Denmark

(Copenhagen | Odense/Egeskov Slot | Legoland)

(Click on any picture to get a larger version of that image.)

	Copenhagen After checking in at the hostel, I rode very futuristic-looking mass-transit into the city. The first thing that greeted me coming out of the station was this mass of bikes — anyplace with this many bicycles can't possibly be bad. (The crowd of bicycles was even thicker around the main train station!)
		Copenhagen's signature little mermaid, looking out over industrial sprawl in the harbor (and surrounded by chain-smoking Japanese tourists trying to get that one perfect shot that nobody else had found yet).
	Near the mermaid was the Kastellet, a former 17th century fort-turned-park; joggers were running along the berm of its outer wall.		A church on the other side of the Kastellet.
	Tivoli That evening, I went to Tivoli Gardens, the 19th-century amusement park in the city center. After dark, everything was spectacularly lit by colored lights, capped by a fireworks display.

My hostel in Copenhagen (HI Vandrerhjem Amager), the first of many amazing hostel experiences during this trip. (Because they were so good, hostels had a mix of people — families and the elderly — rather than just being full of annoying American college students on summer break.)

Odense/Egeskov Slot
	After Copenhagen, I went to Norway. Coming back from Norway on my return to Hamburg, I stayed the night in Odense, a city whose main claim to fame is as the birthplace of Hans Christian Andersen. (And for the traveller, it also has a very nice new hostel, with a multiscreen movie theater showing subtitled English-language movies right next door.)
After staying the night at Odense, I continued south to visit Egeskov Slot (Castle), because it was on the way to Legoland (relatively speaking) and had received impressive promotion in Let's Go: Europe. What I found was a tourist trap attempting to grow into a theme park: a bunch of unrelated items (a motorcycle and car museum, a children's playground, an incredibly schlocky "Dracula's Castle") centered around Egeskov Castle, a 450-year-old "floating castle" built on top of oak pilings in the middle of a lake.
	Actually entering the castle cost again as much as a ticket to enter the park; being short on time, I elected not to pay the fee.	The Egeskov auto museum did have one redeeming feature: my two favorite German microcars, the BMW Isetta and the Messerschmitt KR200, appearing side-by-side!

	Legoland Billund
	I once again saw many of the European sights I'd seen over the past six months, only this time done in Lego, like the model of Neuschwanstein Castle to left.
		I also saw Berlin's Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche and revisited Bergen a few days after seeing the real thing.

In addition to the scenic wonders of the world, there were also such technical wonders as a Lego railway, a Lego oil derrick, and a Lego version of the Frankfurt airport.
To keep things in line with peoples' traditional expectations of an amusement park, there were also rides and stage shows (entertaining just in the fact that everything had to be done in pantomime, as they couldn't count on their audience understanding a particular language).

This page maintained by Kevin Hogan <khogan@Adobe.COM>.
If you enjoyed it, you might like to see pictures of my other European travels.

Last updated on March 30, 2001