been produced for many many years. But in 2008, the brewing facility was moved to somewhere else, and now there are plans to redevelop the whole area into a new district of Copenhagen. As part of the redevelopment plan, there are a lot of cool installations in the area to encourage people to come visit. Jonathan took us to one of them. This is called the "Rope Forest." Some 3,500 ropes hang from the ceiling of a structure I don't know what it was formerly used for. A loading area? Parking lot? I don't know... The ropes are quite long, and it's not really suitable for small kids to play, but we still had quite a bit of fun as you can see...

Here is another installation. 

Then we biked through some old Carlsberg buildings. There is a visitor's center and a museum, but we are not really interested, so we didn't go in. But we went under the Elephant Tower, which is the most famous landmark of Carlsberg land. There are four elephants carrying a small tower on their backs. I liked how the front two elephants are standing straight, but the two elephants in the back are tilting their heads.

From the Carlsberg, we took a short bike ride to a park called the Sondermarken. The park was really beautiful, with a big lawn leading to a fountain, and also nice tree-lined paths. One of the tree-lined paths reminded me of the famous tree-lined street in Tokyo near where I grew up (外苑のイチョウ並木), though this one is much quieter and more peaceful...

Under this beautiful lawn is a museum for modern glass art, Cisternerne. It used to be the site of three underground cisterns which used to be part of Copenhagen's earliest water supply system. The glass and steel, pyramid-shaped structure you see on the lawn is the entrance to the museum. We decided to go to the museum. While it is a great use of the underground space, and pretty cool to be underground, the floor is all wet and muddy, and chilly, and the collection of glass art was, for me (and probably for Jonathan as well), pretty disappointing. Mio especially did not like the museum, and she kept saying that we would "never-ever" go back to this museum again... But at least we've done it once. 

Sondermarken and the entrance to the Cisternerne museum. 

It was a great weekend. And we only have one more weekend left... :(