After four and a half years, I decided that it was high time I returned to Denmark to visit friends and relatives, and to experience that great weather the country is so famous for :/
After having been battling with French for five weeks, I was quite happy to be going to a country in which the grammar of the native tounge is relatively simple. For once, I made it to Charles de Gaulle airport without incident, only to discover that my flight had been delayed due to a freak mass of fog which had descended on Paris. To keep me entertained, Romi texted me helful suggestions for passing the time, including buying things I didn't need and couldn't afford and repeatedly going to the information counter and asking the same question. While the second suggestion did sound rather fun, I decided not to risk further damage to French-Anglo relations and so rather sat down next to all the other discontented travellers and tried in vain to decipher the occasional garbled messages coming from the loudspeaker. Eventually I made it onto the plane and breathed a sigh of relief as I thought "Thank god, from here on it's all Danish and English!" Just seconds later I found the pilot standing in front of me saying something that should have been Danish but for some reason I could hardly understand a word of it. My immediate reaction was panic - I had already forgotten even basic Danish! No, wait a minute, that wasn't Danish, he was speaking Swedish; trying to confuse me I'm sure, the bastard! When I settled into my seat and pulled out the in-flight menu, I was surprised to see that the entire thing was in English, even though I was flying with a Danish carrier. Amusingly, they seemded to have taken English slang to the extreme, so that it more closely resembled "Engrish" than anything else. In an attempt to be hip and down with the times, the word "stuff" had been tacked on to the end of every heading, so that one could purchase "snack stuff", "drinks stuff" and "jewellery stuff", to name a few categories.
No long after, I arrived at Copenhagen airport and was greeted with that wonderful Danish efficiency. A sign above the conveyor belt in the baggage reclaim section told me exactly how many minutes I could expect to wait before the bags from my flight would arrive. And just in case I felt unable to wait that length of time, a hotdog and beer stand had been conveniently placed just ten metres away. Carsten, an ever reliable Dane, was waiting for me when I walked out with my bag and we returned to his apartment for some open sandwiches and a cold beer.
Roadtrip
Day 1 - 28/08/07
We left Carsten's apartment and caught the train to Nykøbing on the island of Falster, where we were to spend the night at Carsten's parents' house before stealing their car the next morning. That evening, we walked across the road to borrow some camping gear from a neighbour. It was here that for the second time this trip I felt doubtful about my ability to speak Danish. When Carsten's neighbour found out that I was Australian he looked happy and said "Ah, har du nogle fugle med?" Surely, I thought, I have misunderstood... he cannot possible be asking me whether I have any birds with me. As it turned out, that's exactly what he was asking me - apparently he is some sort of bird enthusiast and wondered if perchance I had brought an exotic parrot along with me.
Day 2 - 29/08/07
Carsten got up bright and early while I lazed around in bed until late morning (honestly, what's the point of a holiday if it's not relaxing?) An obscene number of coffees later, we were on the road. We crossed the sea on a ferry and drove through picturesque towns on various islands before stopping in Kolding, a town on the peninsula, "Jylland", where my grandparents grew up. We set up camp for the night in Ribe, a former viking trading port and allegedly Denmark's oldest town.
Day 3 - 30/08/07
Little did we know it at the time but this was to be the first of many days of rain. We woke up in our cramped tent which the rain had managed to penetrate quite effectively. Unfortunately we were using the tent I had purchased years ago from the discount supermarket for less than AUD10.00 and had never been intended to survive more than one or two Roskilde Festivals. For some reason, I had decided to leave this tent with Carsten when I left Denmark rather than incinerating it as I should have done. (To my horror, Carsten still even had in his cupboards some of the (by then weevil-ridden) food I had left with him, but that's another story...) We packed up the tent for good and spent the morning in Ribe, where we saw a viking museum , wandered around the quaint cobbled streets and ate lunch in a typically Danish part-timbered house. In order to fight the cold (and satisfy my caffeine addiction), it was imperative that I buy a coffee before leaving town. It was in the coffee shop that any confidence I had in my Danish-speaking ability was to receive its next assault. I ordered a coffee in Danish (quite competently, I thought) and received a response which for all I could tell was in ancient Greek. The lady repeated the question and I honestly thought I had completely lost the capacity to understand Danish until Carsten rushed to my side and, addressing the shop assistant said "No, she speaks English, not German!" Evidently Ribe, being close to the German boarder, receives a large number of German visitors and seeing as my accent was not Danish, I had been assumed to be one of them.
