Art, archaeology and architecture in Copenhagen

The winter garden in the central atrium of the Glyptotek museum with its amusing sculpture of the babies crawling all over the mother figure.

 I found the width of my identity card frame coincided with a kilometre on the maps of Copenhagen we had picked up from the quayside. This revealed it could be a two and a half mile walk from the ship to the Glyptotek and National Museum we intended to visit. We decided we needed transport. My attempt to gain information from one of the QR codes on my map failed, so we opted for the open top, hop on and hop off bus. After noting there were as many cars in the car parks we saw, as bikes in the bike racks, and that in spite of all efforts by Copenhagen City Council to get residents and visitors to walk, bike or use public transport, the traffic jams and snarl-ups, some of which held our bus up, appeared to us to be as bad as any other European city.

As our hop-on, hop-off bus deposited us by the side of the Glyptotek, we went inside. It's Copenhagen's equivalent of the British Museum, plus some major art works. Architecturally it is stunning and we took the advantage of the lift to take in the views from the roof. We could hear the squeals of excitement from the rides in the nearby Tivoli gardens up there. In the atrium is a winter garden with a central goldfish pond, dominated by a sculpture of many babies crawling over a mother figure. We decided to stick together and visited the Egyptian collection, which has beautifully designed Egyptian-style wall and floor features in every room. I particularly like the Roman and Egyptian lions. One lion head, of the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet arrested my attention and made me laugh. There was something about it which reminded me of the late television presenter Huw Weldon, although it took us all the rest of the day and most of the evening to remember his name and the others took some convincing the sculpture looked anything like him. I also loved the figurine of the long suffering rat, although I have been informed it is probably a long suffering mongoose, rather than a rat. Unfortunately we discovered the Glyptotek's "Highlights" catalogue in English is out of print.

We returned to the bus stop to catch the bus back. I failed in my second attempt to find information from scanning a QR code at the bus stop, but we did not have long to wait and took the rest of the tour before returning to our ship. We noted the city traffic was even worse at this time of day. The bus stopped for ten minutes near the Little Mermaid statue, where there is an ice cream kiosk and conveniences, before we completed our return journey.

The expression of this Sekhmet sculpture is exceptionally evocative and very human.