Winter Comes to the Danish Coast

On the bus from Odense to the village of Faaborg we passed thousands of Christmas trees.  Funen island is full of them, planted for some future yule.  The air was cold, but not yet freezing - the rain stayed wet, the ground stayed green.  It felt like fall.  By the time we left town and the island, a feeling of winter had come over the place, drawn in from the dark sea beyond the harbor.  Mornings dawned with white breath, coats and cloaks were pulled tight.  In this part of northern Europe, where thatched roofs and half-timbered houses still stand sentinel next to ancient fields, winter feels like the natural mode of being.  It's a part of the oldness and rockiness of the landscape.  In three coastal towns - Faaborg, Kolding and Vejle - waves and cold air mixed, and the wind began to smell like snow.

At Oasen Bodega, a salty place with a palm tree on the wall, we were greeted by a cloud of cigarette smoke and curious stares.  The regulars were drinking bottles of Carlsberg beer and nodding at one another.  One old lady fondled my butt as I passed her on the way to the bar.  A glassy eyed old man gave Rebecca his facebook address.  Not long after we sat down, a taxi driver came through the door and began calling for John.  John was reluctant and feigned surprise, but there was a powerful force at work - likely his wife.  He stumbled out the door with the help of a friend's shoulder.  None of this happened with any great urgency, or even much movement at all.
The scene was like one from Chaucer's winter tavern.  We could have come back in April, when the land was thawing out, and found the same group sitting on the same stools.  It reminded me of bears settling in for hibernation - eyes closing, heartbeats slowing, mouths slackening, the world growing quite dark around the edges.  This is what living on a winter island must be like.

Sea and land mix easily here, because traveling overland through Denmark is deceptive.  The bridges and train causeways make separate pieces of land feel like one entity. It's all very flat. Copenhagen has an air of solidity, and I never felt like I'd been off the mainland until I was on the mainland.  This after crossing bridges from Zealand to Funen to Jutland, which is attached to Germany and the rest of the continent but isn't much higher above the waves. So Funen feels like an island, but also doesn't.  The land is wide-horizoned, and no-one is hemmed in, but the people still share a closeness - everyone grew up with the same sea around them.
The leaves were being blown out of the streets, leaving bare cobblestones behind.  Faaborg is an old place, where once a huge fishing fleet docked.  The houses are pretty and close together, painted in bright, earthy russet and yellow.  On our last night, we began wondering when the weather was going to turn - the season had already tilted into winter, a storm felt inevitable.  Everyone had shut themselves up indoors.

In the castle town of Kolding, on a fjord of the same name, we saw our first snow of the season.  It wasn't much, and it came out of a bright blue sky, but it was unmistakably snow.  The flakes were the hard, bouncing kind that might have been sleet, but it wasn't sleet.  We caught the sight through a window. A team of construction workers stopped what they were doing and looked around at the sudden white.
Later, in the early dark of a late October night, we found ourselves surrounded by a throng of people at another pub.  There was no lethargy - the cold and season had invigorated the crowd, and they drew together for comfort.  There was a lot of beer to drink and a quiz game to listen to - a man stood up to call out questions and we all scribbled on sheets of paper.  He spoke in English, which was surprising, but nobody had a hard time and it was lucky for us.

Vejle is drawn as far away from the water as it can be without really leaving the shore.  The harbor and town are at the far end of a narrow, long cut of water.  This far inland the ocean is calm and full of sea grasses and gulls.  A little fish market was set up at the head of the water, near the bestilled boats and a big factory.  This scarred shark's head rested on a bucket of ice.  It wasn't clear if the meat was for sale or if there was some other meaning.

In the morning, Velje was coated with a thick frost.  The dense grass by the water was white and stiff, the air was frozen dry.  Dead leaves lay on the sidewalk, coated in patterns of crystal.  The day would cloud up and grow windy, but those early hours were as clear and bright as any midwinter dawn. Our hands and ears were cold - the first pinches of real cold we've felt this year - but the sun was warm on our faces.  We walked along the fjord and listened to the birds squawking.  The nordic winters are dark, but the season has some brightness too.

You Are What You Sit On

The Swedes may have given the world IKEA, but the Danes gave us all a place to sit.  Sure, chairs existed before the Danish design movement, but the idea of what a chair was or looked like was vastly different.  To be fair, it really started with the Germans.  Danish furniture makers were highly influenced by the Bauhaus school in Germany which, from 1919 - 1933, taught a revolutionary style of furniture design that mixed craftsmanship with fine arts, encouraging creativity, but also keeping human proportions, modern materials and technique top of mind.  The even greater 'gift' (I really hesitate to use that word) from Germany, when it comes to Danish furniture design, was World War II.  Denmark was relatively unscathed, the rest of Europe was looking for cheaper, simpler products and plywood construction became the start of a Danish empire on four legs.

