July 9, 2007 day 1 DENMARK Aarhus

We are now in the town of Aarhus which is on Jylland or Jutland in Denmark. It is a little town which is probably the oldest in Denmark. I read in a brochure today that there is for sure evidence that the Vikings settled here in the 900's, but latest archeological digs are now pointing to 770 as the year of settlement. We had no Internet service at Legoland, so here's what we did yesterday:

We spent the morning having a leisurely wake up and nice breakfast with Joakim, Eddie, Sabina, and Rose-Marie, who had just come home from some exciting root canal action! Carina and I had originally thought to take the ferry over to Helsingor to see Hamlet's castle, Kronborg, but we decided to leave that for our last three days in Copenhagen. Rose-Marie and I had a long talk over coffee and kanelbullar (cinnamon rolls) talking about so many subjects. Whenever she and I have the good fortune to be together, it is as if there had been no time at all between the meetings at all. We just take up where we first left off.

We said goodbye at the Helsingborg train station and

took the train from Malmo to Copenhagen, and as we crossed the Oresund Bridge between Denmark and Sweden, I felt a bit forlorn. I wonder when I'll be able to return to this little country I have grown to love so much. Copenhagen Train Station was crowded but buzzing with excitement. There had just been that huge rock festival at Roskilde, Denmark, which the rain had just about ruined, and there were concert-goers sitting on the floor everywhere waiting for trains to move elsewhere in Europe or otherwise. Many had rubber boots caked in mud, orange t-shirts displaying "Roskilde--the Orange Festival," and many looked weary but light at the same time. It reminded me a lot of my college days in the early 1970's when a friend and I hitchiked one weekend from Uppsala to Copenhagen.


At 4:00 we got on a long train to Vejle, Denmark, and were very grateful to Adrian, a Dane I met online at Trip Advisor and who has been helping us with tips and reservations and even Mac support along the way, who made us a "sittplats" reservation, which I picked up in Copenhagen when we first arrived. He emailed me the booking number, I paid an extra amount for it, and we were able to have assigned the seats for the 3 hour train ride across two Danish islands to get to Vejle. Because of all the concert-goers (Roskilde was on the train route), many people stood in the aisles. Once we arrived in Vejle, we had to take a bus out to Billund, were Legoland is. It was quite a strange feeling on the bus--being in the middle of the country and nowhere where I have ever been before. Danish is very much like Swedish, so I can mostly get by, but their accent is so "muddy" to my ears (very gutteral like German) that I have to use some English here and there, too, to make sure I get what people are saying. The Danish countryside was beautiful!
Many of the houses had thatched roofs and were brownish-red in color, and the churches had very few trees surrounding them but bushes carved out in unusual shapes by each grave. I tried to take a picture from the bus window, but it didn't turn out so well.

We arrived in Billund about 6:00 and first saw the legos--giant ones by the Lego plant like the ones by the Mall of America. We were dropped off outside of the Legoland gates, but first had to find our hotel. We made a mistake and went to the Hotel Legoland across the street from Legoland first, but that was the wrong hotel. About 700 meters away was the Legoland Village Hostel, where we had reservations. It was quite a hike with all the suitcases and stuff, but it was great. The Legoland theme was everywhere.

The hostel had mostly places for camping, but we had a triple room in a building.
The room was fully equiped with Legos--from on the key chain, to being used to hold up chairs, and a table full to play with, too.

The kids had a blast revisiting their Lego-Days!

There was mini-golf, pony rides, a terrific smorgasbord dinner included, and free writstbands to the Billund Bad, an indoor swimming complex with an awesome whirlpool, water slide with black lights with flashing colors when we went down, and two huge diving boards, and kiddie pools. We went for about half an hour and then back to the hostel for dinner.


We took out the Legoland map and got ready for our big day tomorrow!