8 July, On the Road to Aarhus

Checked out of the Palace Hotel and taxi'd the short distance to the Budget rental office, which turned out to also be the Avis office. While going through the rental formalities we learned the proper pronunciation of our destination, Aarhus: it's about oar-us, rhymes with chorus or Horace. (The Danes seem to write a lot more letters than they actually pronounce. I'm sure they'd appreciate our telling them so.)

So for three days we have an Opel Mokka, a small SUV a bit larger than a VW Golf. It's a diesel and a slug for acceleration but quite nice otherwise. Anyway, traveling on our own by car feels very free and convenient.

Update: Here's a map of where we went today.

Louisiana

Our first destination, after getting clear of Copenhagen, was Louisiana, a popular museum of modern art that all our guidebooks said was a must-see, just 25Km north of the city. We got there just at opening time and found quite a queue waiting to get in.

The ticket sellers were very efficient and we were inside within minutes.

The museum starts in a central country house but it rambles on in all directions for hundreds of yards, partly underground, around a triangular sculpture garden (above).

(Why Louisiana? Because the original property owner in 1855 had married three successive wives who were all named Louise. So obviously...)

They have a lot of sculpture, a whole gallery of Giacometti for example, and lots of modern and post-modern works, many of which didn't interest us.

The special exhibition just now was a large (hundreds of pieces?) retrospective of the career of Emil Nolde (Wikipedia is your friend), 1867-1956, an influential German/Danish painter whom we, naturally, had never heard of. In his long career he went through a lot of styles. When very young he was an impressionist, and we liked this one from that period:

Because we are so sentimental...

Then he did a lot of things that were, frankly, ugly. But somewhere in the middle he started doing watercolors of flowers. He used wet paper and dilute paints to get amazing translucent colors. There was a wall of these,

Of which we took a close-up of this one, just before a guard told us sharply that photography wasn't allowed.

Worth clicking-through for the full version.

We had a very nice lunch there, sharing a Danish-style open-face chicken salad sandwich and a piece of strawberry tart, then headed for stop #2, at the...

Testament to Excess

...more formally known as Frederiksborg Castle. Here's the front view.

What happens when you have too many bricks for your own good.

We decided that this figure in the fountain represents the goddess Ceres (note the sickle) and she is about to fillet the ugliest fish in the world.

So proceed into the front courtyard:

On your knees, peasant.

Although how, in all the neo-classical stuff, did this bit of humor sneak in?

"Do you want me to step down from here and give you what-for?"

There are three floors and we learned there was a lift hiding in a corner, so we went to the top and worked down. Your jaw drops in the first of the 57 numbered rooms, and keeps dropping. There is room after room after room packed with the most incredible antiques, fabulously valuable inlaid and gilded and carved thing-um-a-bobs large and small, and hundreds of paintings of people with long noses and curly wigs. What makes it astonishing is how close you can get to these things. There's no rope, you can walk right up to anything and peer at it.

Any idea of taking pictures went out the window in the first room; there is just too much to give any idea. Well, here's one; we took this because the frame of this life-size portrait was just so over the top:

There are two main rooms to see. First, the Great Hall. The expanse of it was hard to see because it was now full of exhibits from the life of the Prince Consort, who passed away just last month.

Here, as everywhere, the rule was that if a surface wasn't painted, gilded, or carved, it was hidden by tapestry. Here's one of the chandeliers:

Click through and revel in the details.

Then there's the chapel.

Here's the organ.

Onward!

So then we rolled on about 70Km to our night's stop, a B&B in the town of Nykøbing. We landed here almost by accident. Tomorrow morning we have a reservation for a long ferryboat ride, so we used Booking.com to find something close to the ferry terminal. We asked our friendly hosts for a supper recommendation and they sent us down to a restaurant named Madkunsten, literally, The Art of Food. They specialize in fresh and regional ingredients etc. Dinner was actually more expensive than in Copenhagen, but it was really good: a large flattish mild-tasting fish served whole with little potatoes and a lemony sauce. And panna cotta with fresh strawberries for desert.