It's amazing how little you think of designs that have become so mainstream they are simply the default.  For example, we have missed Q-Tips deeply since beginning this trip, never really realizing that "cotton swabs" are just not the same.  If I saw the above chair in a home, I might think "nice chairs."  Maybe.  If I saw it in a store, I would recognize that it's a perfect version of chair that I may want for my own home.  In a museum,  specifically Trapholt in Kolding, I realized that this chair is a work of art that didn't just always exist.  The fathers of Modern Danish chair design were (or worked closely with) cabinetmakers.  Lighter woods, function and simplicity, the idea that the piece would fit into the personal world of its owner all factored in.  Thoughtful craftsmanship was key.

Arne Jacobsen, Kaare Klint, Hans Wegner, Verner Panton led the wave of design, teaching and studying at the Royal Danish Academy of Art.  They were commissioned by hotels to make one-of-a-kind furniture.  Wegner's Round Chair became known simply as The Chair after it was used by Nixon and Kennedy in one of their historic, televised debates.   Jacobsen's The Egg and The Swan are icons of modern design and his stackable Ant Chair was so popular that it became Denmark's first industrially manufactured chair.  Above, Ant chairs fill Trapholt's museum cafe.

Finn Juhl was a little more radical than his Danish design contemporaries.  The Pelican Chair, strung up in a colorful array at Trapholt's exhibit commemorating what would have been Juhl's 100th birthday, was called "aesthetics in the worst possible sense of the word" when it debuted.  A great artist panned during his lifetime? Shocking.  What I found more shocking, though, was that this and other curvaceous and plush, colorful and space-age designs were created in the early 1940s.  Looks that I associate with the swinging 60s or the groovy 70s predated both by my entire lifespan.  Juhl may not be the most influential of the chair designers, but he is credited with bringing modern Danish design to America, where it gained instant popularity and still flies off the shelves.

The above Ball Chair was actually designed by a Finn (Eero Saarinen), but when you read the architect's account of his process, you see why Trapholt would include it in a retrospective about Danish design.  With all of its whimsy, uniqueness and its futuristic feel, the chair's dimensions were still based on the most functional of factors.  "Being the taller one of us, I sat... and my wife drew the course of my head on the wall,"  Saarinen explained.  From there, it was simple enough to make a ball "just remembering that the chair would have to fit through a doorway."  It's the art of making something completely logical look and feel imaginative.

The thing about chairs is that, more than any other piece of furniture design, it just won't catch on unless it's truly functional.  You can own a table and define its use by what it can handle.  Lamps, shelves, they serve functions, but there's really no wrong way to do them.  Chairs have to hold weight, they have to be comfortable, they have to fit the owner's taste and also their frame.  Imagine a world where chairs didn't stack or swivel, weren't light enough to move with one hand or inexpensive enough to buy in large matching sets.  Then, thank Denmark.  (with a shout-out to Germany, Finland and the US).

The Great Dane

Less grim than the Brothers Grimm, more lucid than Dr. Suess, an actual person (unlike Mother Goose), Hans Christian Andersen was a master of fairytales.  His works have been translated into 160 language dialects and have been rehashed, updated, paraphrased, quoted and borrowed for nearly two centuries.  Some of his stories are so woven into popular culture that they've become figures of speech, illustrations of some of life's most pervasive themes.  The naked, duped, leader in the Emperor's New Clothes is the archetype of vanity.  The Ugly Duckling's triumph over bullying is the original It Gets Better.

"It doesn't matter about being born in a duckyard, as long as you are hatched from a swan's egg!" The Ugly Duckling, 1843.   Andersen's duckyard was Odense, where he was born to a poor cobbler There are places and things names after Anderson throughout Denmark, but the greatest congestion of tributes is here in his hometown.  On a Saturday afternoon, we joined the rush at Den Grimme Ælling ('The Ugly Duckling') which was serving a brunch buffet of epic proportions.  The 'all you can drink' period was just ending, but the servings of pork crackling, smoked salmon and fried eggs were being replenished with fervor.

Odense is a charming, livable town with a strong attachment to its famous son.  There are statues of some of his best known characters scattered around town, a large statue of him in the park.  There is the big, wonderful Hans Christian Andersen Museum and a smaller collection within his childhood home.  My favorite tribute was Odense's Walk/Don't Walk signs.  The little green man wore a top hat and held a cane, no doubt an impression of Hans' silhouette.

