We had an utterly stunning day. Started off with the national Sex Therapy Clinic. Three staff members welcomed us to their lovely conference room, supplied with the standard coffee, tea, bread, cream cheese, jam and pastries. They say "Danes live to eat; Swedes eat to live; Norwegians eat to drink." Indeed, the Danes make any occasion together an opportunity to take time over food. I haven't seen anyone eating while in motion. People SIT, EAT, TALK. Every clinic we've visited has a complete kitchen.
From there we went to the same park on the Baltic Sea that some of us biked to yesterday. Then we drove up the coast for a brief stop by Isaak Dinesen / Karen Blixen (author of "Out of Africa").
Then we spent the rest of the morning at a leading modern art museum: Louisiana. The museum was built by a wealthy collector of modern art, who had three wives, all named "Louise." Very interesting collection with a great deal of sculpture, including several outdoor Calder stabiles (mobiles that stand on the ground). I took lots of photos, maybe I can upload some of from Grace's camera later. Then we ate lunch at the cafe in the museum. Again — outside by the sea, in the sun. Scrumptious food. For many of us, the best salmon we had ever tasted.
Then further up the coast to Helsingbor, or Elsinore as it was called in Hamlet. This is the castle in which Shakespeare set Hamlet. The site was first used for fortification in 1409, and the castle we saw was built in the early 1600's. This is also the site where Danes ferried Jews 5 miles across the sea to Sweden during the Nazi invasion. The castle was beautiful with moat, thick walls, towers, cannon and a huge inner courtyard. It was very quiet and peaceful here today, with no wind and very little activity. We all liked it very much.
But then we came to the main castle of Denmark — also built by Christian IV in the 1600’s. Oh my gosh! Frederiksborg Castle — “Frederiksporg Slot” in Danish — is huge and ornate beyond imagining. The chapel was saturated with decoration: gold ornamentation on every surface, towering stained glass windows, a beautiful pipe organ. In a balcony level hallway surrounding the chapel, the walls were covered with coats of arms: some of them were very, very old, and some were contemporary, including inductees like Dwight Eisenhower and Winston Churchill.
The great hall was awesome, in size and décor. The walls featured huge portraits of royalty on walls that were covered in needlepoint tapestry. I am staggered when I contemplate the number of people-hours that went into creating the building and its furnishings and then that must have been required to maintain it. One of the most impressive parts of both castles was the inner courtyards. They are so huge and just seem to beg for activity: horses, workers, traders, kids, animals. The place almost seems like a ghost town now. When we came out of Frederiksborg today the clock tower was tolling 5:00pm. The bells were ethereal, and we commented on how many centuries they had been heard. (As I write this right now, I can hear bells ringing 10:00pm here in Copenhagen.)
We wrapped up the day with dinner in the town that is next to the castle — Hillerod. Wonderful Italian food, lots of laughing. Now we are back in our hotel, Hotel Christian IV, and tomorrow we leave Copenhagen for the western part of Denmark, called Jutland.
|
