But I still have photos to post, and I wanted to show off some of the things I bought while touring, so here goes one last hurrah for the travel blog:
Copenhagen (or Cobenhavn, as it is in Danish) was my final stop, and where I flew out of. I had 3 days there, counting the day of departure. On the first day I went to the National Museum with several of my fellow cruisers. It's a great museum, if you're ever there. Lots of gold and silver from Viking hoards:
along with lots of other Viking-iana:
I was particularly drawn to this display of footwear and sewing tools (since textiles rot so fast, there were very few actual garments on display, and they were in special, very low light rooms):
Personally, I think the scissors on the far left are a hoax. They look like they came out of my sewing box upstairs (except the corrosion....)
We also all descended on a couple of yarn stores in a huge hoard and picked them clean. It felt like being part of a swarm of locusts. (Actually, the woman who makes the mitten kits in the open air market in Helsinki actually wrote on her blog about the experience of us coming into her booth en masse.... she was gracious, but with a detectable edge of panic.)
The next day I was on my own. I made my way down to Nyhaven, which means New Harbor, but which is paradoxically one of the oldest parts of the Copenhagen waterfront. It used to be pretty seedy, but in recent years has been spiffed up and now is a bit touristy.
There I found a restaurant in which I had a terrific meal, certainly the most unusual of the entire trip. A little place in the cellar right off the street had a herring buffet:
Twelve kinds of cold herring, and two hot ones, served with rough rye bread and new potatoes. I was in heaven. I ate way too much, but man, was it terrific. The smoked herring was my favorite. (Yes, those are raw egg yolks to be eaten along with one of the salted preparations. I declined. )I also took a harbor cruise, but it was raining, so the camera stayed in my pocket.
And the next day, I went home.
So the rest of this post is about my purchases. First, the shoes.
These are my favorites, boots I bought in Amsterdam my first day in Europe. I saw them in the window of a shop, told myself it was stupid to buy boots to shove into my luggage, spent the day at museums, and then came back and bought them.
Cute, no?
These I bought in Oslo, also after seeing them in a store window.
Though I bought them in Norway, they are from a Dutch manufacturer.
The next ones are actually from an American designer, Marc Jacobs, and I bought them in Berlin. When I got home I realized I already own slip ons from the same collection. No wonder they were so familiar looking:
And the last pair I bought in Helsinki. I've actually seen the same shoes in the states, they're made by Reiker, a German company. They were much less expensive in Europe, even with the crappy exchange rate:
They're very very comfortable. And red. I think they'll cheer me up this winter.I did buy some yarn, but I'm choosing not to post photos. Some is for gifts, some is just to plain, and some I'm not sure what I'll do with, so I don't feel like writing about it yet.
So, on to the knitwear. I bought 3 lace shawls. One in St. Petersburg, mostly to warm up on the day I got drenched in the rain and had no coat with me. That one was inexplicably impossible to photograph well, so let me tell you: it's a large, square shawl out of some kind of mohair blend. I think it's handknit (there was much discussion the night I bough it about whether it was handknit or machine knit or some combo). I also bought 2 Estonian shawls, both on the small side, which may end up seeing more use as scarves than shawls:
I also bought mittens in Tallinn:
I like the souvenir quality of this. Like a greetings form Tallinn postcard. Also these, which may see snow shoveling duty the next time we have a blizzard:
They're slightly fulled, and double knit, so they're very soft, thick and warm. Very similar to this hat I bought in the market in Helsinki, because the wind came up and I was freezing:
It's actually made of the same yarn, as is this machine knit hat, which is silly, but I love it:
The yarn is Kauni Effectgarn, which is a fingering weight wool yarn which changes color very slowly and makes these garments with terrific color gradations. It's milled an dyed in Estonia, though it's usually marketed by a Finnish yarn company. (I bought some of it, of course. It's rarely available in the States, and is MUCH cheaper in Estonia.)I also bought a felted hat in Helsinki from an artist in a cute little artists' mall:
It was an impulse buy. She also had these fantastically embellished wool coats which I loved, but alas none in a size that matched mine. The last in the parade of hats was this Norwegian fantasy:
All wool, embroidered, lines with fleece, I will make walking the dog in the winter a real joy.So that's it. (Well, I also bought some jewelry, and an amazing blanket I had shipped to me, and which has yet to arrive, but enough is enough.)
It was fun to blog this all out to you, to share it in (nearly) real time, to have folks comment and talk about my experiences even before I got back. I may do it again if I undertake another trip or project (though I'm not sure I'll use blogger.... it handling of photos is just absurdly awkward.) Anyway, thanks for listening.
Bye bye!