The Hans Christian Andersen Museums itself was fun to explore.  My knowledge of the author came from childhood viewings of Hans Christian Andersen starring Danny Kaye.  The movie-musical was as much a work of fiction as Thumbelina or The Princess and the Pea, but the fact that all of these stories sprung from the mind of a single man still resonated with me.  As it turns out, the real HC was much more interesting than the Kaye version.  He was a paranoid neurotic who traveled with a big rope because he was convinced he'd need to escape a hotel fire.  When pen wasn't being put to paper, his high-speed creative mind found an outlet in paper cutting.  Think snowflakes gone beautifully mad.  His nose was big, his feet were bigger, he abstained from sex and had infatuations with both genders.  In a questionnaire, he answered "Fresh Air" for his "Favorite Perfume."  This 'fresh air room' in the museum celebrated his love of outdoor introspection.

Other answers in the questionnaire included "to be happy" for "Dream in Life" and "contentment" for "Your Idea of Happiness."  The museum had a pair of old dentures, as lifelong toothaches kept him constantly ill at ease and these 3D portraits that you could view through stereoscopes.  Beyond these, there were hundreds of portraits of the author around the space and quotes from friends saying that no photo or painting ever really looked like him because he'd always try to put on a 'dignified pose.'  In that same questionnaire, he answered "Hans Christian Andersen" for "Who would you most like to be if not yourself?"  It's a good guess that he never really saw himself as the swan. 

For all his eccentricities and depressive moods, he appeared to be well loved by everyone he met.  Dignitaries and royals fawned upon him.  Before he ever published a word, chance encounters with nobles resulted in scholarship to school and connections in Copenhagen.  There was the Charles Dickens debacle, when Hans accepted an invitation to dinner and then stayed for five months.  He had no idea why Charles never returned his calls afterwards.  But mostly, he was adored worldwide.  It actually took Denmark a little longer to recognize their own genius, but once they did, he became a local hero.  Above, a 3D statue of Hans Christian Andersen at Legoland.

From the very start and until the very end, the greatest love for Hans came from children who ate up each new collection of fairy tales as they were published.  It was fitting that our trip to Odense coincided with the last day of the week-long Harry Potter Festival.  Children ran around in costumes playing a game I don't know how to spell because I've never read the books (blasphemy!)   Andersen enjoyed a notoriety akin to Rowling's.  When a nasty rumor started about Andersen being destitute and ill, children in America began a collection and a big wad of US cash arrived in an envelope.  On his deathbed, once he was actually ill but still not destitute, Hans requested that his funeral march be composed to "keep time with little steps" because "most of the people that will walk after me will be children."

Of course, there's a kid in all of us, right?  (Hence our visit to aforementioned Legoland, which will be covered in more depth soon).  The tourists taking photos at the little mermaid statue in Copenhagen may not even know the origins of the character or the author of the tale.  Disney gave her red hair, a purple shell bra and a happy ending, but Hans Christian Andersen gave her to the world as a version of himself.  In that same questionnaire posted in the Hans Christian Andersen Museum,  he was asked to state his occupation.  "Dreaming life away."

A Nation on Two Wheels

One night in Copenhagen, as the two of us were riding our rented bicycles to dinner, a policeman stopped us on a bridge.  At first, I assumed that he was motioning to a passing car, his stance was so official.  But he was making eye contact, and I noticed that a few other cyclists were also stopped there on the sidewalk, talking to other officers.
"Where are you from? How long have you been in Denmark? Do you live here?" he asked, once we'd pulled over.  We were smiling and almost laughing at him - it didn't seem like we could be in any trouble. Our passports are in fine order, we hadn't broken any laws. Turns out, he wasn't worried about our immigration status, and we were doing something illegal.
"I can take you to the bank right now," he said.  "Seven hundred kroner fine for you" - sticking his finger in my chest - "seven hundred kroner for you" - pointing at Rebecca. "Payment immediate, or I arrest you."  He put his hands together, miming handcuffs.  Uh… what?
It turns out that bike lights are required at night in Denmark.  It's a national law.  As soon as the streetlights are illuminated, every cyclist needs a white light in the front and a red light in the back - this being one of the most bicycle friendly places on earth, riding un-lit is a bit like driving a car without working brake lights.  The policeman very sanctimoniously let us go - walking our bikes - because we were foreigners.  "Buy lights at a seven-eleven," he grunted.
Yes sir.

