MC and Bugshaw Head to Denmark
Aug. 29th, 2005 11:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
major_clangerWorldcon was over; our brains were frazzled; we had not much holiday spare. A weekend break was thus called for - but where to go?
"When I was little", said I, "we used to go to Denmark..."
Århus (sometimes rendered as Aarhus) is noted in our Lonely Planet guide to Denmark as being 'the world's smallest big city'. That's a good description; Århus feels like it has the quote of bars, restaurants, museums and shops of a fairly respectable city but condensed into a town about the size of Oxford. You can walk across the town centre in fifteen minutes, but you could happily spend a month exploring.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bugshaw and I had two and a half days (and were trying to relax!) but it was nice to feel that you were in a place that was cosy and compact whilst having much more to offer if you wanted to go and look.
Why Århus? I was taken to Denmark several times as a child: on weekend trips to the North Sea port town of Esbjerg when I was six or so, and then for a week on a farmhouse B&B near the small town of Billund (home of the original Legoland) as a teenager. Denmark always figured pleasantly in my memory, clean and modern yet friendly in a perhaps stereotypically Scandinavian way, but somewhere I always wanted to return to. Århus was somewhere I'd never actually visited, but had very positive reviews as a good base from which to experience Denmark; it was also easy and fairly cheap to get to from Stansted. So, when it came to finding a short post-Worldcon getaway, Århus ended up on top of our list.
Århus was certainly easy to get to. The airport is some distance from the town, but is very small and we were very quickly out onto the bus for the 45-minute trip to the town centre. We were dropped off at the railway station, from where it was a few minutes' walk up to the central plaza where our hotel was located. Here was our first slight glitch of the trip: our room turned out to be a twin. On asking, we found that all the hotel's rooms are twins. I suspect that in fact some rooms had two singles next to one another, but in ours they were firmly set on opposite sides of a room that was clearly modelled on a (albeit quite nice) ferry cabin. Moral: when booking via Expedia, check what the local interpretation of 'double room' is!
The hotel's location was superb though: facing the central plaza and Århus' cathedral on one side, and backing onto the cafe-lined River Århus on the other.
We had a nice lunch, a pleasant wander around the back streets of Århus' shopping district, and a very pleasant dinner. It was a good thing we were flying and had limited ourselves to hand baggage only, as otherwise various interior design shops might have been quite badly raided...
For Saturday, we'd planned to take the bus south a few km to Moesgård, home of an archaeological museum and a nature walk to the local beach. The bus trip should have been very straightforward, as the Museum was the last stop on the route. Nonetheless, we kept a careful eye on the signs at each stop to make sure we didn't miss it. Now, Danish bus stop signs - at least near Århus - have the route destination on top and the stop name underneath. So when we pulled up at one with just 'Moesgård Museum' on, we thought we'd clearly arrived. OK, all there was to see was a path leading over a small hill, but we assumed the museum must be on the other side. As we got off, the driver said something in Danish, but we didn't quite catch it. Feeling pleased for navigating the Danish public transport museum, we strode up the path... and found ourselves next to the club house of a golf course. On going back and looking closely at the sign, it said (in very small letters on the timetable) 'Golf'.
At this point it occurred to us that the driver had probably said "you do know this is the golf course, don't you?"
The buses being fairly frequent, we decided to stay put and enjoy our brief sit in the Danish countryside before catching the next one and riding one more stop to, yes, the museum itself. The Moesgård Museum turned out to have a good exhibit on local history from the Iron Age to early medieval times, with the highlight being the fascinating if rather macabre Grauballe Man, a preserved 'bog body' from circa 300 BCE. From the Museum, there's a 5km or so walk through woods and fields down to the beach and back, featuring a number of reconstructed examples of burial mounds and buildings from various stages of Danish history. It certainly helped us work off the previous day's dinner: Denmark, certainly around Århus, is a good example of the difference between 'flat' and 'has no high terrain'. At the end of the tour, near a reconstructed Viking-era church (the exhibition made it clear that the Vikings were very nice really, and shouldn't be judged by the behaviour of their away team) we found a few decidedly non-Viking artefacts; no explanation was given, but I worry thatbugshaw had been Inspired.
