I’m putting this post together while enjoying the last week of our staycation. I’m trying not to think to much about the fact that instead of sitting at my basement desk I should be basking in the Greek sunshine on Rhodes while smiling minions tend to my family’s every need.
As you’ll see, our vacation hasn’t been entirely uneventful. Trine and I have been enjoying the time off from work immensely, getting lots of sleep and taking things nice and slow.
Never mind all that, there’s a lot to get through so let’s get moving.
We pick up in the second half of June, when the weather was beautiful.
Another picture for the permanent record: for the first time since February, we had a company meeting in our big auditorium, but seating was a little different.
(“ONLY EVERY OTHER SEAT MAY BE USED! (Skip this one) THANKS”)
I think I’ve mentioned our acquisition of a quarter cow this spring. As a part of the arrangement we’re required to take part in a rotating schedule of cow checking. It’s not much work, just a question of getting out to the field and counting the cows, double-checking that the electric fence is active, and being sure the cows are doing all right.
Trine’s been handling most of this on her own, but I accompanied her one afternoon.
They’re going to feed us, so it only seems fair that we should feed them.
The 24th of June was Molli’s graduation from Søndersøskolen, the only school she’s ever attended. Like everything else, her ceremony was modified by virus considerations: each “homeroom” had its own ceremony. Molli’s was scheduled, if I remember correctly, for 17:15.
We gathered around the flagpole as always for big Søndersøskolen gatherings, except this time each family had its own table set up, complete with refreshments and hand sanitizer.
Shit was getting real for Molli.
It was the most scorching afternoon of the summer to that point (as of today it was still the hottest day of the year), and there was neither wind nor shade to alleviate the heat.
There are so few pictures of me on this blog and I’m so happy with these of me and Molli that rather than struggle over which one to include, I chose to keep them all.
In a total reversal of normal procedure, Molli was fine with being photographed but Maddie wanted the camera to leave her alone.
Here are a couple of shots from a distance to try and give a sense of the weird arrangement that social distancing forced on us.
The principle — a new one, not the one we’d come to know for the many years where both girls were attending the school — gave a speech that she falsely promised to keep short. I felt bad for her because I still remember stumbling through my own high school graduation speech one scorching summer day in ’83. And it was a nice speech, but sympathy didn’t stop the sweat from rolling out of my every pore.
In the photo below you get the full layout: the kids are lined up just left of the big tree at center: the principle is standing atop the stairs (in the shade). Each kid got called out by name, walked up the red carpet, and received their diploma. (It’s not a diploma, but I don’t know what else to call a bevis, which literally just means “evidence” or “proof.”)
So now we can follow Molli on her journey out of folkeskole.
(I really, really hope that this whole elbow thing is something we all look back on some day and say, “what the hell was that about?”)
And there she is: folkeskole graduate Molli Malou Kammer Nagan, diploma and bluebook in hand:
After the little ceremony we were directed over to one of the playground areas so that we could carry on while the next class had their ceremony.
Molli’s teacher gave a nice speech…
…and then the kids lined up for a photo op.
Believe it or not, I tried from a dozen angles. I didn’t get a single clean, clear shot of Molli (but I assume you have no problem picking her out).
Proud mor:
And no sooner was it wrapped up than Molli was coordinating her evening.
Speaking of which…. about a week prior to this, I had been hurrying out the front door one afternoon and noticed Molli putting something up on the fridge.
“Is that finally your list?” I asked. We had been hounding her for weeks to give us a birthday wish list and it was getting awfully close to her birthday.
She made some kind of acknowledgment that it was indeed her list, but it wasn’t until I gave it a good hard look the next day that I realized it was not her birthday wish list.
“Molli’s Plans,” it’s titled. And it’s basically her social calendar: all the parties she’d be attending for the period from her last school day through the fourth of July.
Suffice to say that once her graduation ceremony ended, she went out into night and for the next week or so she was rarely out of bed before noon or home before 02:00. (And she was entirely gone from the 28th of June through the 1st of July, off at a summer house with the girls.)
