Hello all!
In case you were wondering, yes I did go on a cleaning frenzy at 4:30 AM last week. And yes, I did just use a pair of scissors and some innovation to turn my brutally rough duvet cover into window drapes.
But, back to the weekend: overall, great trip. I’ll give the bad news first:
1) I lost my buspass on Wednesday (moment of silence) the day before I left while I was transferring buses, and unfortunately had yet to make a photocopy of it, so now I have to buy a new one. I couldn’t remember how much it cost, and at the time I was flipping out, and I was thinking in terms of kroner, so in the thousands, and I was hyperventilating because I was thinking it was going to be in the thousands in American dollars…….but it turns out it won’t be too bad. I did however start crying in the middle of Copenhagen, and rushed down an empty alley so the happiest people in the world wouldn’t be saddened by my sadness. I’m better now, though. No worries!
2) My boots….that have cozy looking fur in the inside…not so cozy when they get wet. Especially when it’s below freezing outside and they are soaked through and I don’t change my socks or go inside for 5 hours. Ouchies.
MOVING ON…
So at 7:45 am on Thursday, my European Culture and History class (the same group I’ll be going to Prague with in a little while), headed to Western Denmark on a bus. Our first stop was Jelling, where we toured a museum and learned all about the Jelling Stones. Here’s what wiki says:
The Jelling stones are massive carved runestones from the 10th century, found at the town of Jelling in Denmark. The older of the two Jelling stones was raised by King Gorm the Old in memory of his wife Thyra. King Gorm was the first king of all of Denmark. The runic inscriptions on these stones are considered the most well known in Denmark. [1]
The larger of the two stones was raised by King Gorm’s son,
Harald Bluetooth in memory of his parents, celebrating his conquest of Denmark and
Norway, and his conversion of the Danes to Christianity.
What wiki didn’t say is how King Gorm’s son, Harald Bluetooth, made these worker slaves bury his father deep, deep down…and then decided that no, that wouldn’t do, and to take him out from this un-take-outable tomb (which had tons of pine trees on top of it, and was below the ground from a digging process that took 2 years) and move him to a tomb-house above ground. What a pain in the butt. But, I guess they didn’t have much else to do back in the day. The thing was, they couldn’t really get the King’s body out whole, because it was mummified, and so they had to cut it into pieces and hull it up and out of the ground. How…honorable???!!
After that, we departed for Vejen to an art museum where we checked out all these cool statues of trolls and grotesque shadow-men and also Nordic Mythology representations.
troll!
After the museum, we headed to Sonderborg, had dinner, and attended a concert where a Polish pianist performed Chopin, which was lovely, but the second my head hit the pillow that night, I was out.
The next day, we drove to Dybol Banke where we learned about how the Danes fought and lost lots of land to the Germans. In the afternoon, we headed to Froslevlejren prison camp, which was a WW2 camp in Denmark, but it wasn’t as bad as the other infamous camps, because it was run by Danes, and so they controlled food rations, prisoner treatment, and punishment. Again, see pics from the link above.
Then came Flenburg (aka where my feet nearly shriveled into themselves like a turtle into its shell). This is a German border town, which was pretty, but I was ready to head out pretty fast. The last day and a half we spent in Ribe (pronounced REE-beh), which is the oldest city in Denmark, dating back to 710, and we happened to arrive on its 1300 year birthday! So we celebrated:
cheers to ribe's bday!
girls from my hostel room
There was also randomly a dog show…inside our hostel…as in..dogs jumping over poles, up and down on a seesaw, zigzag through rubber poles, and all that jazz. We watched it as we munched on Danish breakfast the next morning…very strange but adorable.
That was pretty much my weekend, except for a short visit to a Viking Museum the next day and also a tour of a beautiful cathedral in Ribe. My camera had died though, so no pics yet. I’ll get from friends later.
Hope all is well at home!
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