Århus

So I managed to wake myself up at pretty much exactly 7 am (cause I'm magic like that), and I got ready and out the door quite quickly.

Side note "About this hostel": Kinda cute, kinda sketchy. It's toeing a fine line. The common area is pretty nice, but the bedrooms are a little sketchy. I wasn't feeling like much of a backpacker when I had a sleeper coach on the train and my own shower on the ferry, but now I feel like a backpacker. I am on a 3-person bunk, and there are 2 toilets and 4 showers in the bathroom that serves approximately 80 beds (a couple more if every one is full). This means that you have to get up really early to beat the rush. There is a Muslim girl in my room (who is from Malaysia and is studying in England), who gets out her prayer mat usually before anyone else is awake.

I got to the train station, and it took me a little while to figure out what was going on with my Eurail pass (even though I had used it to get discounts in Norway, no one had ever really looked at it or stamped it, so it only got activated now). The ticket counter man told me that I didn't need to have a seat reservation in Denmark, but in Sweden I probably would.

So the reason to get a seat reservation in Denmark is so that you don't have to stand. Because they really don't care how many people get on the train. The cool thing about Denmark is that every seat has a little lit tag above it saying where that seat is reserved from and to. I got lucky and managed to get a seat for about the first half of the trip before I had to go stand.

I got to Århus about noon, and got a little distracted by the mall that was attached to the train station, but then I started exploring a little. I walked up and down a couple streets and then ended up back where I started to get some information from the tourist office. I picked up a little city guide with a map and then I decided that I would try to find the Art Gallery since it looked close by.

Barfing pig fountain. I thought it was funny.

I loved the Art Gallery! It was too bad, because a couple of their exhibits were closed, but their special exhibit was absolutely wonderful!! It was an artist named Julie Nord, and her stuff was all very detailed and cute but usually had a touch of evil to it. There was also a video explaining a bit of her thought process while she was working on one of the pieces. It even had the perfect music to compliment the art. I thought it was all great!

View from inside the Art Gallery.

One of Julie Nord's works that was on display.

They had some good classic paintings from Danish artists throughout the years, and some contemporary art that was arranged in a really neat way, but like all modern art, kind of hit and miss. They also had this giant fibreglass sculpture of a boy that was pretty creepy. In the very basement, there was this really creepy "light display". There were all these dark hallways, and a few really dark rooms that had some sort of videos playing. And the scariest thing was this little bridge in a room that was all mirrors, so it looked like everything went on infinitely!

Creepy giant fibreglass boy.

The mirror room that was so scary I couldn't even look. This is the floor.

The darkest room. It was so scary. Even my camera flash could hardly light it up.

I bought myself a copy of the book of Julie Nord's exhibit, and a couple postcards and grabbed lunch at the cafe in the gallery before going off to explore more.

I found a little museum that was almost all local history. It didn't have much that was in English, but there was almost no one in the museum (I saw about 3 other people total), and the lady at the front reception was super nice. She explained what all the exhibits were about and warned me that there was only English in one of them, and even gave me the student discount just because I said I was a student (I was ready to dig through my bag to find my ID card).

Model of the city that was at the museum.

After the museum, I decided I was pretty tired, so I would just hop on the next train back to Copenhagen. The train was super crowded, and I didn't get a seat. It was super hot too, I was sweating buckets with just my tank top and everyone else was all bundled up. There was a girl who tried to ask me something in Danish and when I told her "I don't speak Danish," she said "But English?" and I said "Yes," and she said "....why..." and I don't think she spoke English well enough to figure out how to ask me what she wanted to ask me, so she just trailed off and left it at that.

When I got back to Copenhagen, I pretty much went straight back to my hostel and worked on getting things onto my blog before I headed to bed.