Trip Report: Denmark, Day 4

On day four we took the train to Roskilde, about 30 minutes, to see the two main tourist sites in that town. 

This isn't one of them.

The first is the Viking Ships Museum. In the 1950s, scientists discovered five Viking ships that had been intentionally sunk in Roskilde Fjord to prevent invaders from using the shipping channel. They started a long process of bringing up the ships and restoring them, and today they are in this building right here.

There's also a big outdoor area where they work on using Viking techniques to reconstruct ships and there are a bunch of activities you can do if you have children and need to entertain them. Rope weaving and such,

It was a beautiful day, although chilly and windy. In general we did a poor job of packing for this trip and we each bought a new sweater at H&M one day to compensate. It's hard to recall what 62 windy degrees feels like after four months of heat and humidity.

Here they are working on building a new boat according to the specifications of one of the ships dredged up from the bottom of the fjord.

Ships!

This is what one of the warships looked like when it was in use.

And this is one they have out in the water that is an exact reconstruction built using only Viking methods and materials. It was pretty interesting! It looks just like a regular modern ship!

We went to the little cafe in the museum for lunch and I thought, "oh, I'll just get a little ham sandwich." And this is what I got! It was huge and amazing! I couldn't even eat all that.

Ben ordered the pulled pork flatbread and it was similarly delicious.

Then we walked back on this pretty little path to the Roskilde town center.

The other big thing in Roskilde is the Cathedral, Denmark's biggest. It's where all their kings and queens are buried ("Denmark's Westminster Abbey," says Rick Steves).

It was pretty impressive!

Around the central part of the church are little chapels that have been built on over the years, according to each monarch's style and how they preferred to be buried.

This archway dates from 1280.

Then we wandered a bit in Roskilde and headed back for Copenhagen.

We got off at the Østerport station, which was different from our usual stop. It looked about the same distance from home, though, and we thought it would be good to try something new. Unfortunately for me, it turned out to be right next to the Kastellet, which Ben had been sort of obsessed with since we arrived. He really, really wanted to go in there and walk around. It's an old military citadel that is still in use but is also a park. This is what it looks like from above.

I'm a nice wife so I agreed to go in there. It was pretty!

Then we walked right by the National Art Gallery on the way home. It was about 4:00pm but we are usually pretty efficient in art museums so we popped in to look around.

And then we got to go home and sit down until dinnertime.

Unfortunately, right before it was time to leave for dinner it started hailing. We had an umbrella and the hail was small, but still. We took the bus most of the way and then got caught running around for only a little bit in order to find the restaurant, Kodbyens Fiskebar, which was in the meatpacking district.

The food was really wonderful. To start we got a big bowl of mussels to share. 

And then for dinner we each had fish (me: baked cod, Benjamin: pan-fried hake) with the same vegetables of kale, squash puree, et cetera.

Benjamin got raspberry sorbet for dessert (the picture is off-center because he kept trying to do a thumbs up in the photo).

And I got chocolate cake crumbles with ice cream and crunchies.

It had stopped raining so we stopped in at Tivoli on the way home. Tivoli is one of the oldest amusement parks in the world and is right in the center of town. We didn't see any reason to visit, per se, except that everyone says it's really pretty at night, all lit up. It was included in the price of the Copenhagen Card, so why not?

At the end of this day we had walked 30,015 steps. That's like 14 miles! My feet were dying. I made Ben promise we would never do that to ourselves again, and he agreed it was a bit much. We took it slightly easier from here on out.