We decided today was our day trip day, and the Castle of Elsinore, as featured in Hamlet, was a short train ride away.
We got our train cards and accurately punched them, and headed to Helsingor. It is right across the sound from Sweden, and it has been the place where we've had the most "trouble" with English. (We had to point for our treats this afternoon at a grocery store's bakery.)
We grabbed a map at the tourist information center, and headed for Kornborg Slot (the castle's actual name.) We quickly joined up with a tour that tried to tie together Hamlet and the castle as much as possible.
The sad part is, Hamlet doesn't really exist (though an "Amlet" might), and he definitely did not live in this castle. (They were separated by a couple hundred years.) Shakespeare might have heard of or visited Frederick the Second when he was around, but the castle was fairly new at that point.
Though the castle was new, having a fort guarding the entrance into Northern Europe was anything but. Good old Bishop Absalon came up to Helsingor (we're guessing after he got kicked out of Copenhagen). Whoever had the channel could enforce the "sound dues," and get money from the traders going by.
Now, what have we learned about anything awesome in Denmark? It burns down. So in 1629, it caught on fire. The next king rebuilt it, but it is much simpler than it would have been. No garnished ceilings or fully tapestried walls.
After peeking around the royal apartments and the small cathedral, we took a brief (thankfully) tour inside the casements. I'm not sure I've ever really known what a casement was, but it's like a basement for soldiers, I believe.
We first went to an antechamber where there was a statue of Holger Danske, the legend of Denmark. It is said that when Denmark is attacked, he will wake up and protect it. (Didn't really work during the occupation by Germany, but there was a resistance movement called the Holger Danske that donated the statue that we saw.)
We kept going down, and we kept getting colder. The tour guide told us that it was 4 degrees and got down to -5 in the winter. That translates to cold and really cold in Fahrenheit.
We had a batch of disappointments after leaving the castle. The nunnery (ok, church with a monastery attached, but taking some creative license here) was closed Mondays. The other palace was closed indefinitely (darn scaffolding). There was a pretty park and a pretty overlook that made things better.
We tried herring the other day. Not too bad, but pretty salty. And it must be a trend (or we ended up at a really bad restaurant), because the pizzas we had for lunch were practically inedible.
However, a stroll down their pedestrian mall, and some rum balls (I think), and we were feeling good and ready to head back to Copenhagen.
After an hour or so of having our brains leak out our ears watching MTV in the hotel room, we were back on the streets of Copenhagen (though not in the sense of all the women we see on the corners near our hotel - but don't worry, it's perfectly safe). We headed to the Library Bar, in a posh hotel by the train station.
I enjoy talking to people, and having Alisa around is nice, but half the fun of traveling is having one-night-stand conversations with strangers. So I walked over to an old English couple and started a conversation. They invited us to join their table, and a few hours later, we said our goodbyes. They said they'd meet us at breakfast, and that's when we broke it to them that we were staying in a hotel in a far different budget... We still had a 7-11 trip to finish up our night.
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