Well, we arrived in Aarhus Tuesday afternoon and checked into a site about 9 kilometres out of the town. The people in reception were very nice and spoke good English. That made a change as in northern Germany we found not many people did! We had intended going into town but at 4.00 pm we made a half-hearted walk for the bus and then decided it could wait till tomorrow. Lynne is suffering with pain in her neck and feeling a bit low so I understand her wanting to relax.
Unfortunately the following morning she was worse and we started looking at the possibility of finding a doctor. In the end she decided just to take painkillers and see how it goes. We walked toward the bus stop intending to go to the town. As soon as we were out the gate I could see we had just missed a bus and had no idea when the next one would come along so we started walking and wouldn’t you know it, in-between bus stops we missed another!
By now we were approaching a huge Ikea store at the side of the road into Aarhus. Ooh we could go and get a toilet roll holder she say’s. Now now, lets not get carried away with all this fun we’re having shall we. Yes, we went into Ikea to buy a toilet roll holder! How frigging sad is that? It took ages to find and I was slowly losing the will to live but eventually we exited Ikea and you guessed it, yes, it was chucking it down with rain!!
Long story short, we made it into Aarhus on the number 117 bus and headed straight for the open air museum. It had stopped raining and was actually quite pleasant as we made our way there. There are buildings in the open air museum that would have been built-in the 1600s. You can see representations of life in 1927 as well as a small district depicting 1970s Denmark. I don’t quite know what I expected but I was slightly disappointed to find that a lot of the houses were reconstructed after being moved from other parts of Denmark. I had seen photo’s and always thought it was a genuinely old, pretty part of the town. I took photos but the only one I really liked at all was one I managed to get without any of the many other tourists in it.
Nevertheless it’s a fascinating display and we spent a good couple of hours wandering round.
Aarhus was proving to be a bit of a disappointment all round really. From first impressions during the bus ride of particularly uninspiring urban neighbourhoods dominated by miserable looking apartment blocks on the outskirts of town to some pretty drab area’s nearer the centre. I really had wanted to like it because our only reason for visiting was that my mom (who’s no longer with us) was born here but so far I wasn’t loving it!
However, after leaving the open air museum we walked back towards the main town centre and found a shopping area that seemed quite vibrant with lots of places to eat. We eventually sat down to eat at an outdoor restaurant on a street called Aboulevarden with a river running alongside through the town. It’s a bit like Broad Street in Birmingham with the whole street lined with restaurants. We sat and watched the seagulls raiding table for leftover scraps of food. Some didn’t wait for scraps though, and we saw one person lose a whole burger to a large gull. He didn’t seem interested in the salad part though so the floor was strewn with pieces of lettuce and cucumber when he finished! We had a really nice meal there although I was slightly taken aback by having to pay before the food was on the table, is that normal in Denmark? Not a clue but it seemed strange to me.
So the town redeemed itself in the end after we had wandered around these brighter areas and then down by the harbour. Of course the sun coming out made all the difference too. We started back towards the bus station as we were both knackered after so much walking. My iPhone says we walked a total of 11.5 kilometres today. Also Lynne was still suffering with a pain in the neck (no not me) so we made our way back to relax for the evening.
Wandering Wildman 