Sunday we staying in Århus, starting off at ARoS, the new Art Museum. Architecturally it's staggering, a superb example of brutalism done properly. From outside it looks like a vast red-brick cube, but as you approach you see the huge curving vertical slice through the building, splitting each floor into two gallery areas with an airy atrium between them. The collection itself started off with a brief nod to traditional Danish painting (much of which can be summed up as 'groups of people looking glum') before diving into modern art. The collection was of a very high standard (a fair bit of Warhol); as with most modern art, I found that most did little for me, some was awful but a small but significant element really connected with me. I suspect that this is true for most enthusiasts for modern art - the important point being that the 'good' fraction is different for everyone.
From ARoS we walked to Den Gamle By, a collection of reconstructed and relocated Danish buildings from the 17th to 19th centuries run as a sort of folk-museum-cum-reenactment. It was interesting enough to look round for a while, although the place seems a little unsure if it's trying to be a theme park, a museum or a living history project. [It also didn't help that as we arrived so did several coachloads of the loudest sort of retiree American tourist. Fair enough, I suspect they were on some sort of cruise or tour and were only briefly in Denmark. But it does grate to repeatedly hear loud US accents asking "Do you take Dollars?" - come on, people, some of the rest of the world has its own currency.] We escaped to spend a couple of hours having a relaxing read in the town botanic gardens (bugshaw with some Ian McDonald, I made do with OU revision) before wandering gently back to the town centre via a pleasant cafe before our trip back home.
So, would we recommend Århus for a visit? Very definitely! There's a lot to see and do in a nice compact area, and the town has a very friendly atmosphere. Our trip coincided with the annual town festival, which featured vast amounts of street partying but in (by UK standards) an amazingly mild-mannered and well-behaved manner. I'd definitely like to go back sometime, although if we did I might take the ferry and drive over (more space to bring back shopping) and also try to learn a bit more Danish. Not because the locals don't speak English - almost all of them do, usually very well - but I always feel a bit awkward being limited to 'hello', 'thank you' and 'do you have a menu in English?'...
"When I was little", said I, "we used to go to Denmark..."
Århus (sometimes rendered as Aarhus) is noted in our Lonely Planet guide to Denmark as being 'the world's smallest big city'. That's a good description; Århus feels like it has the quote of bars, restaurants, museums and shops of a fairly respectable city but condensed into a town about the size of Oxford. You can walk across the town centre in fifteen minutes, but you could happily spend a month exploring.
bugshaw and I had two and a half days (and were trying to relax!) but it was nice to feel that you were in a place that was cosy and compact whilst having much more to offer if you wanted to go and look.Why Århus? I was taken to Denmark several times as a child: on weekend trips to the North Sea port town of Esbjerg when I was six or so, and then for a week on a farmhouse B&B near the small town of Billund (home of the original Legoland) as a teenager. Denmark always figured pleasantly in my memory, clean and modern yet friendly in a perhaps stereotypically Scandinavian way, but somewhere I always wanted to return to. Århus was somewhere I'd never actually visited, but had very positive reviews as a good base from which to experience Denmark; it was also easy and fairly cheap to get to from Stansted. So, when it came to finding a short post-Worldcon getaway, Århus ended up on top of our list.
Århus was certainly easy to get to. The airport is some distance from the town, but is very small and we were very quickly out onto the bus for the 45-minute trip to the town centre. We were dropped off at the railway station, from where it was a few minutes' walk up to the central plaza where our hotel was located. Here was our first slight glitch of the trip: our room turned out to be a twin. On asking, we found that all the hotel's rooms are twins. I suspect that in fact some rooms had two singles next to one another, but in ours they were firmly set on opposite sides of a room that was clearly modelled on a (albeit quite nice) ferry cabin. Moral: when booking via Expedia, check what the local interpretation of 'double room' is!
The hotel's location was superb though: facing the central plaza and Århus' cathedral on one side, and backing onto the cafe-lined River Århus on the other.