About half of Copenhagen's citizens bike to work or school every day.  In a flat, mostly temperate metropolis like this, it's hard not to see the benefits of taking a bicycle instead of a car - it's faster, easier and maybe even safer.  During the three days that we had our rentals, we fell in love with the capital's terrific double transportation system - one set of lanes and traffic signals for cars and a separate one for those of us on two wheels.  It's orderly and well set-up, and almost everyone plays by the rules.  Cars are very careful of bicycles and every rider stops at the miniature traffic lights.  Most main roads have good bike lanes, and on smaller streets the smaller vehicles have the right of way.
This reliable bike is a postal trike, for delivering the mail.

Like in Holland - another flat, much cycled country - the wealth of different cycle options is really outstanding.  Ingenious, front-mounted platforms and crates allow people to carry heavy loads - we saw one man riding with a set of four dining room chairs.  Children are whisked around in a similar way, in the front bucket.  There's a multitude of different companies making vehicles like this - from Copenhagen's own Christiania Bikes to the hipper Bullitt Cargobikes. There are mail bikes and delivery bikes, street vendor bicycles and cycles with pizza-boxes built in.  Sometimes the cargo is carried behind the seat, but usually between the handlebars and the front wheel.

The best part about getting around by bike is that you never have to look for parking - just pull over, flip down the kickstand, lock the back wheel and walk away.  The woman we rented our apartment from told us not to worry too much about bike theft.  "Sure, it happens," she said.  "But not like in New York, for example."
One reason why is that there are so, so many bicycles parked out on the street.  Huge masses of them - like shoals of shining fish - congregate around train stations and supermarkets.  In crowds like that, the nicest bikes are usually the only ones fastened to something sturdy.  Most - like our rentals - just had a locking bar that clicked through the spokes and prevented the bikes from being ridden away.  We didn't worry too much.  Someone might have picked up our rickety old things for scrap, but that would have been a lot of work.

It's not just the city streets of Copenhagen that are full of cyclists.  All through Denmark, people are enthusiastic about riding.  On Funen island and in Kolding it was about as common as in the capital, if a little less organized.  Local governments have been banding together to create "superhighways" for two-wheeled commuters, complete with air-pump stations and winter plowing.  Several of these mega-paths already service Copenhagen's suburbs, and the government is planning on adding more soon.
An initiative (curiously) named "karma" has also been started, to reward cyclists for following the rules of the road.  Supposedly, volunteers on the street hand out chocolates to riders who obey traffic lights and use the proper signals.  I'm not sure why this is really necessary.  Barely anyone breaks the law.

In recent years, there's been a wave of public bike rental plans - or bike "sharing" - in European cities.  Most of them work with some kind of easy, credit-card based system.  The idea is, you have a charge card that's billed for the amount of time the bike is used - or, maybe, a payment is made that's good for a full day.  Special bike racks are set up at different points so that it's possible to pick up a ride on one side of town and "return" it on the other.  Some version of this exists in 165 cities worldwide, with notable examples in Barcelona, Paris, Amsterdam and soon in New York.
Copenhagen has one-upped the other cities though, with free "borrow" bikes.  A twenty kroner coin is all it takes to unlock your ride.  You get the money back when you re-chain the lock - much like the  deposit mechanisms on supermarket carts or airport baggage dollies.  They're not the greatest vehicles - heavily built, with airless, hard tires and balky gears - but they're dependable.  They also come with handy maps mounted to the handlebars.  We didn't use them - they're not always easy to find - but did see plenty of them around town.

The night we were stopped by the police, we did end up buying lights (dinky, flashing, plastic things) and making it to the restaurant we were heading to.  There, when we were talking to the American chef, he congratulated us for arriving "like the locals."  He laughed when we told him about getting pulled over.  "I always play the tourist card," he said.  "I've been in Copenhagen for four years, and I still haven't gotten the lights. Never got a ticket."

Ready, Set, Copenhagen!

We couldn't really understand the warbled voice over the loudspeaker, but context clues told us we'd better watch our heads.  The canal tour of Copenhagen was coming to an end and the final, oldest, lowest bridge cut things pretty close.  These boats were designed for just this moment, to fit through snugly like a coin into a slot.  The sides scratched and bumped a little, but we made it through to the other side.  Canal tour, check.  We had visitors in town this week and they came armed with a handy book filled with Top Tens for Copenhagen.  This wasn't a travel guide, it was a challenge, a game, an adventure that had us whizzing through the city collecting pieces for a figurative jigsaw puzzle called The Complete Copenhagen Experience.

