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!

Århus

Thursday evening

We were picked up at the train station by a friend of my mom’s, Gitte. She was SO nice as to let us abuse her hospitality and spend two nights at her place. They’re a really sweet family, and hilarious, as well.


The family dog was also really sweet, if a little insane.


Cozy!

In the evening, the older son Anders showed us the Danish film Adam’s Apples (Adams Aebler). It was so bizarre, but also very good. Danish films are certainly unlike the ones I’m used to.

Friday

I thought my cold, which I had contracted the day before our adventure, was finally going away. I woke up with less of a sore throat and I’d actually been able to breathe half the night. However, twenty minutes in the cold outside, and my throat was on fire, my head was congested, and I felt terrible.

Still, the day wasn’t all bad. Gitte left out an amazing breakfast – simple, just bread and cheese, but the bread was oh so amazing, and the cheese, too. I tried to get similar bread when I got home, but the bread I bought just tasted plain :( And Aarhus is, like every town so far, adorable.









We walked through Den Gamle By, the Old Town. It’s an area of reconstructed buildings, some from Århus, but also many from other parts of the country that were dismantled and rebuilt there. It’s really neat, especially when you think that you’re walking through a building that was built five hundred years ago. In the spring and summer, it’s more lively, with people dressed up in old clothes and making crafts, but we did manage to find one man making wooden barrels in the old fashioned way.




As I took this photo I had an overwhelming sense of deja vu, and a flashback to ten years before when I had taken a similar photo, but with a film camera.









Elyse and Theresa went out with Anders and his friends that night, but by that point, I was feeling pretty terrible, so I ended up just going to sleep early and taking the Nyquil that Theresa so luckily had with her. I did get a phone call in the middle of the night from the girls who had lost Anders and needed the address to get home, but I had told them they could call for whatever reason.

Saturday

I hate waking people up. Nobody ever wants to wake up, and people usually make a huge fuss of it. It’s not really fun being the designated waker, but I guess someone has to do it.

I think Elyse and Theresa didn’t mind waking up so much when we discovered Gitte had laid out a full-fledged Saturday breakfast, complete with boiled eggs, rugbrød, other bread, cheese, juice, coffee, tea, and pastries.

Gitte decided she wanted to come to the museums with us, so she first drove us to Moesgård, a prehistoric archaeology museum.



Interesting in its own right, but the crowning glory and my real motivation for wanting to go was that it has the Grauballe Man, according to the museum, the best preserved of the bog bodies. Also, it seems there is a poem written about the Grauballe Man, which seems odd.





The area around is a place worth visiting as well.





We then switched from prehistoric to contemporary when we went to ARoS, the art museum in Århus. The modern art section was closed, but besides the relatively small exhibit of “Golden Age” up to 1920s art, they had a whole floor dedicated to contemporary art. The art, which I have a hard time calling that, was full of weird, graphic, and rather uncomfortable images. Maybe it was supposed to make you think, but it just gave me kind of a sick feeling. There was a video that had combined clips from black and white movies of men hitting women, there were images of talking heads with grotesque features, one with purple skin, one with green, talking with really annoying voices, there was paintings of severed arms…I don’t exactly feel more cultured, but it was an interesting experience. There were, however, some interesting things. I loved the “Golden Age” art, and there were some special exhibits that were strange but kind of fun. And a really cool room of mirrors.





Tired and museum-ed out, we went home and had cocoa. Gitte made it herself on the stove, so impressive! It was sad to say goodbye. It felt like we’d been there longer than two days. Thank you, Mom, for having been in Denmark to make my stay so much more homey.

Odense

(Strangely, Firefox seems to like Blogger better than Google Chrome does. Interesting...)

Wednesday

Elyse, Theresa, and I set off early in the morning. The train ride was so pretty as outside it was snowing.

Odense is the cutest city. Well, town, I suppose. The map was very misleading because the scale was so small. 1 cm was 300m or something like that. What looked like it should have bee na 10 minute walk was one minute, so we missed some turns every once in a while, but everything is in the center of the city. We also walked around the same square at least five times.

There was modern art everywhere.

We went to the Hans Christian Andersen museum, which is nestled right in the midst of the cutest neighborhood with houses that look too small to live in.

Some really neat murals based on photographs of H.C. Andersen's life.

I learned a lot about his life – turns out it was horribly depressing. That explains a lot. And The Ugly Duckling was a metaphor for his life. And yet, his outlook was always so positive.

A sketch he made of himself, trying to audition for a dance role in the theatre.

Now on my list of things to do if I find a time machine and/or become the Doctor’s companion: hug Hans Christian Andersen, and slap Charles Dickens for being really rude to the poor guy.

And, perhaps, ask to have his hat.

For the first time, I had multiple people speak Danish to me, and it always felt weird having to apologize and say I didn’t speak Danish. Also for the first time, more of the people didn’t speak English.

The hostel was really nice, except for the fact that the heater in the bathroom didn’t work, and the one in our room did not heat up our room. But under the duvets it was cozy and warm.

Elyse had never had quesadillas so we made some for dinner. She was weird out by the orange cheddar cheese, and it took her several reassurances that the cheese was not harmful. All the cheddar here is sharp, though, so it was a little different. Still, I think we introduced passed on the American college staple to the Australian.

Thursday

Today was such a beautiful day. No wind, no rain, no snow but bright sunshine! I could take photos without freezing my fingers!

We had the most delicious apple pastries this morning, and I had the first high-pressure shower in a month. So amazing. Seriously, the hostel was so nice…I want to stay there. Actually, I just want to live in Odense.

Today we went to the zoo. Perhaps being in another country you should not go somewhere as normal as a zoo, you say, but this place was so worth it. As zoos go, there were some depressing small-enclosure moments, but it seemed to be a decent zoo.

Red panda - I think it's cuter than a giant panda!

Manatee!

And they had really close-up encounters. I’m pretty sure the giraffes were close enough to lick us,

and we watched the cutest lion cubs only separated by a glass panel.

It was adorable until the mom sat RIGHT in front of the glass and gave us death glares. Then it was kind of terrifying.

There was also a rather epic playground with the steepest slide. I attempted to go down it, but then it wasn’t slippery at all, and I ended up pushing myself down. Ah, well.

After, we went to Skt. Knud’s Kirke, a beautiful church with the bones of St./King Knud from 1086. Gotta love Europe.

The train to Århus was crowded, we couldn’t get a seat for the first half hour. I didn’t think it was a big deal – it made sense – the tickets weren’t for specific times or seats, it was peak time…but Elyse wasn’t too happy about it. I think the lady standing next to us was very interested in our English conversation about whether or not it was wrong of Elyse to expect Australian standards in Denmark.