Aalborg

An interesting note. The Danish letter å replaces what used to be spelled simply ‘aa’. The government, when it made the å, made everything and every place change to that spelling. However, Aalborg petitioned and protested, and eventually got the original spelling of their town name back.

Aalborg and its snow and trees reminded me of home. No mountains, though.



Our hostel was a little out of the way, but it wasn’t too bad. It’s a camping area in the summer, and it has cabins. It was less than a ten minute walk from the bus stop, though.

Sunday

We took the bus to Lindholm Høje, a Viking museum, or really more of a museum about the archaeology of this particular Viking site. It was pretty neat, though the original reason why it sounded neat ended up being inaccessible due to the snow (a special Viking cemetery). The area around was absolutely gorgeous covered in snow, and I’m sure it’s just as pretty in the summer, as well.












Next thing to do when I get my time machine - trade with the Vikings for their jewelry.



The rest of the afternoon we spent walking around.








This may have been my favorite town.

I would have liked to see more of the town, but Elyse and Theresa got tired and cold, so we hopped on the bus back to the hostel, got our bags, and took the train back, which itself was an adventure. It felt like we were playing musical chairs since we had not reserved seats. We found seats that weren’t reserved, but turns out even if the seat itself says “can be reserved”, people can reserve it five minutes before at the stop, so what wasn’t reserved in Aalborg, two hours later was reserved, and we’d get kicked out of our seats.

I did make it back, eventually, with a detour. The train that goes to the airport (which is what we took from Aalborg) usually stops at my stop, but it this time decided to pass it by, so I ended up at the airport, which is actually one zone outside of my pass (though it’s really not far away – it’s only in another zone so they can charge more for transportation). I was really scared about being checked for a ticket (it’s an honor system but with semi-frequent ticket checks), but I wasn’t going to pay for only one stop out of my zone when it was an accident in the first place, so I ended up taking the metro, which is checked less often, rather than the train back. However, the problem with the metro is that the airport is on the other metro line, so I had to go back into the city and transfer to my metro line, and it took a while to get home. When I did get back, I discovered Copenhagen had been covered in quite a layer of snow. Welcome, February :) It’s okay. Boston had a late start to winter, so I’m still loving the snow!