"We're not doing what you guys are doing.  We're here to be tourists.  We have to see all the sights."  Parents have a knack for saying things like that, a declaration that hovers somewhere between judgement and praise.  A little befuddled, I began to think about the difference between what we're doing and decided that it's not all that different.  All tourism is essentially a scavenger hunt.  Maybe our personal top tens don't always include that statue, that tour or that attraction (Amalienborg Palace, Check.  Tivoli Gardens, Check).  Maybe ours are more often eat singed lamb head, try to fit in with the cool kids in such and such neighborhood, spelunk, but we have that list we try to check off nonetheless.  Visiting a foreign country can be a brief stint at trying another life on for size.  So, these Top Tens or To Dos are really just the bucket lists for those lives.  Who knows if you'll ever find yourself back in Copenhagen?

It's often difficult to know where to start in a city, what to focus on, how to crack the local code.  In Copenhagen, the place to start is undoubtedly the bike rental shop.  (Ride Bikes, Check).  We kept ours for three days, using them to get everywhere.  On the bicycles we were invisible, just a part of the two-wheeled traffic.  There was no walking slowly, clutching a map or hopping on and off a big red bus.  It gave our safari an instant sense of adventure and individuality.  It gave our experience of Copenhagen a true feeling of authenticity, just us and the locals signaling and ringing bells with the pedaling commuters.  Anonymity.  Well, until the last few hours of our final day when my father's brakes began to wear down and his arrival at a stop light was announced loudly to the entire city.  The sound can best be described as two donkeys on a rusted seesaw.

 

The canal tour gave us a new perspective on the city.  Places we'd pedaled through, Christianhavn, Nyhavn, looked different from our below-street-level viewpoint.  The buildings rose up around us, boats were parked (and in some cases double and triple parked) along the sides of the canals.  People were out doing post-season work on their vessels, a dog sat next to a deck barbecue.  Inching through narrow bridges and canals is a lot more romantic than squeezing through narrow streets in a bus and there was a great fly-on-the wall feeling about it. 

There were multi-course explorations of New Nordic cuisine (Check), there were cold Carlsberg brews and smørbrød (Check and Check), there were many coffees at many cafes.  This one, Bang & Jensen, was our go to spot in Vesterbro, where our rental apartment was located.  We were excited to bring our guests, to show them this cool place we'd discovered.  As it turns out, the cafe was one of the first to move into the neighborhood, at the helm of its transformation/gentrification from red-light to hip neighborhood.  "It's on the list!" we were informed to mixed emotions.  A small part of us felt like we'd fallen into some sort of trap, the pride in our 'find' stripped from us.  But, then there was a new feeling of pride in our instincts and that we'd led our little team to another victory (Bang & Jensen, Check!).  After 47 countries and 38 capital cities, maybe we've just gotten good at this. 

Restaurant Klubben made its way onto one of the Top Ten lists because of its 'large portions of traditional Danish food.'  Restaurants in tourist guides are always a double edged sword.  Yes, you have a recommendation to go by, but you also run the risk of eating in a room full of other people clutching said guide.  When we walked into Klubben, which was packed on a Thursday evening, my father and his wife, two native New Yorkers, pointed to the counter.  "Takeout.  You know it's a good local joint when there's takeout."  People streamed in past us to grab their orders.  "This is the real deal."  The checkered table cloths, loud groups and enormous platters of meat screamed 'family dinner.'  A tiny old woman whose wrinkled mouth suggested toothlessness served us our homecooked grub with aplumb and we rolled out full and happy.  Another sign of authenticity:  the place was empty by 9:30.  Danes eat early.  Restaurant Klubben, traditional Danish food, stewed pork heart (Check, Check and Check).

Next up, Freetown Christiania, the 40 year old self-governing section of Copenhagen, which is part squat, part utopia.  They have their own health care, currency, school system, post office, constitution.  It is a hippie commune, a haven for the homeless and a 'safe place' for addicts who can no longer function in society.  It is also a community of 850 that rejects capitalism and governs their property ownership and local business in ways that benefit everyone.  We saw only a sliver of the neighborhood, entering through the main gate and immediately being approached by an old man.

'Where it says no photos. Don't take photos.'  (We happen to always follow such rules).  'They will take your camera and smash it,' he repeated emphatically.  'Smash it.'  It ruffled our feathers.  The strong stench of hash, signs saying not to run because it 'causes panic,' and the blocks of resin for sale next to buds and pipes on Pusher Street turned us off from an afternoon family stroll further afield.  It was a shame, because we never really got to the idyllic heart of the place, to the kooky architectural creations, to the fish-filled lake and ecovillage center which inspired the broader sustainability plan for Copenhagen.  We checked Freetown off our list, but barely scratched the surface.  Just how these things go sometimes.

