Aarhus
We left behind the tiny rooms of Aalborg's hotel "Jomfru Anne" the next morning and stopped for visiting Aarhus, Danemark second biggest city, a short 120 km away.
Before entering the city center, we stopped at "Den Gamle By" ("The Old Town"), an open air museum of village / town architecture and life in Danemark from the 16th to the 20th century. Whole houses, typical of Danish towns from the pre-industrial era were restored and realistically rearranged there.
The interesting thing about Den Gamle By is that one can get a glimpse of life across all Danemark over several centuries. Here you can experience buildings not only from Aarhus but also from Copenhagen (see below) and Aalborg.
One can enter the various houses and meet wax statues displaying the way people occupied the usually tiny spaces available (like: sleeping in wooden boxes up to four or more in 10 square meters)
Of course the important people enjoyed much larger houses, such as the Aarhus Mayor's, whose house, originally built before 1600 in the center of Aarhus, was reconstructed inside the museum area.
Note the use of apparent red bricks in conjunction with the wooden structure, a building technique I don't remember seeing anywhere else.
The most imposing building of the town was the "Mintmaster's Mansion", originally built in Copenhagen in the late 17th century and rebuilt in Den Gamle By with materials from the original.
Because of the Covid pandemic the restaurants were, alas, closed and the general atmosphere was not as lively as one would expect. The interior of the mansion was lushly decorated but not as impressive as, for instance, the Versailles castle (built around the same epoch)
Coffee was a recurring leitmotif of the exhibition. Coffeehouses dot the museum area but were all closed (because of Covid). One learned that, when coffee arrived in Danemark it would be sold by apothicaries (pharmacists), before becoming an item one would buy from a merchant's shop, about one century later.
As one approaches the exit of the "Old Town" modern eras are represented, including a Danish "Ford dealership" from the 1920-ies sporting a few original "Model T"
Sorry, forgot to clean the lens before shooting the picture
After leaving the museum we went for a short walk in the city center and stopped by the Aarhus Cathedral, the tallest and longest in Danemark and one of the tallest in Northern Europe
This was our first visit in Northern Europe and I was a bit surprised to discover that you can build so high out of regular bricks and the resulting building would withstand the tear of several centuries. Cathedrals are usually built of stone in Southern Europe
Another interesting remark was that the interior looked a lot like that of a Catholic church despite Danemark being a protestant country
The explanation is of course that the Dom was built before the Lutheran reformation and, unlike the people of Hamburg, the Danes did not raze the church but simply converted it into a reformed place of worship.
One of the distinctive objects is this big model ship (below). Despite the many Danish flags adorning it (the Danes love their flag), the story goes that the Russian Czar Peter the Great wanted to order a ship be built by Dutch shipbuilders. Instead of sending him drawings of the ship, the Dutch shipmasters built this model and loaded it on a ship bound for Sankt Petersburg. However, that ship was caught in a storm and sank around Skagen. The model ship survived and sailed by itself to the shore where it was salvaged by Danish fishermen and donated to the Aarhus cathedral where it now hangs proudly
Vejle
In order to harmonize the length of our driving periods we had booked a hotel in Vejle, another 70 km to the South. We arrived there in the evening, took our room and went for a quick walk to the sea shore: Vejle is located on a fjord.
Vejle is a beautiful little city of about 40000 inhabitants and, looking back, was probably my favorite stop in Danemark. Among its advantages, it's not far from Billund, the city hosting the original Legoland theme park, which we visited the next day. We stayed 2 nights in Vejle and got to visit it better the third day, before departing, so I'll show you in the next posts more pictures from this jewel of a city.