It was especially complicated for us since we were still at work on weekdays, but we got through it.
The glorious weather made biking into and home from work every day a true joy (I even look forward to resuming it once this vacation is over). It’s so much more relaxing than the stupid train, even it takes a bit more effort on my part. But a sight like this, of mists rising off a field beneath the rising sun, in a sylvan silence broken only by birdsong, can’t help but get a day off to a good start.
(I no longer take that route, but my new route takes me through a gorgeous stretch of forest that’s even more relaxing.)
Maddie went through a meringue phase. It was spectacular while it lasted: fresh meringues every day!
Didi had finally torn her pillow to shreds, so when I saw one for a good price I took a chance and bought it. I set it out on the floor to see how she’d take to it.
No problem.
The weekends before our vacation I went berserk on yard work to make sure that my vacation wouldn’t be a yard work vacation.
I won’t bore you with much (I photograph everything each spring and summer to help me remember what the hell I need to do the next one), but here’s a before and after of the front hedgerow.
Aw, what the hell, here are the after shots of the driveway and the rest of our Hybenvej frontage.
And as long as I’m on the exciting topic of landscaping, here’s a shot of the back alley in its final form. (The container at bottom right is a big box we got for outdoor storage, because apparently our giant house and garage aren’t enough space for all our crap.)
Didi really took to that new “nest,” by the way.
At Molli’s request, out of consideration to her exhausting social calendar we made no fuss on her actual birthday, and instead celebrated on the Fourth with a lunch at one of the nicer restaurants in Tivoli.
It was also the first day of Trine’s and my vacation.
Tivoli was a little different from what we were used to.
(“Take care of each other.”)
We have never, ever been in a more desolate Tivoli.
We always get annual passes, so we’ve sometimes gone in on cold and gloomy and rainy summer weekdays specifically to try and get in there on a day when tourists and fair-weather visitors won’t be crowding the joint up. We’ve also been there on snowy Tuesdays in December and dark and sleety Wednesdays in October. Not on the rainiest, gloomiest, chilliest of days have we seen fewer people in Tivoli.
It was a cool gray day but we were happy to be there with our birthday girl.
Sweet sixteen:
And the birthday girl’s sister.
I’m sorry that I have only one picture from our lunch, and it’s not a very good one. (I think Trine’s saying, “Waiter, please have that photographer removed.”)
Molli was very happy with the lunch and her presents.
Sixteen. Weren’t we whooping and hooting and high-fiving over her first head lift like three months ago?
After lunch we decided to try a few rides.
…I can’t stress enough how bizarre it was. Like the zombie apocalypse had just swept through. (Which, in a way, I suppose it had.) Almost spooky.
The weather got worse so we didn’t do many rides. Here are the girls getting off the Flying Suitcase:
After that we booked a trip on the Demon rollercoaster. A misty kind of rain had begun while we stood in line, and by the time we got off it was raining in earnest, so we decided to leave.
Fourth of July.
Sigh.
The following evening we went out to eat again (the decadence!), this time at the girls’ favorite: McDonalds. Molli brought her friend Emilie or Emilia (I’ll never get it straight: two of her best friends are named Emilie and Emilia, and my stupid American ears have a hard time hearing the difference).
So were a party of five–each in our own world.
(Even the guy in the background is looking at his phone!)
Maddie’s friend Josephine spent the night one evening, and as an experiment she brought along her golden retriever Bailey to have a sleepover with Didi.
The dogs had a lovely time, but Bailey was clearly homesick and had to be picked up at around 22:00.
Trine, Maddie, and I finally made our way back to Hai Long for the first time since February. We were all relieved that they hadn’t closed their buffet. (Single-use gloves were provided, and there was hand sanitizer everywhere.)
Maddie remains as interested in the fish tank as she has been her entire life.
