Aalborg & Skagen

Well, to write about the last days of a trip is the hardest. One lacks motivation. Mainly because one knows that he or she’ll be at home in couple of days and he or she knows, that he or she (oh, damn it, gender neutral talk, in this case it’s me) can tell everything verbally. But! I realised that I may later use this kind of text as a good memory restoration tool, when I want to remember the trip. And it will be the only way too as we forgot to take the f**king camera with us for the most interresting parts. So let’s do it. Even when it’s almost a week late news. This time in English again, since I’ve told everyone at home already, and I am in this international mood again.

First thing that is cool about our(me and Jano) trip to Skagen is that Skagen is the northernmost place of Denmark. There is something very attractive for me in these something-most places. It is the property of this very thin thingies protruding from the land to the sea, that if you stand on that tip and there’s only one direction you can walk to, that makes it kinda magical. I’ve experienced similar constellation of land in Gibraltar (point Europa) the last summer and that was wonderful too. Second cool thing is that it was my very first car-roadtrip. We counted the expenses we would need to get to Skagen by train, bus, public transport etc and found out, that it would be much cheaper to hire a car. Then we realized that hiring the car via a car rental company is much more expensive and we’ve made a mistake in our calculations but, we were lucky because one of Viera’s (Jano’s sister at whose place we were staying) friends was very kind to ask his granny about her unused car and she made us a deal: 1,5DK/km that was very generous. So saturday about a noon, we’re sitting in this 93 Honda something, floor covered in straw, cruise controller set at proper 80km/h (Denmark’s speed limit outside towns), leaving Herning and headed for Viborg, our first stop. Jano was driving during the whole car-trip. Not because I won any “who drinks and who drives” battle, merely because Jano didn’t trust my driving skills at all, but I didn’t care and enjoyed the view.

Viborg on the map seemed like a small-sized town of close to no significance, so that we’ve almost skipped it. But spending a couple of hours there was really worth it. It was my first contact with the nice Danish historic towns. Next time I read in a tourist guide that a town was the main residence of some ancient kings in middle ages, I’ll take it more seriously. And the lake in the middle of the town is cute too. And the Psychiatric hospital on it’s side. When my computer science profession finally get’s me, I’d want to spend my days rehabilitating there. So we’ve taken a nice romantic walk around the lake watching ducks and inventing stories about them. Mostly about relationships between male and female ducks. Btw. during our roadtrip we’ve done so many romantic walk’s with Jano, that If I did the same amount with some only-slightly-attracted-to-me-and-still-hesitating girl, I’d definitely get laid.

Our goal of that day was Aalborg. It’s like a second largest city in Denmark. At least something, since we’ve only seen Copenhagen from train and a bit from plane (well actually the whole Copenhagen, but from unpractical distance for observation). So back to Aalborg. Another town with it’s nice historical stuff, but this time with some bonuses of a larger city: clubs. About that later. We arrived there at about 5 o’clock. Again did some walking, again ended in a coffee bar (KlosterTorvet, nice one). There we’ve phoned our CouchSurfing host Nicholas and arranged a meeting in front of the McDonald in the center. (Them McDonald’s logos. As they’re almost always the hideous smudge of the city center’s historic look, they’re as well wonderful meeting points) Nicholas left his bike in town and we’ve driven to his place. He lives in a student dormitory. He and his flatmate Francesco, have a two room flat with entrance from a hallway with common kitchen. Kinda similar with Slovak student dorms, but little less mess. We got to sleep on the floor of Nicholases room. Nicholas showed us on the map of Aalborg that most interresting places are basically around that place where we met in the center. We wanted to check out the city a little bit more so we arranged that we’ll go out, then come for dinner and then go for drinks together with our hosts. So we went to the center, saw about three more interresting streets and buildings and again ended up in a coffee bar, where for the 48579th time we’ve discussed women, why I cannot get laid and wtf is my problem. All the time, we had a strage feeling that the waitress serving us was from Czech republic or Slovakia and understood everything we talked about, when she was around.

Then we went straight to Nicholases place, had good bolognese spaghetti Nicholas prepared for us and went to town again. Nicholas told us that he doesn’t want to stay late because he had enough yesterday, which was pretty much the same we didn’t want, because we wanted to head out to Skagen early in the morning. So Jano even generously decided not to drink and drive us to the town. (The previous plan was to ride a bike). The guys took us to this very cool underground club called 1000fryd, with the same level of undergroundness and alternativeness as our Subclub in Bratislava, but much cleaner and pleasant. We hit some alternative disco night (As far as my music recognition brain center could tell). I came to bar and asked for a non-alcoholic drink for Jano and a beer for me. The barman, who had a significant part of his face covered in piercing, was a very nice guy, who gladly described to me all the non-alcoholic beverage they had on the wall behind the bar. Finally I chose a rather unpleasant orange lemonade Jano almost spit back to my face, but what can you do. (Well after he was done, I’ve invited him to exactly the same, wachachacha… When he recieved the second bottle he’s taken the etiquette from the bottle as a proof of his great self-sacrifice to remind me of it for the rest of my life). Then we had some talk with the barman about sqatting in Europe, sat down for a while, chatted with our hosts, I almost initiated a discussion with a completely strange girl (that story is much better, when told by Jano… so I won’t bother) and then we went back.

We’ve woken up around 8:30 (when I say around I mean a bit later than that) packed our stuff and headed out to Skagen. All the way the weather was quite nice (for Denmark at least) but Skagen was totally covered in fog. We went straight to the Grenen, the northernmost point of Denmark. We parked the car on official Grenen touristic parking spot, thankful that off the season all the parking ticket vending machines were on holiday. We walked cca 20 min. along the sea shore (the only way how to not get lost in the fog) and finally reached the northernmost piece of Danish land. Then we kept wandering near the coast, still in quite dense fog. We went quite far from the crowd concentrated mostly on the “main” point, photographying their children on the junction of the northern an the baltic sea, so we ended up completely alone. The beach was made of a soft sand covered with little stones of different colors, so we collected some of them. Jano’s goal was a nice piece of every color, mine was to find the blackest stone possible. Then I wrote the link to my website to the sand in 1meter big letters and we were good to go. As the fog became a little thinner we decided to not return the same way and wander around a bit in the sand dunes further from the sea. To my surprise, we didn’t get lost and returned happily to the parking place. We checked the center of Skagen, had some fastfood and coffee in the harbour.

Another attractions we had to see according to the tourist guide were “Den tilsandede kirke”, a church that was built in 12. century and unfortunately for the churchgoers one sand dune decided to settle itself exactly on its location, so today only a tip of it’s tower can be seen by interrested tourists. Another spot was another (allegedly “wandering”) sand dune called “Råbjerg Mile”, probably without any significant building under it (yet). So I did another website sand link and we were done with our touristic goals at around 4. We had to be in Herning at 8 to return our car. So we decided to take exactly the same highway that we had taken to come here. Anyway, we were too tired to observe anything more.

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