Aarhus

After two trips to the gas station, one drive thru stop through the golden arches for a six dollar cup of coffee (don't worry it was a cafe latte) and a couple bathroom breaks, we ended up in a little town called Aspe...oh wait, I mean Aarhus. According to the locals this city is quite large. We found the city to be bigger than Frederikshavn but calling it large is a bit of an overstatement. It took longer to find a parking space than it did to drive through the entire city. Once we found our lovely hotel, Villa Provence, we parked the car at the price of a night in many North American hotels, which should be a lesson to all those looking for travel in Europe...take the train. The hotel was built in the heart of the city and modeled after a French country inn.

The location of the hotel was ideal as we were able to explore the city the European way, on foot. The city revealed many treasures during our exploration. We first headed to a place called Den Gamle By (The Old City). This was an outdoor museum which displayed actual houses dated back as far as the 16th century. Each house was decorated for the holiday season as it would have been during the period from which it came. Also, each house depicted a different trade and how people worked during that time. The experience was enjoyable because it felt as if we were actually in a small town during the middle ages. In America, we never had much history of Denmark during the 16th and 17th century so it was intriguing to see how life was lived without the things we have today. Despite all the fun we had there, we will not request the time machine to transport us back because we would have been dead within two days. Let's face it, we are spoiled living in the 21st century.

After Den Gamle By, we took a stroll around the city on the pedestrian street. You may be wondering what a pedestrian street is, well, this is the one concept we want to take back to North America. The pedestrian street is for walkers only (Elizabeth no longer has pedestrian stress). All cities in Denmark have a pedestrian street, many of them have multiple streets. The big cities, the streets can span up to five miles. This particular walking street is lined on both sides with shops, boutiques, and restaurants. During the holiday season, the street is ordainly decorated with lights and Christmas trees, and if you are in the mood, you can purchase some cinnamon roasted nuts from one of the various vendors along the street. As we dodged the mega shoppers we took some time to relax and window shop until we had to get ready for our fine dining experience at Seafood restaurant. Yes, they did serve fish at this restaurant and yes, this was the actual name.

Now, we don't need to go into heavy detail about each course at the restaurant, but we did want to share about the choice of dessert. Since we can't read Danish too well (thanks to our teacher), we picked both options for the dessert thinking that it would be nice if we were able to taste each others selection. This turned out to be a disaster. One of us ordered what the waitress called chocolate cake and the other ordered what the waitress called cheese. Growing up in America, we assume dessert will be something sweet and tasty. When the waitress brought out the word cheese, Elizabeth and I incorrectly guessed that it would be some form of a cheese cake. Wow, we were wrong. You could smell our dessert the minute it came out of the kitchen. To our amazement the plate consisted of a variety of cheese with some olives. Two of the cheeses made me want to puke, two more of them smelled so bad I had to check my pants to see if something was there, and the last two were edible only if I hadn't cracked my tooth on the un-pitted olives that came with the cheese. I guess the next time we see the word "ost" on our dessert menu we will happily avoid it like I would if I read liver and onions instead. Fortunately, the other dessert wasn't half bad and we left the place with a very positive experience.

This was our first official "trip" away from the friendly confines of home. It was good to just get away and see something different for a change of pace. We conquered Aarhus, next is Christmas in Copenhagen. This trip will feature a couple new characters and some more classic adventures. Stay tuned.