gollygoshgumgoonz: Gingerbread houses and concentration bloks

We arrived in Copenhagen at midday, 30^th January. We were to discover:

· It really was freezing in Denmark in late January - 1°C to be precice

· The coffee is excellent (Phew)

· The style in a basic hotel lives up to the Danish reputation, check out the alpha-world map headboard in the Zleep hotel we stayed in on our first night in Danishland…

With four suitcases to lug around in the misty cold of winter, we didn’t stop for sightseeing. Our first full day in the new land was spent catching busses and trains firstly to the state administration to begin the process of getting ourselves registered (in order to receive our personal identification cards and gain access to public services), and secondly, to get to Horsens, and to our new home – a top floor flat in one of several blocks of flats that sit right next to the university.

From the outside it looks a bit stark and bleak, especially in winter where the trees are just skeletons, and the sky is grey.

But inside the rooms are light and bright and very warm with central heating throughout.

The past few days have been spent shopping to see what’s on offer and to buy some supplies. Like bedding, and towels, and toilet paper…

Food wise, we have mostly been happy with the fruit and the vegetables, and the amazing seeded buns and ‘sandwiches’ (filled seeded buns), not to mention the mouth-watering ‘weinerbrod’ (Danish pastries) which have lived up to all expectations so far with some kind of baked almond paste with jam in a sweet pastry…

However we have had a couple of mishaps.

Today I bought a wee packet of sliced cheese to go with a couple of seeded buns I bought for the road – we had planned a trip to Aarhus to visit the humongous IKEA. Once we were on the train, I got the buns out and pulled them apart for the cheese, then opened the cheese...

Wow. It utterly reeked with what we could only imagine a rotting festering piece of dead flesh could smell like. I wrapped it back again and buried it in the plastic shopping bag, then a plastic rubbish bag, and we still couldn’t get the smell out of our nostrils. Barry chucked the thrice wrapped bundle into a vacant seat and it went straight into the first rubbish bin we saw upon arrival at Aarhus.

Not long after that we were at the Aarhus central library café where I ordered what Barry described as a ‘Turd’. Yes it looked like one but it was actually a Rugboller chocolat and ablet (chocolate and apple rye bun). How bad could it be?

It was bad. In fact it tasted like half cooked bread that had also gone soggy with some bitter cocoa nibs, no sugar at all so no sweetness to speak of, and bland apple bits clumped at the bottom. Turd was pretty much accurate and the turd was turfed pretty quickly.

So onto the nicer discoveries, such as how all the houses (that are not blocks of flats – which are all pretty much of the same stark style as ours) look like gingerbread houses. We have yet to learn more about the age and history of Horsens but many of them look like they are hundreds of years old.

Some are separate, some are grand and embellished and there rows of different sized and coloured houses all next to each other like something from a children’s storybook.

I’ve started taking hundreds of photos of these quirky quaint, wonky little and big houses but can imagine how much lovelier they will all look when its brighter and sunnier and the trees are full of greenery and the well-tended gardens full of bloom. I can hardly wait.
Here are some photos of Denmark so far...