Look at this delicious cake Trine made:
Psych! It’s homemade beef lard!
Trine actually bought a bunch of fat from the butcher and rendered it herself for use in lotions (or something). The girls thought this was a disgusting concept until they got a whiff of their mother’s homemade lotion (or whatever).
I hadn’t been walking Didi very often lately due to time constraints, so it was a pleasure to have the time to get out into the woods with her again.
I had resolved to make a big batch of bagels early in our vacation. I made sixteen one evening, and it was the best batch of bagels I’d ever made.
We left them out overnight just as you see them, there on the dining room table, and we all went to bed with visions of delicious homemade bagels dancing in our heads.
I was the first up the next morning, and was surprised to find there were only ten bagels left. It didn’t seem possible the girls had gotten up in the middle of the night and eaten five of them. (We’d shared one the night before while it was still warm.)
I couldn’t figure out what had happened until I realized Didi hadn’t been expressing her usual impatience for breakfast.
The dog had eaten five bagels.
What kind of dog eats bagels? What the hell kind of dog eats five?
I made a trip to the range with Mads, and we were taunted by a robot mower. It is quite a test of willpower to be standing at a shooting range, loaded shotgun in hand, and not shoot holy hell out of a moving target like that. It was like we were being tested.
So we took pictures of each other that made it look as though we were fixin’ to blow that thing to smithereens.
(I can hit just about any clay pigeon coming straight at me, or coming out from behind me, but I can’t shoot them on the perpindicular. Mads is just the opposite. Practice, practice, practice.)
I made another batch of bagels to compensate for my losses to Didi. These came out just as well as the first batch, but we cooled them way up on a shelf where even the cats had no chance of reaching them.
(That’s after boiling but before baking.)
One fine day Trine, Maddie, and I made another trip into Tivoli.
It wasn’t as empty as it had been on our previous visit, but it was more confusing.
I didn’t mention the new queue system last time. You have to use an app to register for a ride; the app then tells you how long until you can get in line. It’s a terrible system. You can only be registered for one ride at a time, so if one ride has a 20 minute wait and another has a 40, you can’t register for both; you have to register for one, and you can only register for the other once you have been through the first. And people without smartphones are just shit outta luck.
(“You may now get in line!”)
We’d agreed to meet Mormor and Moster Mette in the park; here’s Trine calling them to tell them where we are and ask where they are. Maddie already knows.
Maddie knew because they were able to yell up their answer.
Besides the new queue system, some rides required masks. (They hadn’t before.) Only some, and it was difficult to figure out the logic behind which rides did and didn’t need them. So you’d be queued in a serpentine line belly-to-back and side-by-side with strangers until you got to board the ride, at which point you’d be handed a mask.
Theatre.
Denmark’s official policy is mask-free, so we’re not used to wearing masks, and as you’ll see in a bit they’re of minimal efficacy on roller coasters anyway. So we assume this is just a gesture for tourists.
I hope this photo, too, is someday laughably surreal. (“Did that actually happen?”) It certainly falls into the category of “pictures you’d have a hard time understanding in 2019.”
But the rides were still what they’ve always been, even the classic old Odin Express that had been repurposed into the Milky Way.
Trine wouldn’t join us on the Demon, but Maddie was desperate to do it again (for the second time in her life, the first time having been on Molli’s birthday visit).
I shelled out the shekels for the “official” photo because I wanted the masks documented (and look how useful they are mid-ride: the virtual wind from our motion had peeled them down our faces). Maddie and I had agreed beforehand to do “something fun” with our hands for the photo, because we thought our faces would be concealed. Maddie’s idea of “something fun” wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, but the big smile makes up for it — in the picture from our July 4 visit she looked like she was terrified out of her mind (probably because, in her own words, she was “terrified out of her mind.”)
Note for the permanent record: Maddie is now taller than Mormor. (Also note: I love this photo.)
The hard candy kiosk now allows you to build your own lollipop. They give you a stick and a gloppy pile of still-hot candy and the rest is up to you.
