Taler du Engelsk?

What's the first thing you think of when you think of Denmark? Do you even know where it is?

I have to admit that before we decided that we were going to visit our friends Tara & Jason in Denmark, I wasn't even quite sure exactly where it was. I mean, I knew it was in Scandinavia somewhere, and I knew that Norway, Sweden, and Finland were all crunched together up there, but where is Denmark? Well, here it is (oddly unnamed on this particular map of Europe).

Denmark is comprised of a series of islands and a peninsula connected to Germany. The capital, Copenhagen, is on one of those islands, while the majority of the land mass is on the peninsula, Jutland. Since our friends live in Vejle on the east coast of Jutland, that was our home base for our week-long trip.  In fact, in the ~7 days we were actually in Denmark we never made it off of Jutland, and that was just fine with us. We did consider going to Copenhagen (on the island of Zealand near Sweden), but that was one of the trips that we skipped in favor of a more leisurely vacation.

We took a non-stop flight from Portland to Amsterdam, then a short-hop connection to the small airport of Billund in the middle of Jutland. Our first plane left Portland at 4pm on Thursday, and our last arrived in Billund at ~2pm Friday, with a 9 hour timezone difference to which we never did quite adjust completely. I'm sure you've heard that "everyone in Scandinavia speaks English". I can confirm that that is mostly true, but our bus trip from the airport to Vejle was our first indication that this was not a universal axiom. Thankfully Tara had prepped us with the necessary Danish phrases to get us by:

"Taler du Engelsk?" = "Do you speak English?"
"klipkort" = "punchcard" (10-trip ticket bus ticket that we had to purchase from the non-English speaking bus driver)

...and we didn't learn much Danish beyond that.

When we arrived at Tara & Jason's apartment in Vejle, we decided to just push through the jet lag in an attempt to adjust as quickly as possible. It mostly worked, although I don't think we went to bed before Midnight a single night (and we were often still eating dinner at that time!) Since we arrived on July 4th, Tara prepared a multi-course "American meal" of corn on the cob, potato salad, blueberry cobbler, and oven "fried" chicken. At 1:30am we finally went to sleep.

Our trip only afforded us 6 full days in Denmark, so we knew that we would have to pick and choose our activities. Since we were primarily there to spend time with Tara & Jason (exploring Denmark was really secondary), we ended up alternating day trips with more local activities. This also allowed us to more easily adjust our plans and schedules based on weather.

Saturday we explored Vejle with Tara & Jason, including stops at the Farmers' Market, cheese shop, bakery and supermarket. At the Farmers' Market we bought all sorts of local produce, most of which we could easily recognize and compare the English and Danish words with the farmers. Berries, though, were another story. The ones in this photo we figured out were currants (red and white), but there were some jars of preserves that were a bit of a mystery. Of course we had to buy some and then search the Internet for the Danish/English translation. Tara was excited to be able to report back the answers to the farmers the following week.

Danes really have a thing for licorice and gummy candies. I took this photo in a typical grocery store. Note that this entire section is JUST LICORICE AND GUMMY, and all of their food stores have equivalent sections. Both Corinne and I are big fans of licorice - including the salt licorice, or saltlakrids. At one point during the trip when we mentioned that we liked licorice, we were "tested" by being given the strongest, saltiest licorice that they had.  It wasn't our favorite, but we still liked it; apparently most non-Danes (or at least non-Scandinavians) spit them out. I guess that means that we passed.

There were so many ways to enjoy licorice, and we tried all we could find: sweet licorice, salty licorice, licorice chewing gum (Stimorol, made right in Vejle!), and even two kinds of licorice ice cream. We did lots of sampling while we were there, and brought back as much of the licorice and gummy as we could manage.

On Saturday night we did the unthinkable - we rented a car! Cars are the exception rather than the rule (as they are in the states); perhaps it is the 180% tax that is imposed on buying a car. Yes, that's right - 180%. That is a disincentive if ever I heard of one. Most people bike or take public transit (bus, train), but since making our Sunday day trip to the west coast of Jutland by public transit would have required at least 2 transfers and about 3 hours of traveling, we chose the rental option.

Sunday morning we hopped in our car and headed off towards Ribe, which dates itself back to the 8th century and is dubbed the oldest town in Denmark. Here we explored a Viking museum, enjoyed some Danish "street food" (hot dog shoved in a hollowed baguette with thousand islands dressing), climbed a church tower, wandered the cobblestone streets, and enjoyed the spoils of a Danish bakery - one of many that we patronized during our visit.

At the Viking Museum we all good a good chuckle out of a carving of a Viking-era boy, shown above in the yellow shirt. I guess public urination wasn't frowned upon back then as much as it is today?

From the top of the church in Ribe, it was easy to see how flat Denmark is. The highest point in the country is only ~500ft above sea level.





From Ribe we continued on a little further west to the coast and the town of Blåvand in search of German WWII bunkers. During the war when Germany occupied Denmark, the Germans constructed somewhere around 8,000 concrete bunkers which they used to defend the coastline. After the war many of the bunkers were destroyed but some have survived to this day.


