Jeg hjerte hjorte

I’m going to dwell on past adventures again in this post. A few weekends back, during the week-long ‘summer’, we rode our bikes up the coast. Our plan was to stop at various swimming piers along the way before eventually ending up at Dyrehaven.

We kicked off proceedings with a quick swim at Svanemøllen pier, before riding further north to Charlottenlund Strandpark for lunch. Ant took our picnic in a uniquely Danish direction with some fish pies washed down with liquorice-flavoured iced black coffee… it tasted exactly as interesting as it sounds.

With summer comes berry season, and it’s been fun getting to know all the new types (new to us, at least) that have appeared in the supermarkets. Despite the novelty value of red currants (ribs), black currants (solbær), and gooseberries (stikkelsbær), it’s pretty hard to go past the classics – strawberries and cherries. There is a definite hierarchy of produce at the shops here, which can be summarised as:

1. anything Danske AND okologiske
2. anything Danske OR okologiske
3. poisoned food from terrible places (everything else)

Denmark is so into organic produce that it’s sometimes hard to find pesticide-full options (what can I say, old habits die hard?). It helps that the mark up on basic organic fruit and veg is low, and even the most budget supermarkets have heaps of organic options.

As far as we can tell, the only thing that the Danes love more than organic produce is seasonal produce from the motherland. You are culturally obligated to hit the Danish produce super hard when it comes into season, which this is fine by me – one million punnets of Danish berries/new potatoes/fresh peas please. On that note, we’ve generally been trying to pay more attention to seasonal availability since being here, because Danish supermarkets seem less inclined to sell fruit and veg out of season. You have to resign yourself to not eating so many obscure root vegetables in summer, which is perfectly reasonable once you think about it.

OK – how about I move on from this unexpected and lengthy tangent about produce and get back to the point of this post…

Further north of Charlottelund is Skovshoved Havn, where they have built what I thought was an oddly shaped swimming pier, but is actually a special structure for canoe polo (I know, how foolish of me not to guess that…).

Canoe or kayak polo is actually super fun to watch. It also looks extremely tiring and difficult. If you are into people with stacked arms and powerful torsos (but presumably withered little legs), then this is the sport for you! You’ll also take to it if, like Ant, you enjoy seeing people get brutally shoved.

When there was no more canoe polo to watch, we ventured back into the forest at Dyrehaven. Dyrehaven is World Heritage listed as part of the par force hunting landscape in North Zealand (par force hunting = hunting with dogs). The area covers the hunting reserves used by the Danish royals, particularly in the 17th and 18th centuries. The first time we went to Dyrehaven we thought we saw a lot of deer, so we were a bit unprepared for how many we found this time, and how big their antlers were. They were VERY intimidating – I spent a decent amount of time trying to work out if my bike would offer any protection as a shield, or if it would make things worse.

Wiki reliably informs me there are actually three types of deer in the park – Red Deer, Fallow Deer and a few Sika Deer.

That’s probably about enough gratuitous deer pics for now (I lie – there is never enough), so I am going to wrap things up on a real high point – proof that White Deer Park is real and in Copenhagen (Anna, you might want to be sitting down when you see this):