Copenhagen 2026

After working on my travel blog incessantly for months, I finally finished writing about last year’s Scotland trip just in time to concentrate on our 2026 vacation to Copenhagen, Denmark. This knocks off yet another new Western European country that we have not visited before from our bucket list.

Unlike the Scotland vacation which involved changing accommodations multiple times and driving from small village to small village at the back end of the trip, this time we will stay in the same apartment hotel in the heart of Copenhagen for the entire 13 days of our stay.  From there, we will walk or take transit to thoroughly explore the city including suburban neighbourhoods like Osterbro and Norrebro. Once we getting a sunny and warmer day, we plan to buy an all-day City Pass that includes rides on the harbour ferry so that we can use it as hop-on/hop-off transportation to explore various ports on both sides of the Copenhagen Inner Harbour. The boat, metro and train service seem to work off the same Rejsebillet app. As usual, we will have castles, museums, art galleries, boutique shopping, flea and antique markets, cemeteries, parks, sculptures and architectural walks on our itinerary.

We also allocated some days to take the train to visit remote castles including the one that inspired Shakespeare's Hamlet, as well as the Louisiana Art Museum within Denmark. We will cross the Öresund Strait twice to visit coastal towns in Sweden, taking a train from Copenhagen to Malmo, Sweden one day, and a ferry boat from Helsingor Denmark to Helsingborg Sweden on another.

As we usually do when we visit a foreign country, we tried to buy a small amount of local currency. But we found that none of the Canadian banks or currency exchanges carry the Danish Krone (DKK).  Since stringent anti-money laundering compliance rules were implemented after a 2018 Danske Bank scandal involving a major money laundering case, Danish banks have been reluctant to accept DKK from foreign banks, effectively making it unavailable for exchange abroad. However, we have been assured by many previous visitors that Copenhagen is mostly a cashless city and that our credit card will be accepted just about everywhere. To ensure it is not rejected, we called our credit card company and informed them of the dates of our trip. If we really do need cash for some reason (e.g. perhaps to make a small purchase at a flea market or antique market), we can withdraw some from the local ATMs. By the same token, as we are only in Sweden for parts of two days, we will try to go cashless there as well.

In terms of getting e-Sims for our phones so that we can have data for google map searches, we looked into a European e-Sim but it cost significantly more than just getting a 30-day Danish e-Sim and a 3-day Swedish e-Sim.

Although English is spoken widely in Denmark, we have started to recognize some Danish suffixes in the big, long street and place names, making them seem a bit shorter. For example, gade=street, havn=port, borg or slot=castle, Kirke=church and kirkgard=cemetery.

In terms of dining, we are looking forward to trying Danish specialties including smorrebrod (dark rye bread with a variety of toppings, especially seafood), fish paste, polser hotdogs, and baked goods including cardamom buns.