Aarhus; Tuesday, 03 August, 2010

I walked to the hotel, checked in and dropped my stuff off before heading out into the city to do some sightseeing.

The hotel is right next to a number of sights so I ticked a couple of them off straight away in the Viking Museum and the Cathedral. There is nothing odd about the Cathedral, apart from it being the largest church in Denmark. The Viking museum, on the other hand, is a bit of an oddity being, as it is, in the basement of a bank. You have to go in, past the tellers and down a flight of stairs into an area where Viking age houses were found during an archaeological dig in the 60’s (I’m assuming when work was underway to build the bank that is now above them.)

From the Cathedral I walked the short distance to the Vor Frue Kirke (not to be confused with the Vor Frue Kirke in Aalborg or the Vor Frelsers Kirke in Copenhagen – I know I’m starting to get confused between them!) which is in fact three churches in one with a church in the crypt on the main church, and another chapel in the attached cloister, which itself is now a care home for the elderly.

From the Church I wandered back across town to the tourism office to pick up an Århus card and then wandered out to the Den Gamle By ethnographic museum to have a look around it. Unlike the similar examples in Helsinki, Oslo, Riga, Stockholm, Turku and Riga I’ve visited (I think it’s something about the Scandinavia/Baltic region!) this one focuses on the Urban rather than rural environment so the buildings are all from town settings and the aim is to try and create an idea of what life was like in a small town in the past.

Den Gamle By is also unique in continuing to expand having recently opened buildings from the early part of the 20th century and now working on a plan to create a small area that recreates early 1970’s Denmark for future generations (complete with reel to reel tape players!)

In the end I was looking round the outside of buildings as all the insides close at 6pm, so I took that as a hint it was probably time to head off (though you can wander around the outside of the buildings all the time) for a bite to eat, a bit more of a wander around town, and then bed.