One of the nicest things about Copenhagen - apart from the fact that it is such a delightful laid-back city - is that everyone speaks such good English that you don't have to worry about making yourself understood when you stop off at a restaurant for lunch and drop of the local brew.
One of the bad things is that same lunch will leave you several pounds lighter. My bill today for two bottles of beer, a burger and a very small - but very delicious - portion of chicken in a curry sauce on a tiny sliver of bread was not far off £40. Wow.
Not that I am complaining. Copenhagen, even without the Little Mermaid (she is in Shanghai for Expo 2010 and there's a live video of her in China instead), has been one of the highlights on my Saga Pearl II cruise in the Baltic that has already been packed full of highlights.
And it is only day three.
The first highlight was finding myself in Grand Suite Ninety Nine (note how the number is spelt out, making it even more Grand!). It is a fabulous room, spacious, stylish and with a shower that just empties onto the bathroom floor so there is no messing about with curtains or cubicles.
It comes with Dennis, my rather handsome butler, who serves canapés in the afternoon (and bothers to ask first which you'd like, which is a really special touch), any or all meals if wanted and even does my washing for free. And there's a bar that most certainly isn't mini but is all complimentary.
Highlight number two was going through the Nord Ostsee Kanal - that's Kiel Canal to you and me - linking the North Sea to the Baltic.
It's probably one of the least-known canals in the world - certainly not on the list of must-dos with Panama or Suez - yet if anyone ever wants a reason to cruise on smaller ships, the fact they can nip through the Nord Ostsee, cutting off all those sea days going around Denmark, is surely it.
The canal, built between 1887 and 1895 on the orders of Kaiser Wilhelm II, is nearly 100km long and took something like five hours to transit. It was actually just like being on a river cruise, with fields, forests and towns to look at as you went along.
Highlight number three was Lubeck, in Germany, which I visited on a day trip from our first port, Travemunde. Actually, the city wasn't so much the highlight, although it was very pleasant, but rather Hans the hippy, who guided us at high speed from one point to another, telling us from the moment we left the ship that we were "already very late".
He was good though, full of information - about the free three litres a day of beer everyone (men and women) received in medieval times (they used to make a baby and child version of beer as well) and the fact they used a picture of a gladiator in the court room in the Rathouse to symbolise discretion because a woman couldn't be trusted not to talk.
But my favourite was about Bach, the composer, then 20 years old and with a dream to become master organist in the Gothic-style St Mary's Church - until he discovered that to achieve his ambition he had to marry the oldest daughter of the existing master.
She was 40 years old and "a bitch", to quote Hans, so Bach did the only decent thing and scarpered.
The church was almost completely destroyed by the British during a bombing campaign in 1942, during the Second World War, and reconstruction was considered so dangerous that only bachelors were employed to piece it back together again.
I'd love to know what that did to the marriage statistics that year.
Jane Archer