(If it had been a “build your own beef kebab” kiosk, would that picture look any different?)
One day in the middle of July we decided to take a family day trip down to the new Skovtårnet (“The Forest Tower”) about an hour south of the city and the white cliffs of Møn, on the easternmost point of that island off southern Sjælland.
We began at Skovtårnet.
We’d hurried out of the house around midday, so the first order of business was getting ourselves some food.
Once we’d eaten, it was time to embark on the hike to the tower. It was a beautiful walk along a raised boardwalk through the forest.
The park also includes a climbing park, and the path wound its way through its many stations; one would from time to time forget about the climbers, only to be startled by someone suddenly swooshing by on a zip line twenty feet overhead.
(I had to filter this one a little to make the zip liner visible.)
I’m in love with the next three pics:
(I have no idea what they’re looking at. None. But I’m sure curious!)
It was about a mile out to the tower.
The tower is 45 meters tall, and it’s really just one long winding ramp.
There are bleachers around it.
In its full size, I love this image of Maddie trying to get a sense of how much farther there is to go.
Trine’s fear of heights stopped her at about the fourth or fifth level (about a third of the way up).
We left her there, and on the way down we found her at about the same spot. To work on her fear of heights she’d gone back down and up entirely on her own. She thinks if we had a tower like this near our house, she could conquer her fear of heights by going up just a little higher every day. I think she may have a point… but we don’t have a tower like this near our house.
As the girls and I continued, the bleachers got smaller and smaller.
At last we achieved the summit. Forty-five meters is higher than you’d think. The forest ceiling that had stretched so high above us on our walk now lay like a carpet far below us.
I hate this Zippy-the-Pinhead shot of me (the wind was unkind to my hair), but it’s the only of me on top of the tower, so I need to include it just to prove I made it.
You can get a sense of its height from observing how far below us are the tops of the interior trees: if you scroll back up to one of the early pictures in this series, you can see those same tall trees disappearing into the heights above us.
And that was it: we made our way back down, made the hike back to the parking lot, and set a course for the white cliffs of Møn.
There was some internal conflict about this trip. Some family members had been down before on school field trips and didn’t see the appeal of a bunch of stupid cliffs. I was told that we should by all means avoid the stupid Geocenter, which was a stupid waste of time, so I parked at the first area Google Maps recommended.
It was some kind of camping area that boasted of its access to the cliffs.
Not far from where we parked there was a map showing that a short walk through some woods would take us directly to the cliffs.
Off we went.
We passed through fields of cows and goats before reaching the woods.
And the woods were lovely.
And ultimately they led us to a kind of cliff inlet.
While we were admiring the yellowy cliff inlet, a young couple came by along the trail. They explained the white cliffs could be reached by following the trail they’d come on.
This was welcome news: some in our party had become frustrated at the length of our walk and the lack of white cliffs.
“How far?” we asked.
“Not far,” they answered. “Just maybe three or four kilometers.”
I was not a popular man.
We made a deal: we would get back to the car, drive to the stupid Geocenter but not enter it, and anyone who wanted to could wait in the car while I took the stairs down to the beach to see the actual white cliffs.
In the event, no one chose to remain in the car. Instead, we all descended what was proudly billed as “the longest staircase in Denmark.” Four-hundred and fifty-some steps, if I remember correctly.
At one point along the way, we were nearly struck dead by grapefruit-sized stones that had come tumbling down the wooded cliff at high speed: one went whooshing between Trine and me, another struck the boardwalk at my feet and ricocheted off. It was startling and terrifying. It was a kind of avalanche that had been started by some idiot kids we could see who had climbed over the fence at the top of the cliff and were now, having seen what their footwork and stupidity had done, desperately scrambling to climb back over it.
It was a long way down, but we made it.
We stopped on a platform about five meters up from the beach, because it was high tide (as you’ll see) and the only way to reach the actual beach was to pick your way through about ten meters of thick black mud. We opted not to.