On the other end of the spectrum, but at the center of millions of visitors' plans in Copenhagen, is the little mermaid.  Her head is turned down in a plaintive, somber way, perhaps dreaming of her former fins, perhaps bashful at all the attention.  Like the mannekin pis in Brussels, the diminutive statue is a sort of mascot for a city that can't and shouldn't be quantified by big-ticket items.  In a lot of ways, the mermaid is a perfect Danish icon.  She was given to the city by the Carlsberg family in 1913 and is, of course, the creation of Hans Christian Anderson (arguably the country's most famous son).  The original statue has never been on display, the sculptor's family keeps it somewhere secret and sells authorized copies from their website.  Through her almost 200 year old life on the rock, the little mermaid has been decapitated, blown up, draped in a burqa, painted, sawed at, replaced in parts and altogether.  But maybe it's better not to tell the tourists that.  Then again, so long as its at the top of the lists, I doubt anyone will care.

A Collection of Collections

Pieces of the only surviving gown belonging to Marie Antoinette.  A u-boat reconnaissance helicopter. Four hedgerow mazes. A museum dedicated to old groceries.  Another museum of Falck rescue vehicles, another of dolls, a barn of old farm equipment, more than a hundred motorcycles, planes, Parisian dresses, American cars, African shields, scent gardens, comic strips, folding campers, novelty bicycles, rare stamps, Japanese lanterns, chicken coops, treetop walkways, license plates, hotdog stands, cursed figures, impala heads... even Dracula's crypt!  It's all at Egeskov Slot, one of the most interesting and strange places we've ever walked around.  Containing no less than eight on-site museums, this is a castle experience that only just begins with bricks and arrow slits.

Egeskov castle lies at the end of a long, treelined allé in the flat countryside of Funen Island.  It's an interesting structure (billed as "Europe's best preserved renaissance water castle") that we'd come to for a castle-hunting post.  The sky was grey, though, and the light was too flat for good pictures. Funen - sometime's called "Denmark's larder" - is a low, central isle covered in beet fields and dotted with beef cows.  We passed thatched roofs and half-timbered houses on our way to the castle, all cloaked with fog and buffeted by the damp sea-wind.
If the weather was disappointing, what we found wasn't.  Let's put it this way: we arrived at Egeskov a few minutes before the gates opened at 10:00.  We left at three-thirty, half an hour before closing.  And there was still more to see.  Here, a remote-controlled, steam-powered toy boat splashes and puffs its way around the castle lake.  It let out intermittent whistles and made a delightfully self-important gurgling, chugging sound.

The name Egeskov means "oak forest," which refers to the one thousand oak pilings that the castle is built on.  Originally constructed in 1554, the fortifications are actually on the surface of the water - surprisingly, it hasn't sunk much in the centuries since.  The sight is staggering even in dim conditions - it's the kind of place one assumes couldn't really exist.*
The castle's biggest enthusiast, probably, is the current owner and inhabitant, Count Michael Ahlefeldt-Laurvig-Bille.  He appears on the castle website, in the brochures and in several on-site videos.  His exploits are told and retold on different info-boards: he rescued an ancient Harley Davidson from a recluse's garage, he built the world's biggest maze, he "thoroughly explored" the castle moat (Michael's a "keen diver") and dredged up old plates and canons.  We laughed when we read this bit of pomp on the official website: "Legend has it that, in the mid 1960s, a boy was born to the name Michael Ahlefeldt-Laurvig-Bille. Today he is the Count at Egeskov and lives in Egeskov itself."

*Not only does it exist - there are TWO Egeskov's.  A one-to-one replica was built as part of the Hokkaido Aquarium, in Japan, which is truly bizarre.  

We laughed again when we read about the count's very own suit of armor (the same one he wears on the website).  An information board tells how having the armor made fulfilled "a childhood dream" for the count.  Supposedly, it's an exact replica of the suit worn by a distant ancestor, Frands Brockenhuus - we're betting that old Frands also had a taste for the dramatic, because the piece was absolutely festooned with weaponry and covered in gold details.
Egeskov - the building - is packed to the rafters with bits and pieces from several lifetimes of collecting. The bottom floor is given over, in large part, to hunting trophies from the current count's grandfather.  Under the eaves is a strange array of windup toys and an impressive model train.  There's victorian cookware, furniture from the court of Louis XVI, old paintings, several pianos, aspic molds, rare books, metal chests, family trees and louche knick-knacks. The staff does an admirable job of dusting, but the place still feels a bit like an overcrowded antiques shop.

