Round About Rungsted

 Scandinavia, Uncategorized  Comments Off on Round About Rungsted
Aug 032010
 

Our final days and nights were in Rungsted on the Oresund coast, eighteen miles from Copenhagen. Positioned in a six to eight mile radius of the final highlights for our trip, Louisiana, Karen Blixen Museum, Frederiksborg Castle and Kronborg Castle. Rungsted is a tourist coast hamlet for Danes with lots of sailing and affluence. Menus are not in English so we ate with locals or Danish visitors and huddled under umbrellas or dining canopies when it predictably rained every night at dusk. It was a very relaxed atmosphere which was a perfect way to end our glorious trip.

Our bodies are tired and our grateful hearts are headed homeward. We have been deeply affected and inspired by what we have seen, experienced and learned.

Aug 032010
 

Arhus is Denmark’s second largest city and like Copenhagen, it too melds contemporary architecture with the rich historical heritage. An attraction for us to come to Arhus was Den Gamle By–“the old town”–a living history museum founded in 1909 to depict Danish urban history and cultural development. We have visited other open air museums but their focus has been on Danish agrarian life over the last one thousand years.

Here in Den Gamle By buildings and interiors have come from all over Denmark and are clustered together to recreate and demonstrate the development of a typical Danish market town. Most of the buildings are timber-framed Renaissance structures from a period of rapid economic growth when specialty “industries” were established in the downstairs with living quarters above. The joiner,tailor, apothecary, distillary, tobacco merchant and weaver are all here in wonderful and accessible detail enriched by “people of the period” delightfully interacting and sharing details of daily life of the period they represent.

Tomorrow we have the grand finale with a visit to Louisiana,  Denmark’s lovely modern art museum and Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen Museum.  Both are very close to where we have been staying on the Oresund coast.