Trip to Aarhus

First, a couple of local pictures:

Happy hour in Christianhavn.  Don't worry, we haven't taken up smoking.  A large percentage of the population  here smokes (as in Europe in general, I guess), and it's horrible to walk down the street and be continually hit with puffs of cigarette smoke.

The street behind our apartment.  We like it because it's quieter than our front door street.  It's called (in translation) Big Cannon Street.

Fastelavn is the Shrove Tuesday celebration here before Lent begins.  It has turned into a secular Halloween type affair.  The kids' school didn't have regular classes; they had an all-day celebration and talent show.  You can see pictures here if you select "Fastelavn & Talent Show" in the drop down menu on the right.  There are some pictures of Maggie playing her saxophone.  She also won a prize for her Merida costume.  There are also pics of Maggie's friend-who-is-a-boy, Adrian.  He is wearing striped pants and a red beret.

Last weekend, we took a trip to Aarhus, Denmark's second largest city. It was an easy, comfy 3-hour train ride.  We visited a historic Denmark museum, Den Gamle By (The Old Town), where I took virtually no pictures for some reason.  We also visited their modern art museum, ARoS, which has a very cool rooftop walk.  You can see outside pics at the link, but here is Maggie inside:

And a boy with one of their most famous pieces, Boy:

Spring is beginning to spring here in Denmark, so we took the bus to a park south of Aarhus and hiked through some woods, across a field full of sheep and Iron Age burial mounds,

and ended up here:

 

Shoes off and all!  It was a great day.  As much as we are loving living in a city, it was really nice to get out in nature.

Oh yes, we also visited the cathedral, which was amazing.  Many churches here have ships hanging to symbolize the navigation of birth to death.  This boat was actually being sent to Peter the Great as a model of a warship.  The ship carrying it sank, and the model floated to the shore intact.

Fascinating to me was the fact that the original frescoes were covered in white to make the church more modest during the Reformation.  But they have been able to save a few frescoes from the church's Catholic days, like the one above.