That evening we drove through Esbjerg, Denmark's fishing capital, in order to buy a nice fresh fish for dinner. Tragically all the fish markets were closed, so we had to settle for frozen fish from the supermarket - an extremely poor substitute. We spent the night in Grinsted - not in the still sopping wet tent, but in a cosy little hut in the camping ground.
View of Ribe from church tower
Sunny Ribe
Part-timbered house, Ribe
Part-timbered house where we ate lunch, Ribe
Cold!!!!
Cathedral, Ribe
Day 4 - 31/08/07
It started out looking like it was going to be a pretty miserable day and I had fairly little desire to leave the comfort of the car when we pulled up outside Legoland in the pouring rain. However, we had come to Billund specifically for the purpose of seeing Legoland and we were on a tight schedule, so we got out and braved the rain. Fortunately, the rain cleared after a couple of hours and we were able to enjoy a sunny afternoon looking at the minature towns Legoland is famous for. We also went on some rides, the most interesting being the "Power Builder", which you program yourself. It was probably unwise of me to choose the second highest level of nauseating fun, but at least my neck didn't snap despite my head being thrown about in an alarming manner for the duration of the ride. After a day of amusement rides and junk food we found a hut in a camping ground in Resenbro.
Castle of which I have forgotten the name, Legoland
Paparazzi-style photo of Princess Mary & Crown Prince Frederik, Legoland
Nyhavn (Copenhagen, Denmark), Legoland
Extremely overpriced novelty lego-shaped chocolate, Legoland
The "Power Builder", Legoland
Lego Flamingoes, Legoland
Fredensborg Slot, Legoland
Statue of Liberty, Legoland
Day 5 - 01/09/07
Visited Silkeborg museum, where by far the most interesting exhibit is "Tollund Man", the naturally mummified corpse of a man who lived in circa 400BC. He had been hanged and thrown into a peat bog, where his body was remarkably well preserved due the lack of oxygen and the acidity of the peat. The detail of the face is amazing; even the wrinkles on the man's face are clearly visible.
Tollund Man, Silkeborg
The next stop was Himmelbjerget ("Sky Mountain"), which at 148m has the honour of being one of the highest points in Denmark. The strenuous climb to the summit took 5 minutes (including the walk from the carpark to the bottom of the hill).
Himmelbjerget
We then continued on to Aalborg where we met up with Kristian (an old friend from the dormitory days) and his girlfriend, Rikke. After an enormous dinner, we ventured out to Jomfru Ane Gade, a street famed for its ridiculous number of bars and discos interspersed with kebab shops. The party was still in full swing when Carsten and I left Kristian and Rikke amongst the vomiting, urinating drunk people at about 3am and headed back to the camping ground to spend the night in the most basic hut we had encountered thus far.
Kristina, Elena, Rikke & Carsten, Aalborg
Day 6 - 02/09/07
After a greasy breakfast eaten in theory as a hangover cure (for me), we went to see Lindholm Høje, an old viking burial ground, before continuing on to Lisbjerg, a town close to Århus. As the day's final cultural even, we went to see the Simpsons movie, as I really didn't fancy seeing the dubbed version back in France. The idea of a cartoon that epitomises American culture with French voiceovers is a contradiction I just find way too hard to get my head around.
With hangover in front of hut, Aalborg
Budolfi Cathedral, Aalborg
Lindholm Høje
Viking grave, Lindholm Høje
Day 7 - 03/09/07
The last day of our road trip. We stopped briefly in Århus where there was a festival going on, part of which involved a ferris wheel-like construction on which small children sat on toilet seats and wore amusingly large train driver style hats which fell over their faces. We then took a detour to Jelling, the site of the two famous rune stones which were engraved over a thousand years ago under the instruction of Harald Blåtand (Harald Blue Tooth), a Danish king who ruled in ca. 960 AD and who converted the Danes from worshippers of the old Norse gods to Christians. That evening, we arrived back at Carsten's parents' house in Nykøbing, where I was fed stuffed pigs hearts at Carsten's special request (apparently he thought I needed to experience some authentic Danish cuisine apart from the usual duck, pork and meatballs that I'm used to).
Burial mound, Jelling
Jelling Stone (Jellingstenen)
With Carsten on ferry to Falster