We had a nice lunch, a pleasant wander around the back streets of Århus' shopping district, and a very pleasant dinner. It was a good thing we were flying and had limited ourselves to hand baggage only, as otherwise various interior design shops might have been quite badly raided...
For Saturday, we'd planned to take the bus south a few km to Moesgård, home of an archaeological museum and a nature walk to the local beach. The bus trip should have been very straightforward, as the Museum was the last stop on the route. Nonetheless, we kept a careful eye on the signs at each stop to make sure we didn't miss it. Now, Danish bus stop signs - at least near Århus - have the route destination on top and the stop name underneath. So when we pulled up at one with just 'Moesgård Museum' on, we thought we'd clearly arrived. OK, all there was to see was a path leading over a small hill, but we assumed the museum must be on the other side. As we got off, the driver said something in Danish, but we didn't quite catch it. Feeling pleased for navigating the Danish public transport museum, we strode up the path... and found ourselves next to the club house of a golf course. On going back and looking closely at the sign, it said (in very small letters on the timetable) 'Golf'.
At this point it occurred to us that the driver had probably said "you do know this is the golf course, don't you?"
The buses being fairly frequent, we decided to stay put and enjoy our brief sit in the Danish countryside before catching the next one and riding one more stop to, yes, the museum itself. The Moesgård Museum turned out to have a good exhibit on local history from the Iron Age to early medieval times, with the highlight being the fascinating if rather macabre Grauballe Man, a preserved 'bog body' from circa 300 BCE. From the Museum, there's a 5km or so walk through woods and fields down to the beach and back, featuring a number of reconstructed examples of burial mounds and buildings from various stages of Danish history. It certainly helped us work off the previous day's dinner: Denmark, certainly around Århus, is a good example of the difference between 'flat' and 'has no high terrain'. At the end of the tour, near a reconstructed Viking-era church (the exhibition made it clear that the Vikings were very nice really, and shouldn't be judged by the behaviour of their away team) we found a few decidedly non-Viking artefacts; no explanation was given, but I worry that
bugshaw had been Inspired.Sunday we staying in Århus, starting off at ARoS, the new Art Museum. Architecturally it's staggering, a superb example of brutalism done properly. From outside it looks like a vast red-brick cube, but as you approach you see the huge curving vertical slice through the building, splitting each floor into two gallery areas with an airy atrium between them. The collection itself started off with a brief nod to traditional Danish painting (much of which can be summed up as 'groups of people looking glum') before diving into modern art. The collection was of a very high standard (a fair bit of Warhol); as with most modern art, I found that most did little for me, some was awful but a small but significant element really connected with me. I suspect that this is true for most enthusiasts for modern art - the important point being that the 'good' fraction is different for everyone.
From ARoS we walked to Den Gamle By, a collection of reconstructed and relocated Danish buildings from the 17th to 19th centuries run as a sort of folk-museum-cum-reenactment. It was interesting enough to look round for a while, although the place seems a little unsure if it's trying to be a theme park, a museum or a living history project. [It also didn't help that as we arrived so did several coachloads of the loudest sort of retiree American tourist. Fair enough, I suspect they were on some sort of cruise or tour and were only briefly in Denmark. But it does grate to repeatedly hear loud US accents asking "Do you take Dollars?" - come on, people, some of the rest of the world has its own currency.] We escaped to spend a couple of hours having a relaxing read in the town botanic gardens (
bugshaw with some Ian McDonald, I made do with OU revision) before wandering gently back to the town centre via a pleasant cafe before our trip back home.So, would we recommend Århus for a visit? Very definitely! There's a lot to see and do in a nice compact area, and the town has a very friendly atmosphere. Our trip coincided with the annual town festival, which featured vast amounts of street partying but in (by UK standards) an amazingly mild-mannered and well-behaved manner. I'd definitely like to go back sometime, although if we did I might take the ferry and drive over (more space to bring back shopping) and also try to learn a bit more Danish. Not because the locals don't speak English - almost all of them do, usually very well - but I always feel a bit awkward being limited to 'hello', 'thank you' and 'do you have a menu in English?'...
