Tivoli, A Fairy Tale For the Whole Family

Well, last night (Friday) was our trip to Tivoli. I was a little stir-crazy from doing homework all day so I was glad to get out. In one of my classes, my group partners are a brother and sister and their father has fallen quite ill, so there is a lot of confusion at the moment but we decided that I would do most of the work on the first project while they figure things out. Anyway I went to Tivoli with some other grad student, Yaron and Telma (from Tel Aviv) and Melanie another student from my program.

For my taste Tivoli was just about the right fit. It doesn't have any giant roller coasters like Six Flags or anything, and the two big rides they have are pretty short. I went on some mine-esque ride that was obviously made for kids, and ended up going on the wooden roller coaster thing three times. The bigger rides had a number of flips and parts where you were upside down so when people I was with wanted to go I stuck to good old terra firma. Actually the strangest ride I went on was a Hans Christian Andersen ride which was almost kind of creepy (kind of It's A Small World-ish).

My impression about Tivoli was that the rides were not really the main attraction anyway. It's kind of hard to make a lot of huge rides when you are located in the downtown area of a major city. There are a lot of shooter games where you spray water or shoot arrows at targets, we took our hand and throwing some balls at hanging plates that moved up and down (one out of three ain't bad). There are a lot of small shops in Tivoli, mostly souvenirs and kitsch but there was one really nice store with a lot of high concept Danish kitchen and housewares. There are also gardens, and a theater, and an aquarium (and of course a Build-a-Bear store).

Mostly though, Tivoli seems to be about eating and drinking. There are in fact more restaurants in Tivoli (39) than rides (25), and I don't think that includes all the small little ice cream and hot dog booths. Beside some pop corn, I had some french fries at the Asian Station which for some reason served hamburgers, hot dogs, and panini sandwiches as well - you know, traditional Asian food. We also ate at the apparently world famous Wagamama restaurant, a Japanese/Asian food chain I had never heard of but is apparently all over Europe.

The night ended with a concert by the Danish band One Two. We got the plænen (the open-air stadium) after the show started so it was really crowded. The music turned out to be in English but turned out to be some combination of europop and covers of older American songs. We were getting a little tired at that point so after wandering around for a little while and riding the Rutsjebanen one last time we called it a night.