Copenhagen... For free?

I have always been very fond of travelling, and thanks to that, I learnt how to find the cheapest methods of travelling as far as possible for the most amount of time possible.

There are so many methods to find low cost flights, buses, trains and hotels, for example, by using an app or different web pages etc. However, last year, I surprised myself by finding not just a cheap method to travel far, but a free method! This experience is something that, like me, not a lot of young Spanish people know about so it's therefore being wasted.

Every year, I tend to go and see different places in summer with my friends, but obviously, only places that are accessible for students. Looking on the internet, I came across a way to travel which I had never heard of before - voluntary service.

What is voluntary service?

The majority of you are going to think that it's something that is directly related to an NGO or underdeveloped countries, but no - it's a type of volunteer work with the objective of helping young people from all over the world to find work experience without being "exploited". It's a very efficient way to learn languages quickly and of course to get to know other places without spending hardly any money.

When I discovered the voluntary service, it all seemed a bit odd to me... A hotel that gives you free food and accommodation, some money and organises cultural and leisurely activities for you to do in your free time... It must be a joke, no? Anyway, 2 friends and I decided to risk it. It was so easy to send an email to the hotel explaining who we were, which languages we could speak and what we liked to do in our free time. It was too easy.

Some weeks after we bought our plane tickets (the only thing we had to pay for and for a good price too as we bought them in advance), we had to get in contact with the manager to inform him of our arrival and departure dates.

On the 12th August 2015, we left from Madrid airport with a layover of more or less an hour in London's Heathrow airport. We arrived in Copenhagen at around 5pm where someone was waiting for us with pick-up cards. They took us by train to the hotel (a fee that the hotel paid for) and once there they gave us a little time to settle in and they told us about how everything worked, as well as everything about the hotel which seemed like a maze to us.

For the first 2 or 3 days, we were quite scared and shy. We had to tend to an average of 50 people a day, people from all over the world, with so many different ways of pronouncing English words that sometimes we couldn't even understand them. We had to answer telephone calls, which I personally hated because it was impossible to correctly write down a Chinese or Russian name with only hearing how it's pronounced. We were also responsible for washing the bed sheets, renting them out to the guests and cleaning the rooms from top to bottom. But this all sounds a lot harder than it actually was, taking into account that the shifts we worked never lasted more than 4 hours during the day and we also had days off.

The managers were only a couple of years older than us, they were very flexible when giving us our shifts and they showed us around the city including taking us on nights out. Furthermore, they slept in the hotel and were always available which made things a bit easier - you can't imagine some of the strange problems that some of the customers came up with...

As for food, there weren't any problems. There was a list in the kitchen on which each one of us would jot down what we wanted to buy to have as a snack and for dinner the following day, each day one of us would go to buy the food then we would prepare dinner for the rest of the group (there were 7 of us).

As I said before, the hotel was giving us money each week, but not only that, they were also paying for some of our excursions, for example, a private boat trip around the city's canals or a Japanese dinner for all of us (it cost around 200€). We relied on bikes to get from place to place, which were very sufficient seeing as the city is completely flat and level.

We were lucky to be able to go to Copenhagen for 20 days and to get to know people from other countries who we still keep in contact with today. We were able to visit and walk around the main attractions of the city which I recommend to anyone who plans to visit Copenhagen.

Places to visit

• Firstly, one of the main attractions are the canals in the city. There is the Nyhavn Canal (which is also a very famous and picturesque street). The little mermaid statue is another famous and important tourist spot as it pays tribute to Andersen's stories which are known around the world and has special links with China, so it's quite likely that the statue will be surrounded by Chinese tourists to the point of not being able to see it (it only measures half a meter). Another spectacular place and one of my favourite places is the "Church of our Saviour", it has a tower that you can go up and view the whole city from, including Sweden on the horizon. Another place that really left an impression on me is the neighbourhood of Christiana, also known as "the liberal zone". Unfortunately, you're not allowed to take pictures there and I don't really know how to describe it, but it's worth the visit.



• When people told me about Copenhagen before I had gone, they recommended that I visit the biggest theme park in Europe called "Tivoli". It was strange to see a theme park right in the middle of a city, but personally I wouldn't recommend going in to anyone who doesn't like rides. From my point of view, it was more or less a normal park. Another place that was recommended to me was the Carlsberg factory; it's quite hard to find and it's not really a factory, so I didn't really think it was worth the visit.
• For those who are like me and attracted to strange things, I encourage you to go to Assistens Cemetery where Andersen is buried. It's not just a cemetery, what's striking is that people go there to have a bite to eat, albeit in between the tombstones, but I have to say it's like something out of a fairytale.
• Lastly, I would like to recommend a visit to "Experimentarium City" which is a spice ship situated on the banks of the canal. It has food and drink from all over the world, with good music and a very good atmosphere.

You can do all this and more thanks to the volunteer experience. I met people from very different cultures, I worked and lived there and now have some funny stories, but what I value the most is how easy it was for me to experience all of this for so long and so far from home but for such little money.

I was scared at first, but since I was there for so long, I was able to get to know so many amazing places. Sometimes you get to know a place well just by wandering around a lot and by losing yourself - the best places are usually found when you're not looking for them.