Here’s a shot of some of the brave souls who’d decided the trek through the mud was worth it.
The trip back up was less eventful but much more exhausting than the trip down.
We piled back into the car, hit the road, and were home a couple of hours later, stopping only for a little dinner at the Exit 30 (Solrød N) McDonalds.
And that was the merciful end our day trip.
Here’s a shot from my walk with Didi the very next day.
And a totally rando shot looking east from our yard as a summer storm moved in while bright sun was still shining from the west. (I just like the lighting and contrast.)
Molli had by now begun her first job at the LIDL in Farum. She’s working a couple of 4-hour shifts per week, and so far she loves it. Working around her schedule, we planned a three-day, two-night trip to Aarhus, a city to which none of us but Trine had ever been.
We drove out shortly after Molli’s shift ended Thursday afternoon and made it to our hotel by early evening.
We stayed at a CabInn in the middle of the old part of town. The rooms were tiny, but since we intended to spend most of our time out and about we weren’t really concerned about that.
Aarhus is Denmark’s second biggest city. It was incorporated in the 1400s. It’s about 150 kilometers south of the northern tip of Jylland (Jutland), putting it more or less parallel to the northern tip of Sjælland (Zealand). There was no particular reason for us to have visited it: it was just somewhere we hadn’t been and it was far from home. (We’d considered a visit to Germany, but most of northern Germany is requiring masks in public and we didn’t think that sounded very vacationy.)
So behold our trip to Aarhus.
(That weird Gilligan’s Island hut there is really just a PR gimmick: it was the “Green Embassy” located in the big square outside our hotel. Within the straw husk there was a little glass and steel office.)
We were lucky enough to get an outdoor table at one of the restaurants alongside the canal running through the center of town. (They call it a stream, but it looked like a canal.) We chose it because we saw a lot of people eating big bowls of delicious looking steamed mussels. We were told those were moules frites, a Belgian specialty that had become a staple of Aarhusian cuisine. Molli and I were drooling.
(The people who told us about the glories of moules frites weren’t Aarhusian passers-by, but the family of Maddie’s old Søndersøskolen classmate Emma. We had been standing there in the square wondering whether we could get a seat at any of the dozen restaurants around us, when suddenly they were there beside us.)
We got our table and our menus and placed our order… and were told they had just sold out of moules frites.
They did, however, have lots of nice beer.
And juice.
And coffee drinks.
I took way too many pictures of this picturesque city, so I’ve tried to include only those with people in them. If a scenic picture struck me as particularly nice, like the one below, I included it.
Here’s the view from the little terrace on our floor of the hotel.
Our first night, Trine and I sat out there sipping whiskey with a visiting Dane named Sonny. Sonny was living outside Dallas with his American wife; they were only in Denmark to baptize their youngest child. Sonny was an interesting guy: for one thing, his name was Sonny because his Danish parents had been huge fans of Miami Vice. For another, he’d made his way through American college on a football scholarship, playing linebacker and fullback for a division 2 team in Texas. For another, he was a math PhD working on predictive analytics with neural networks for one of the tech giants. Also he had become an American citizen right around the time I’d become a Danish citizen, so were like each other’s offsets. It was fun to be able to compare and contrast our ideas about Danish and American politics with someone else who knew both countries as a citizen.
I said our rooms were tiny: here are some shots of Trine’s and my room in a slightly anarchic state to give you a sense of just how small.
That’s it. You just saw every square inch of our room. It really wasn’t any bigger than an economy cabin on the Oslo boat.
Our first morning we went out to Den Gamle By, an open-air “museum” of what life was like in a few selected periods: the 18th century, the 19th century, 1927, and 1974.
Behind the 19th century “pharmacy” two pictures back was a typical 19th century “pharmacy garden” of medicinal herbs, and I took pictures of the plant guide as a reference for the permanent record, so I can someday recommend someone a treatment of (for example) Hare’s Foot Trefoil with a touch of Motherwort.
