Denmark and Sweden

I've been up to a lot here in Germany and boy have I seen a lot! Earlier in the week I went to this Vikings Museum which was really cool (plus it was like I had my own personal guide because Horst knows so much about that stuff). It was just outside of Hamburg and was set up something like Fort Edmonton Park. They had created these straw and mud huts just like what the vikings who had a trading post there would have lived in. You got to walk around inside them and look at all the things they would have used. They also had some of their traditional boats on display which were beautiful. There was video which explained everything that happened historically in English but I thought it was kind of funny how the story went. These people (the vikings) worked and worked and the village expanded and grew and grew and then hundreds of years after it was established, after years of hard work and development, an army came in and burned it all down. And it never got going again. So all that work went into it and it was finished in a matter of hours. Sad really. But interesting as well.
The after the museum we went to a smaller town called Schleswig which was across the bay from the museum. This little town was absolutely adorable! I can't even properly express how cute it was in words. I LOVED it! First of all everything was really really old. Some of the houses dated back to the 1600's and so they were these beautiful small buildings painted in bright colors. Stunning in itself but on top of that they were all lined up along water! Many of their yards literally backed onto the bay and they had all these old fishing boats and docks. It really was picture perfect. There was also a main dock set up as well where there were sail boats and some bigger ships docked. But with the sweet houses, cobble stone streets, narrow, windy ways, and the water ooooohhh! it was wonderful.

Now I'm just getting started. Later in the week we went on our real adventure. A roadtrip to Denmark and then up to Sweden! It was so cool! All these countries are so close together and yet they are all so different. It was really neat seeing all that I did and now I have a real idea of what those Scandinavian countries are like (although I did only spend a day and half there.... so I'm sure there's much more to see and learn). It was quite the journey. We went up to Kopenhagen and stayed there for one night and then over to Sweden the following day and then right on down to Hamburg again. Along the way we went across two BIG bridges (one was 15 km long and went both under and over the water) and took two ferry boats. It was so so so cool. And I loved seeing the water everywhere! Growing up in Alberta I realize now I've never really been to the ocean before and definitely not to the sea. So this was very nice. And I regress, back to the beginning. Kopenhagen. What a nice city it is! We weren't there for very long and unfortunately it wasn't particularly warm but it was still absolutely beautiful. There was so much to see and so many magnificent buildings I can't even begin to describe how it was but you can look at my photos and get a little bit of an idea. We were there in the evening and so many of the shops were closed but we did some window shopping. But both Karin and I decided that the shops being closed was probably a good thing because there were so many cute things! Karin said the Scandinavian countries really do a nice job of making unique things and she was right! There were adorable shoes with bows and sparkles and the kids things were to die for cute. They had the sweetest little knit sweaters and small booties, and sleepers, and anything else you can think of. Later on we stopped for dinner in random restaurant which wasn't typical Danish food or anything but was still delicious. And I was happy because I got to eat.....wait for it....NACHOS! I haven't had them or anything with that much flavor for a very long time now and let me tell you, they were DEL-i-cious! And I had a nice cold glass of water with ice. Did you know Europeans don't put ice in anything? Nope. Most houses don't even have an ice cube tray. So that was a nice treat as well. Simple pleasures I guess. Then it was back to the bed and breakfast for the night.
Now this bed and breakfast deserves a paragraph all to itself it was so special. I loved it too! It was a traditional Danish farmhouse. Built in a square with a courtyard in the middle. Traditionally the people would have lived in one side of the house and the animals in the other but now they had it all refurnished into little apartments for people to stay in. It was white and had a straw roof and everything. When you walked in you found yourself in the middle of a beautiful little kitchen and dining area painted a sunny yellow and then you made your way up these little steps to the rooms. Ours was a double room with a single off to the side. And I was lucky enough to have a window which overlooked the fields. It was a very quaint little farm wiht chickens running around and horses in the back and a beautiful little garden in the front. Almost like a little paradise. The only drawback would have been it being right next to the airport but lucky for us (and terrible for the rest of the world) no flights were running because of the volcanic eruption in Iceland. Which by the way is causing quite a bit of headache over here. There are tons of people stranded at the airports and the trains and other modes of transportation are overflowing as people are trying to get to their destinations. And the flights still aren't running yet!
After our lovely stay in Denmark it was onto Sweden! We took big bridge number one across to Sweden. This one was the biggest and was the one that went both over and under the water. I will put up a picture of it for you to see because it was just so cool. I can't even imagine how they went about building something so ginormous! Once you made it across to Sweden things changed again. The architecture of the buildings was a little different and the landscape was too. We stopped in Landskrona and Helsingborg in Sweden and both were nice cities. I saw Ikea there to! In it's homeland and in case you were wondering, it looks exactly the same as the one in Edmonton and Bratislava and Hamburg. We also stopped in a marvelous little sweets shop. The walls were covered in bins and bins of candies from fudge to sugar coated goodness to gummies to hard candies, really anything you could imagine. You took a bag and could fill it with whichever combination you wanted and then in the end they just weigh it and charge you one price for it all so I got my fill of sugar at that stop. Then we climbed to the top of a fortification and looked out over the city. You could see the harbour and the ships and the ferry we took soon after. It was yet another beautiful place.

And after all those adventures, today was a day at home. Which was lovely as well. I slept in, in the morning and played with Jannes and Piet (my two little second cousins). We made pizza together and baked cookies with maple syrup in the afternoon. Much of the day was spent outside as it was a beautiful day of 16 degrees! And tomorrow there is yet another adventure awaiting me. We will go to the Seaside for the day which I am very excited about!

P