Scandinavia Trip: Day 12 – Copenhagen and Jelling

I began my day as has become custom on this trip: with a juice from the supermarket and pastries from a local café. Since I had already seen the outer parts of Copenhagen, I decided that today would be the day when I would explore the centre. I first made my way to Rådhuspladsen, but I found the city hall undergoing major work to its main tower. Walking southeast, I took pictures of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek but did not go inside, as it was far too early and the museum was still closed. I also visited Slotsholmen, which houses Christiansborg Palace and the lovely Royal Library Garden.

Until around ten o’clock, the weather was not great. Despite the optimistic weather forecast, it was cloudy and windy, which made for a somewhat grey walk through the old town: I wound my way past the Stork Fountain to the Church of the Holy Spirit and Copenhagen Cathedral, which was open at the time. I was walking north to the Round Tower and Rosenborg Castle when the sun finally came out. The gardens at Rosenborg Castle looked particularly welcoming with the parting clouds, and I spent quite a while simply milling about and taking pictures.

Thanking my lucky stars for the good weather, I then walked east to visit Frederik’s Church. The place of worship is a wonderfully symmetrical building with a warmly golden altar. Also known as the Marble Church, the 18^th century building has the largest dome in Scandinavia. The church thus adds to an interesting list of Danish primacies, which include the happiest population and the oldest surviving monarchy in Europe.

As I made my way to Nyhavn, the weather started to look as though it would spoil again. In addition, I had already seen everything I had wanted to see in Central Copenhagen (I have been weighing up whether to visit some museums and galleries, but I am very sick of them after almost two weeks of travels). Somewhat on a whim, therefore, I decided to take a train to a faraway place that I had only vaguely considered visiting: Jelling.

Nestled comfortably in the middle of the Jutland Peninsula, Jelling is usually reachable from Copenhagen in around two and a half hours. Its claim to fame are two mounds and two runestones that date to the unification of Denmark in the 900s. The first Jelling stone was erected by King Gorm in honour of his wife Thyra. The second and larger stone was commissioned by Gorm’s son Harald Bluetooth. Paying homage to his parents, the stone celebrates Harald’s two major successes: unifying Denmark and converting it to Christianity.

As for the mounds, the northern mound was built over a Bronze Age burial site and contains the centre of the longest known stone burial ship in the world. Its edges are thought to extend 354 metres, that is, beyond the southern mound, which is somewhat bigger but contains no burial. The northern mound is thought to be the place where Harald Bluetooth buried his father. Between the mounds stands a small white church, a successor to the wooden churches constructed during and after Harald’s lifetime.

My journey to Jelling was a veritable mess. The train was supposed to depart at 11:45 but left at around 12, and as it forged ahead, its delay kept getting longer. It was almost three by the time we reached Fredericia on the eastern coast of Jutland; I decided to get off there instead of Vejle, which had been my original plan, as I could not quite understand the announcements made on the train. In somewhat broken English, the conductor seemed to be saying that because of the train’s delay, it would leave out some stops, and I feared Vejle might be one of them.

Although I was worried that I would miss my connection in Fredericia, the train from Fredericia had already amassed a delay of almost half an hour. Standing at the platform while eating ice cream, I noticed that two trains were supposed to be leaving it at the same time. I puzzled over this contradiction until I eventually summoned the courage to ask another passenger. With what appeared to be amusement at my ignorance, he explained that the trains would part ways at one of the following stations but until then, they would ride together – the electronic board even showed which wagon was travelling to each terminal station.

I contented myself with this explanation for a while, but when the train arrived, a new kind of chaos gripped the platform. All of a sudden, the electronic board rerouted the other train to a different platform, but the passengers as well as the conductors on the first train still quite logically believed themselves to be travelling to Aalborg rather than Struer. Given this conflicted information, I could not quite bring myself to board the train, but I could not stand by either. I asked conductor after conductor and passenger after passenger about where the train was going but nobody seemed to agree or to know for sure.

Finally, the matter was resolved when the conductors started ushering people out from the train and directing them to the new train headed towards Aalborg. The entire bizarre operation took at least fifteen minutes, and I would have been completely lost in the chaos had I not bumped into a young man who seemed to grasp what was going on. After he explained the situation to me, we sat down in the train together and conversed until I finally arrived at my destination – at half past four!

I learned many new things about Denmark from this conversation: their equivalent of the rust belt is the Rotten Banana, they have Folk High Schools that are neither high schools nor universities, and they love liquorice despite most brands using artificial flavouring instead of good old roots. In the evening, I managed to file a request for a refund to my ticket on the railway website; the application was entirely in Danish to minimise the likelihood of foreigners getting their refunds, but luckily Danish is quite simple.