Fittingly, the prize attraction at Egeskov is another overstuffed house... this time in miniature.  Titania's palace is advertised as "probably the most fairytale dolls' house in the world," which is actually a bit of an understatement.  Dreamed up and built by the Englishman Sir Nevile Wilkinson for his daughter, Gwendolyn, the palace is crammed with minuscule artifacts collected over fifteen years.  The world's smallest working church organ, for example, and several dozen rare, coin-sized books.  In all, there are over three thousand pieces in the doll house.  Tiny photographs, little snowshoes, mahogany furniture, bathtubs, teddybears the size of ladybugs, porcelain figurines and potted plants fill the 18 rooms.  The decorative style is pure victorian overstuff.  It draws a crowd.

Count Michael's parents had already opened up the family home to paying visitors in the 1980's, and one has to assume that the 200,000 annual visitors are let in to pay for upkeep - it's not a cheap ticket, castles (especially ones built on the water) are expensive to maintain.  We couldn't help but wonder, though, if our host didn't relish the attention.
For all his boasting, Michael has made his home really fun.  A birdsong walk snakes through the treetops (like a small-scale baumkronenpfad), there are stilts to use, a maze to explore and, of course, Dracula's crypt... which could never be adequately explained.  The exhibits are so diverse that it would be impossible to visit and not find something of interest.  If motorcycles aren't your thing, you might like the French fashion magazine illustrations or the old harvesting machines.

The end of October is a slow time in Denmark.  The country's tourist attractions are winding up their summer hours, the days are getting dark and short, the country roads are nearly deserted.  We toured Egeskov on the last day of autumn break, before all the schoolchildren headed back to their desks and their parents went back to work.  It was Egeskov's last day open until spring.  A few special exhibitions were going on - in the Falck museum, some remote-controlled truck devotees were driving and talking about their semis.  In the main barn, where the bulk of the airplanes and cars are kept, a model steam and gas engine show was happening.  Stacks of Popular Mechanic lay on the tables next to working airplane miniatures and chuffing steam cranks.
The cars were an eclectic mix of Detroit (lots of Cadillacs and Fords), Germany (especially Mercedes) and some more exotic brands (Ferrari, Morgan, a schoolbus-sized Rolls Royce, electric one-seaters, Danish bubble cars).  Overhead hung an ultralight and a few small airplanes, a float helicopter sat on the mezzanine, rickshaws and camper vans crowded into the corners.

Such is the breadth of Egeskov's collections that some pretty serious contrasts happen in the spaces where two museums collide.  Troll dolls rub up against bicycles, kitchen pots are hung next to spring-powered monkeys, hunting trophies bristle on the same wall as collectable postage.  There are even little mini-collections that seemingly have no real place, and so are stashed away in some incongruous spot.  In the middle of the motorcycles, for example, we found a display of wooden farm animals.  Here, plastic dolls surround one of half a dozen campers.

What do you do when you inherit a family castle, your parents collections, your grandparents cars, ancestral hedgerows and formal gardens?  It must, in some ways, be tempting to sell the whole thing and walk away from the junk and the cobwebs, the headache of keeping everything dry and upright.  Or, as many European castle owners do, rent the pile out to vacationing oligarchs and live somewhere else. Count Michael seems like a different sort, though. He's not only embraced the chaos, he's added to it - particularly in the motorcycle department.
When we caught the bus back to our seaside rooming house, we wondered what the place is like in the offseason.  Egeskov is technically closed from now until April, but it's still a home.  We pictured the count (and countess, Michael is married) roaming the hallways, dreaming up new exhibits and scarier touches for his crypt, starting up his motorcycles and sitting in the old cars.  We wondered if he skated on the frozen moat or ate dinner in the big feasting hall.  It must feel very empty once all the tourists have left and the staff's gone home.  When you live in a museum, do you prefer to have it full of people or all to yourself?

Carlsberg Bryghus

In winter-hardened, cobblestoned Copenhagen, the thing to drink is beer.  Sure, Danes will dabble in wine or sip at a cocktail, but look at any bartop and you're likely to see more bottles and half-liter glasses than anything else.  And in those glasses, chances are, one is likely to find one of two beers - Tuborg or Carlsberg - even if the color varies and the taste does change.  These two pillars of Danish brewing are actually part of the same company, and, until recently, they bubbled to life at the same place.
In the heart of Copenhagen, on a little rise (nothing in Denmark approaches a real hill) that catches the October sunlight, is one of the grandest and horsiest breweries we've ever seen.  We spent the better part of a morning and noontime there, eating, drinking and looking at barrels.