We wandered along several different beaches and peeked into a number of small bunkers. (Note that the horse parts were added by an artist much later and were not part of the original German design.) We had to watch our step along the beach, as there were a fairly large number of jellyfish washed up on shore. Tara took it as her mission to 'save' as many as she could by flinging them back into the ocean with her sandal.

Denmark is also a leader in wind-generated power, with windmills dotting the land- and sea-scape all over the country. I've read that 20% of the power generation in Denmark currently comes from wind sources; I guess that's what you can do when there are no mountains in the way to block the wind.

Our next day trip involved Jason's employer and the reason they moved to this part of the world in the first place: LEGO. The weather on that day was a bit rainy, so we opted to skip LEGOLAND (the LEGO-themed amusement park) and instead took the bus to the LEGO offices. Jason's current project is on LEGO Factory which allows anyone to design their own models from a set of stock parts. As you would imagine, the offices were full of LEGO models just about everywhere you looked. Due to security concerns, we weren't able to tour the actual factory where the bricks are made, but we did get to see huge storage rooms containing bins full of all sorts of LEGO pieces, including a whole room dedicated to parts that are no longer made. We scooted down the wide hallways between rooms on trike-scooters (not made from LEGOs, thankfully), occasionally stopping to use the swings, mini basketball court or one of the other recreational activities scattered throughout the building.

At the end of the tour we were invited to have dinner at the home of Trine & Anders, Danish friends of Tara & Jason. We were pretty excited to get some authentic Danish experiences, and we were not disappointed. The house was lovely, and with a Scandinavian design feel; the food was delicious; and the hosts were delightful. After dinner we spent some time discussing the Danish royal family (by way of a Danish tabloid with lots of photos), then finished off the evening with a traditional Danish dessert called koldskål. Made from a yogurt-like dairy product (something like buttermilk but not quite - ever hear of ymer or A38?), koldskål is traditionally eaten with 'vanilla wafer'-like crumbled cookies, with sliced fruit being a more modern addition. It was delicious, and it was even more fun to listen to Anders and Trine's banter about whose technique was correct.

Our longest day trip was an all day outing to Århus, the largest city in Jutland. We jumped on the train early on Wednesday morning and spent all day walking around the city; we didn't get back to our home base in Vejle until shortly before midnight.

As it turned out, we even had a local contact in Århus. Our Trout Lake neighbor Pat has a daughter and son-in-law who live in Århus. Abby (Pat's daughter) spends some time each summer back in Trout Lake, and as luck would have it that time coincided with our trip. Thankfully her husband Steffen was still in Denmark, and he really went out of his way to make sure that our visit to Århus was enjoyable.

Steffen met us as at the Århus train station and gave us a map of the city, pointing out some of the attractions (including bakeries!) After we had spent a few hours exploring the shops and the Århus Cathedral, he picked us up and drove us to Århus Castle where the royal family was summering. Thus we had an opportunity to see the Danish changing of the guard, though it also meant that we would be unable to tour the castle or its grounds.

After the castle and a short walk through the park with Steffen, he dropped us off at Den Gamle By or "The Olde Towne," which is sort of like a Danish version of Colonial Williamsburg. Old buildings from all over Denmark have been disassembled and transported to create this town. We wandered through the buildings for a while, then grabbed a lunch of Danish meatballs, or frikadeller. (Think Swedish meatballs, only in Denmark.) From there we walked to the ARoS, a world-class art museum, before meeting up with Steffen again for dinner.

From the list of suggested dinner options, we chose the Rådhuus Kafeen for its offer of traditional Danish food. We started with Herring three ways: pickled (white), curried (yellow), and spicy pickled (red), all of which were delicious. Corinne had a hash for her main dish, while Steffen and I both chose the Råduus stew of beef in a paprika sauce. It was all delicious! I think we passed another Scandinavian food test: apparently when Steffen talked to Abby after our visit, one of the first things that he said to her was "They ate the herring!"

After dinner we head back to ARoS one more time, both for the exhibits and for a view of the landscape from the rooftop deck. We said our goodbyes and hopped on the train back to Vejle.

On our final full day in Denmark, we took another walk through the shops and up "the hill" to the Vejle windmill, a landmark than can be seen from many places in town (due to its location on the hill.) There is a small museum inside the windmill, primarily related to the windmill itself, but since all of the displays were entirely in Danish that's about the extent of our knowledge. If I had some knowledge of windmills I could have used some of the displays to learn Danish words, and vice versa. So we just looked at the pretty pictures and enjoyed the view.

Our flight left the following morning at about 6:30am, so of course we stayed up until after midnight eating another delicious meal from our hosts and building a LEGO model. The next morning the taxi arrived sometime before 5am and we were off.

We had a wonderful time on our trip and got to spend lots of time with our hosts. Denmark isn't the most "exciting" place to visit in Europe (no ancient Greek or Roman ruins, or Eiffel Towers, etc.) Everything is very expensive - I would estimate approximately double - and the weak dollar certainly isn't helping that right now. Having said that, we did have a wonderful time and enjoyed all of our experiences with the locals, the food was good, the weather was nice (although we've heard that we got lucky to avoid the humidity). And after all, it's not every country that can claim to be scientifically proven as the Happiest Country On Earth!

- Mike (& Corinne)