I liked this wall of actual posters from 1974.
And there was a poster museum with political and propaganda posters from all over Europe, dating back to the early 20th century.
That was it for Den Gamle By. We would have spent more time under normal conditions, but the Corona restrictions meant there were long queues for some interiors and shops because they only allowed two guests at a time. None of us felt the cost-benefit ration was favorable.
As what must have been an expensive affectation, Aarhus has replaced their pedestrian light signals– usually a walking stick figure for Go and an upraised palm for Stop — with a green walking Viking for Go and a standing red Viking for Stop.
(It was cute, but the figures are kind of complicated so until I realized what the icons actually represented I was just going with green and red.)
Here’s a sandwich sign poster that caught my eye because it looked so retro — but it was not from the museum.
The poster says, “Surprise your wife…. Come home with newly ironed shirts.”
And of course the wife in question is propped up topless against a bale of hay just waiting for her husband to get home with the ironed shirts.
For lunch that day we found ourselves a restaurant that actually had and was serving moules frites.
(You’ve probably noticed I’m using my phones new fish-eye lens to get broad shots here and there. Also, I’ve got phone and Olympus pictures all mixed up here and can’t tell you which are which.)
No food pictures, but Google has plenty if you do an image search on “moules frites.” (The really good places do thrice-fried fries with them. Mm!)
Our room was small, but it had a romantic view.
After lunch I rested at the hotel while the girls shopped, then I went out on a long walk around hitherto unexplored (but sadly unphotogenic) sections of the city while the girls rested, then I came back and we all rested before taking a light supper and returning back to the hotel for an epic game of Jenga.
It wasn’t actually Jenga, it was some knock-off Trine had purchased. It came with instructions, and the instructions came with an astonishing (and hilarious) number of warnings.
I’m surprised it didn’t warn us not to taunt Super Happy Fun Product.
The game was, as I said, epic.
Here’s how far we got before it tumbled:
(Molli kept mocking me for having insisted I had been on the American national Jenga team in the 1980s, but I got the last laugh.)
We were all tired from the walking around, so we retired early. (Trine and I watched a Game of Thrones; we’ve been working our way through it over this vacation.)
The next morning we got up, had breakfast, and set out for ARoS, the big art museum.
To get there we just had to follow the green stream.
The museum is topped with a walkway they call the “Rainbow Pavilion,” a circular walkway enclosed in plexiglass that’s tinted rainbow colors.
We began with their featured exhibition: “Mythologies: The Beginning and End of Civilizations.” According to their website, which I just checked, it’s “an exhibition about faith, hope, crises and revolution and about how the power of stories has created and changed societies throughout history – from the Greek myths to the present-day welfare state.”
The editorializing texts accompanying the exhibit were insufferable (I have pictures of them but have chosen to spare you their proselytizing), but the exhibit did contain some spectacular older works.
Our family was shocked at an old 15th or 16th century oil painting of Adam and Eve. The painting featured a naked man and woman in a garden, each of them holding a fig leaf for modesty, the woman holding an apple with a bite out of it. I say we were shocked at rather than by it, because what shocked us wasn’t the painting, but the words of a man explaining the painting to his children of about Molli and Maddie’s ages.
He was saying, in Danish, something along the lines of, “Well, you see, in the Christian religion they believe that the first people God made were Adam and Eve. They lived in a garden, and. . .”
It was shocking that Danish kids in their teens would need to have Adam and Eve explained to them.
On the other hand, maybe that’s a little hypocritical: I had to explain this painting of a biblical image to the girls. (They loved the story when they heard it, and understood its point immediately.)
Alongisde the biblical paintings were some of Greek mythology, like this one of “The Creation of Man by Prometheus.” I had actually forgotten the old sport had created us, I only remembered his gift of fire (and his horrible punishment).