The Carlsberg plant is so large that it actually constitutes an entire neighborhood of Copenhagen.  The buildings are of fantastic brick and copper, the architectural style is pure 19th century industrial pomp.  Approaching the main gates is akin to walking up to a palace - huge elephants hold up a tower, statues peer out of windows, theres a lighthouse and gardens, chimneys and archways.  A touch of Willy Wonka pervades the place, lent by the magic of booming business and rivers of product, but
it's mostly a show; the brewery was decommissioned in 2008, and the neighborhood (known as "Carlsberg-distriktet") is in the process of being developed into a livable space.  Carlsberg's made a modern dance center out of their old mineral water building, and the bottling plant has become a conference and exhibition space; soon, apartments will begin going in.  Still, beer is the dominant theme.  A small brewery remains in use for specialty products, there's a museum, stables and a visitors complex.

For those with visions of musty cellars, dripping taps and booming barrels, a visit to Carlsberg might seem a little sanitary at first.  The museum's collection mostly consists of old wagons and beer trucks (there's even a Tuborg rickshaw, from India, and a Chevrolet in the shape of a cask), with a smattering of copper tanks and ancient laboratory vials.  You can certainly get a sense of age, but most of the facilities have been thoroughly modernized.  There are loads of videos and two slick taverns, colored lights, giftshop soccer jerseys, scent machines and foosball tables.  In the same way that beer advertisements blend "sepia-tinted tradition" with "awesome nightclub," Carlsberg has tried to amp up its artifacts with flatscreens and glass walls. This is a beer tour, after all, not some lame skansen.

The stables were a highlight because it's hard for mammoth animals not to act genuine.  Carlsberg's "ambassadors" - some two dozen Jutland draft horses - live in a bright, clean space somewhere between the giftshop cash registers and the stools of in-house Bar 1847.  We'd seen the one-ton horses pulling tourist carts around town, but not up close.  Jutlands are huge.  They were used extensively for pulling loaded beer-carts, and became known as bryggerheste, or "brewery horses."  The breed almost died out in the 1970's, but has been revived a little since.  One can pet the ambassadors (who look a little bored), watch them get hitched, see them trot out the gates and then return in a sweat.

Carlsberg was founded in the 1840's by an industrialist named J. C. Jacobsen, who began a laboratory that developed beer yeast for pilsners and the concept of pH.  The beer company grew rapidly, and began exporting in 1868 - its distinctly pale pilsner was a hit in Europe, and by the 20th century Carlsberg was among the largest breweries on the continent.
It wasn't until later, though, that the brewing company became the giant that it is today.  In the 1960's, the Carlsberg group began brewing internationally and snapping up competing brands - including Tetley, Baltika, Kronenbourg Lav, Mythos, various asian products and (Danish competitor) Tuborg.  Still, it's the company's original beer that dominates the world, making Carlsberg the fourth largest beer company on earth.  It accounts for forty percent of all beer sales in Russia and - as far as we can tell - is stocked in every supermarket from London to Tbilisi.

Included in the price of admission to the visitor's center are two (admittedly small) beers at either of the on-site bars.  At Bar 1847, the popular pour was a new beer - Jacobsen's brown ale.  It was sweet and supposedly inspired by British style beers.
Outside in the insipid sunshine, we wandered in autumn garden and listened to the clomping of large hooves.  There was a decorative hops greenhouse and a miniature version of Copenhagen's famous little mermaid statue.  The day was warm, even a little beer was enough to feel sleepy.

The other "tavern" is really a slick, multi-floor extravaganza where families eat lunch above a working bottling plant.  We ate herring, pate and pork meatballs at Jacobsen Brewhouse and Bar, watched Carlsberg commercials and drank pilsner.  It was a light-wood and stainless steel space, outfitted with three copper vats and a long, shiny bar.  The food was good, the atmosphere convivial, the crowd substantial.

Production's been moved west, to Fredericia in Jutland.  Perhaps its just as well - modern beer brewing has little to do with rolling barrels and building with brick.  It would have been fun to see the clattering rows of bottles and the blur of filling and capping.  But, mostly empty, this visit made for a more relaxing day.  After our second beer and a game of foosball, full of fish and liver, we got back on our bikes and rode down the cobblestoned hill to Copenhagen - it really felt as though we'd been away.
J. C. Jacobsen famously had a "beautiful" chimney built for his brewery (the curving, many-detailed "winding smokestack") because he wanted to show the world that a factory could be more than just an industrial site.  He wanted grandeur for his brews.  And, in the movies that play in the museum, you can hear echoes of that old splendor.  In one film, men sing lusty songs as they clean giant casks and harness elephantine horses - the songs sound almost nationalistic, anthems devoted to beer, as though Carlsberg were a nation unto itself.
At least the horses are still just as big.