Painting with light

Just a quick post to say I've uploaded a bunch of photos to Flickr of my Scandinavian adventure.

These are my favourite photos, I may add some more later but these capture the essence of the journey.

Click here to see the album

Click the LINK. geddit?

Keep Danish and carry on

We arrived in Copenhagen on our second day with a long time to explore.

We decided to follow the method we had taken in brussels and cologne of navigating unknown cities using tall buildings and spires. Unfortunately this method wasn't that useful in Copenhagen as there were next to no tall buildings, and hundreds of spires!

We'd head towards what we thought was a church we had spotted earlier, and find that it was actually a parliament building, museum or another church! We eventually picked up a rough guide to Copenhagen and headed north towards an old barracks in the hope of finding the statue of The Little Mermaid, based on the story by Hans Christian Anderson.
The original story is a bit different to the disney version; although it does include a prince and the mermaid falling in love with him, her changing into a human thanks to a sorceress, she dies of cold in the harbour after failing to make the prince fall in love with her.
The statue was surrounded by tourists taking photos of her, some even braving the slippery rocks to stand next to her to have their photo taken with the tragic figure.

Copenhagen is a city steeped in so much history, and seemingly containing so many historic buildings and royal residences that we were only able to scratch the surface of what the city had to offer. Luckily though we were able, later on in the trip, to spend a day exploring the city a bit more.

One thing we did come across which is worthy of comment, is that on our way to ind the little mermaid and the barracks, we discovered an interesting sport. In what we supposed to be the old part of town due to its abundance of tradition-style buildings, cobbled roads and wooden boats, was a small rectangular harbour where sounds of wood being hit against wood could be heard.
As we went towards the waters edge where a large crown had gathered we discovered a circle of men in wetsuits floating in the river hitting a small wooden barrel with a stick. The barrel was suspended from the bow of a boat so it was some form of Piñata, which we found was not filled with sweets or keepsakes, but with inflated balloons! We're not sure whether the barrel and balloons were significant, if there is any historical reason for playing this game while floating in a river, but it was certainly entertaining and drew a largish crowd (most of whom seemed to be english!)
We realised we were hungry at this point so we halted our search for the little mermaid and went into an old and danish-looking pub for some fishy dishes, of which there were many to choose from! There was a small translation error with Marylise's order when she chose the three fish baguette thinking that you chose one of the three fish listed, but it didn't matter in the end as it was all really good food.

We didn't spend the night in Copenhagen, but journeyed to our fourth country, Sweden, and stayed in a youth hostel in Malmo. Supposedly Malmo has a reputation for being one of the roughest of the cities in Sweden, but we found it quite typical of a scandinavian city. This was our first night in a hostel, and it was quite plush.We had a 4-bed room to ourselves, the beds were very soft and we were able to have a shower! This was also the hostel with the best kitchen, which was about the same size as the eating area, which is probably overkill but allowed three groups to cook at once, something we were to wish for later on!

After a good nights sleep, we continued on our journey to Norway.

Here today...

Brussels from high up

The first night of our great journey was spent in slightly less auspicious surroundings than you might expect, it was in a small flat in Surbiton, south London, rented by tom, whose idea it was that we should undertake such a journey. Surbiton has a reputation for being a boring and purely functional town, as it has no centre, no high street and is devoid of any buildings that display an inkling of character. Luckily Surbiton was just somewhere to sleep and therefore we didn't have to spend much time there.

Welcome to the Tin Tin shop!

It was at the beginning of this first night that I met a third of our travelling party, a french girl called Marylise who knew Tom through university. If I had paid more attention to Tom's time at uni I might have known more about her before spending a whole two weeks in close proximity. But even though Tom had written a play about his time in uni, which I was involved in, all I knew about Marylise was that she was french.

We made good time on our first full day, leaving surbiton on the first train of the day, arrived early at St Pancras with plenty of time to check in at the Eurostar. I had a sharp awakening when I forgot to take my belt off before going through the metal detector and was promptly frisked by a big black security guard who, when he had finished, gave me a cheeky grin and a Thank You for my co-operation and gestured for me to carry on through. I gave my own thanks to him for a thorough job and carried on quite awake now, despite it being so early in the morning.
We travelled through France barely without realising it and arrived in Brussels with a short stopover, granting us enough time for a cursory walk around the city, deciding to strike out from the station without a map and just navigating using tall buildings and spires. We found the old quarter eventually, by following the old city walls, and had ourselves a celebratory genuine Belgian Waffle near to a local landmark of a small statue of a boy weeing into a pond. (He apparently has over 600 costumes that mark national holidays, events and any other excuse to dress up.)

Belgium is the birthplace of a very well-known cartoon character who has many books, a TV series and most recently a film, he has been to the bottom of the ocean, into space, across seas and deserts and always up for an adventure with his friends. Since the first Tin Tin comic strips appeared in newspapers, he has been embraced by the people and Brussels is littered with lots of touristy Tin Tin knick-nacks, artwork and the official Tin Tin shop!

After two or three hours wandering around, we caught a train to Cologne where we were plunged suddenly into the middle of a carnival! The man in the ticket office wasn't able to tell us what was being celebrated, and there was a conspicuous absence of advertising or even police, but it was all very good natured. The general theme seemed to be that there wasn't a theme, you just dressed up in/as whatever you wanted, perhaps drank some beer, join a spontaneous drumming collective or have a sing-song outside an irish-themed pub.

One drumming group's human metronome

There are too many photos of all the costumes to put in this post, so when I get round to uploading all the photos into a public domain, I'll put up a link on here as well.

Unfortunately we only had a few hours in Cologne before catching our first overnight "sleeper" train. We weren't feeling rich enough to spend €40 on a cabin bed, so had to try and sleep in a small cabin of upright seats, with two ladies who didn't speak english. A fitful night of half-consciousness and being shunted as the train split into three at Hamburg meant that we were starting the holiday with a sleep debt!

It was strange to think that at 5pm the previous day I was in work in Cardiff, and just 24 hours later I had already been through England, France and Belgium and was waiting in Western Germany for a train to Denmark!

Next time: The Little mermaid, canal-based piñatas and the first glimpse of snow.