I also liked this early nineteenth century (1814) painting by C.W. Eckersberg of Ulysses inviting Penelope’s suitors to say hello to his little friend.
And I was intrigued by this 1866 painting by L.A. Schou of “Chione Killed by the Offended Diana,” mainly because the only one I remembered Diana famously killing was the peeping tom who’d spied on her bathing.
Turns out Chione had offended Diana by boasting that she had more charms than Diana. The interesting thing is that the myth usually has Diana killing her with an arrow to her tongue, whereas this painting has her shot through the chest.
The exhibit worked its way through time, and eventually we reached the modern era.
I thought this said it all:
“The work is partly out of order.”
If that’s not a perfect and succinct assessment of the world in 2020, I don’t know what is.
Unfortunately, the sign itself was not the art. It was a sign about an “artwork” next to it.
The lit neon says “If you don’t like Denmark.” The unlit parts then say “Goodbye,” “Fuck off,” and “Go away.”
It’s some kind of political statement, I guess. I have no idea why it belongs in a museum. I’m embarrassed for my era to see such a stupid thing alongside the works I included above.
But we were just getting started. The next exhibit we checked out — the only other one we checked out — was “Far From Home.” The theme was our feeling of home. There were a couple of interesting pieces, but only a couple. The rest was about what we’ve all come to expect from our modern breed of artist.
Like this one, which was called something like “variations on the Swiss flag.”
Does it not look like, say, the walls around Gate 31 at some international airport?
Maybe I thought of airports because the same space included this piece, “Uncollected,” by not just one but two artists (“Elmgreen & Dragset”):
The belt was actually turning. And turning.
This is art. In a museum.
The same duo of artists also bring us this (“Welcome,” 2004):
And from Gardar Eide Einarsson, we have “Untitled (Flagwaste)”:
It’s a pile of flags.
That’s literally an adequate and complete description of the artwork: a pile of flags. In a corner.
“Hey, lady, I got the 200 flags you ordered, where you want ’em?”
“Just throw ’em in the corner, thanks.”
Art!
And finally we have Doug Aitken’s “House”:
The video monitor in the center of the room shows a looping video of an old man standing wistfully center screen while a house is torn down in the background. The piles of wood and plaster lying around are supposedly the remains of that house. The gravel underfoot was part of the display.
After we left this display, I had to shake some pebbles out of my sandals.
“What’s wrong?” one of the girls asked.
“I got some art stuck in my shoe.”
The one impressive work in this exhibit was “Boy” by Ron Mueck.
I can present it without comment because it’s actually art.
On the conceptual side, the atrium of the museum was filled with a massive mobile called “Valkyrie Ràn,” which is supposed to be one of the Valkyries dragging sailors to their death. I don’t see it, and never would have guessed in a thousand tries, but my Art Interpretation license clearly expired long before I was born.
Very Guggenheimy, the interior layout.
After having our fill of art we made our way up to the roof so we could take a lap around the Rainbow Pavilion. None of these pictures were filtered in any way: the color distortion is from shots taken within the pavilion. Shots without such distortion were taken from the roof proper.
Trine’s fear of heights was slightly activated by this elevated walkway, so Maddie held her hand as we made our way around.
The wind is so unkind to my hair…
That concluded our visit to Aarhus: we had already checked out of the hotel so from the museum I went straight to get the car from its public parking lot while the girls went back to the hotel for our bags. I picked them up, we piled in, and we made the hour drive through Midtjylland (central Jutland) to Jellinge.
