When I book a break, trip, holiday, sightseeing adventure whatever you want to call it, I always looks for things that are happening in the area during the duration of our stay. So when I booked our trip to Copenhagen, Denmark for Mr ESLT’s birthday I set about finding out what was going down at the time. It appeared nothing too spectacular was scheduled for our three night stay however I did come across a lot of recommendations to visit Tivoli especially on a Friday evening as there is live music on the main stage. With previous guest artists including Snoop Dogg and Elton John we thought we were going to be in for a treat. I quickly checked the program which is available on Tivoli’s website and saw that the band playing the night that we wanted to visit was a Danish band called D-A-D(?). I’ll be honest neither Mr ESLT or I had ever heard of them but as fans of live music we thought why not, let’s give it a shot. The added benefit of Tivoli was that it was literally a five-minute walk from our hotel.
I booked tickets in advance for Tivoli through Viator, this was a joint ticket together with a river cruise. I paid around £16* per person for the combined ticket which was great value as the Tivoli tickets were ‘skip the line’ ones which meant we could simply rock up, show the security guard on the gate and walk in. As a walk up on a Friday night you are looking at paying around £10 each for entrance alone. Other packages are available which offer food, drinks and access to the rides but also around a 20 minute wait to get in. We arrived at around 6pm and already people were queuing for rides, drinking at the bars and lazing in the gardens and on the deck chairs. The weather was fantastic for Denmark at that time of year so we joined right in. First we headed to Mamma Mokka and as it was International Beer Day partook in a pint of the local offering, Carlsberg.
After our drink we decided to take a look around. We heard before we saw the rollercoasters in the park as they whooshed and swooshed and people screamed as they did the loop the loop. Mr ESLT and I decided to give the rides a miss and continue our wandering. We walked through the beautiful gardens and found many gift shops and restaurants together with stalls selling sweets and toys. By 7.00pm our tummies were telling us it was dinner time. There are roughly 30 restaurants and cafes in Tivoli serving all sorts of food from around the world yet no matter how hard we tried, we could not get a table at any of them until the Danish restaurant Grøften took pity on us an gave us a table for 1 hour. We quickly ate our beef stroganoff (Mr ESLT) and courgette gratin (me). Even though we were only permitted to use the table for an hour, what a great table it was. It over looked the stage where the pantomime is performed every evening at 7.00pm. Therefore my recommendation is if you are visiting Tivoli and know you will want to eat dinner whilst you are there, don’t forget to pre-book otherwise you may struggle like we did.
By 8.00pm the park was becoming full with numerous people wearing with pride their D-A-D t-shirts and carrying their 5 pints of beer around in beer carriers. Benches and grassed areas were becoming full to capacity with people chilling out and waiting for the main event in the last of the day’s sun. Who were we to buck the trend. Grabbing a delicious ice-cream from one of the many stalls dotted around we found ourselves a small patch of grass to sit, chat and soak up the atmosphere on. Ice creams demolished we joined in with everyone and bought ourselves some beers waiting for the main event to start. The area around the main stage started to become impassable and seeing as though Mr ESLT and I weren’t overly fussed about seeing D-A-D we thought we’d give the die-hard fans the opportunity to get closer to the stage as we tried to find another vantage point within the park to hear their music from. The main event started at 10.00pm to the raucous cheers of the thousands of fans. No be honest their music wasn’t to my taste but the atmosphere was great and it was nice to have music in the air.
We headed over to the lake at around 10.30pm ready for the illuminations which are held daily at 10.45pm. This was quite cute, maybe for younger children and was a nice way to spend out last 15 minutes in Tivoli. With the illumination over and D-A-D still rocking out on the main stage we decided not to try to get back out the way we had got in as I think we would have been taking our lives in our own hands. Instead we optioned to exit out of a sneaky little side entrance even though it added 5 minutes onto our journey home. What a great way to spend a few hours on a Friday evening. Food, drinks, rides and live music. Yes, it is £10 to get it which may seem odd as you then still have to pay everything on top of that when you get in there but personally I thought it was a bargain and we had a great time. No, it’s not Disneyland so please don’t go expecting it to be so. It’s just a nice evening to be had in a great city.
* Price correct at time of publication
EAT SLEEP LOVE TRAVEL 
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