We did this because we wanted to see Jellingesten: the Stone of Jellinge, which is also known as Denmark’s Baptismal Certificate. It’s a stone into which Harald Blåtand (Bluetooth) engraved the following inscription:
ᚼᛅᚱᛅᛚᛏᚱ ᛬ ᚴᚢᚾᚢᚴᛦ ᛬ ᛒᛅᚦ ᛬ ᚴᛅᚢᚱᚢᛅ
ᚴᚢᛒᛚ ᛬ ᚦᛅᚢᛋᛁ ᛬ ᛅᚠᛏ ᛬ ᚴᚢᚱᛘ ᚠᛅᚦᚢᚱ ᛋᛁᚾ
ᛅᚢᚴ ᛅᚠᛏ ᛬ ᚦᚭᚢᚱᚢᛁ ᛬ ᛘᚢᚦᚢᚱ ᛬ ᛋᛁᚾᛅ ᛬ ᛋᛅ
ᚼᛅᚱᛅᛚᛏᚱ (᛬) ᛁᛅᛋ ᛬ ᛋᚭᛦ ᛫ ᚢᛅᚾ ᛫ ᛏᛅᚾᛘᛅᚢᚱᚴ
ᛅᛚᛅ ᛫ ᛅᚢᚴ ᛫ ᚾᚢᚱᚢᛁᛅᚴ
᛫ ᛅᚢᚴ ᛫ ᛏ(ᛅ)ᚾᛁ (᛫ ᚴᛅᚱᚦᛁ ᛫) ᚴᚱᛁᛋᛏᚾᚭ
In case your Danish Viking rune knowledge is rusty, in English that would be: “King Haraldr ordered this monument made in memory of Gormr, his father, and in memory of Thyrvé, his mother; that Haraldr who won for himself all of Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian.”
It dates to the 10th century.
It’s believed the original stone had been painted colorfully: below is a picture of what the back of the stone is imagined to have looked like when freshly painted.
So without much further ado: Ladies and gentleman, the Jellinge stones!
(Oh, come on, you know I had to work a Stones joke in here at some point.)
The smaller of the stones, by the way, was erected by Harald’s father Gorm, and says (in English) “King Gormr made this monument in memory of Thyrvé, his wife, Denmark’s adornment.”
Queen Margrethe can trace her lineage all the way back to old Gorm and Harald.
The stones stand beside Jellinge church.
The white zig zag marks the spot under which Harald’s bones are buried.
On the other side of the stones from the church was Harald’s burial mound.
Nowhere was it explained why his burial mound was out there while his bones were under the church, so I can’t help with that.
Naturally there was a visitor’s center with a museum, a café, and a gift shop.
We browsed the gift shop, bought nothing, but admired this thing we concluded must have been a giant Viking pez dispenser.
We hopped back in the car and pointed it toward home.
We had already been planning to check in on the factory in Nyborg (on Fyn), and it was a good thing we’d planned to stop there: while we were still about half an hour outside of Nyborg, Google Maps suddenly went berserk and added 75 minutes to our arrival time. A little research revelaed that there’d been an accident on the big bridge and so it had been closed to eastbound traffic.
So we took our time, first with our visit to Lapito:
And then with a nice lunch at a harborside café in downtown Nyborg.
Maddie got a lovely iced coffee:
The food was so good that none of us could finish our fries. That’s not something that’s ever happened before, so on the principle of “picture or it didn’t happen,” here you go: it happened.
After lunch we took surface streets through Nyborg to avoid the open but still backed-up bridge, and 75 minutes later we were home.
And that’s it: our little mini vacation within a vacation was over.
# # #
Not much vacation left at this point.
We’re trying hard to take these last few days slowly and store up some rest and relaxation so we’re ready to jump right back into what will surely be a crazy hectic fall, our first with both girls attending schools outside of Værløse.
The girls still have a few weeks of summer left: Maddie’s got a camping weekend with GC, and both girls have their handball day camps the week before school resumes.
The forecast into the foreseeable future is for temperatures around 20 Celsius, with a lot of clouds and periods of heavy rain.
I’ve ended the last few posts by hoping things would be back to normal, or something close to it, by the time I lay down the next one. I find that kind of optimism a little hard to sustain at this point, so here’s hoping at least that things will be at least a little better than they are right now.
I share the optimism. lovely Blog and great pictures.
AML
Dad, Doug, Pop-pop