We woke up docked in Aarhus, Denmark, with a view from our balcony of petroleum storage tanks beyond a giant pile of gravel.
Our excursion left at 8:45 so we ordered room service for breakfast. The yoghurt, fruit, and granola parfaits were really good, the rest was average, but it got the job done.
Our excursion guide, Lina, took us to Silkeborg, a rapidly-growing town beside a picturesque lake. It is in a region of gentle hills dotted with lakes. The hills were left behind when the glaciers from the mountains in Sweden and Norway retreated, and the soil has quite a bit of sand. Because these hills were also covered in forests, that meant lots of sand close to lots of trees, which was a good combination for early glass-making efforts which required a lot of firewood. Unfortunately the glass industry was so successful that in the sixteenth or seventeenth century the king ended up shutting down the glass works because the forests were being cut down at an unsustainable rate. Hundreds of years later the forests had recovered, and the industry that built up the town in the past century was a paper mill.
Besides the pastoral and forest scenery, our tour went there because the paper mill magnate’s former home is now a museum, the main attraction of which is Tollund Man, the naturally-preserved body of a man who died between 405 - 380BC. Organic material in bogs can be incredibly well-preserved via a bryophyte named Sphagnum. It is a good quality museum which exhibits a variety of other artifacts covering the various phases of human habitation of Denmark.
From the museum we took some scenic roads through the woods to the top of the Himmelbjerget (The Sky Mountain), one of the highest points in Denmark, elevation: 482 feet. We can walk from our house to the beach, and then up a hill that is over 500 feet elevation, so it told us something about Denmark that this is one of its highest points. The top of the hill features a tower that is a monument to the constitution of Denmark and to King Frederik the VII, who signed a law that abolished autocracy and enabled the constitution in 1849.
The mountain also has a park with a lot of hiking trails and a neat-looking hotel with a nice view.
On the way back our guide told an interesting story about how her father, who was in his early teens near the end of World War II, discovered a German soldier hiding on their farm. The soldier was trying to avoid being sent to the front in Russia. He was hiding there because he knew our guide’s grandfather and his brother (on a neighboring farm) were against the German occupation of Denmark. The families sheltered the soldier in one of their outbuildings, and the man was nearly caught on the night they all learned on the radio that Germany had surrendered. The farms in the area are lovely with all the gentle hills.
We ate lunch back at the ship then boarded one of the shuttle buses that took us closer to the city from the very industrial area of the port where we docked. We walked down some of the main streets without any real plan but managed to pass some neat landmark buildings.
At the end of a large pedestrian-only street we found an old church and decided to look inside. It is the Vor Frau Kirke (Church of Our Lady), which is built atop the oldest extant church in Denmark. There were only a couple people there when we came in, but shortly after we arrived the organist began rehearsing for an event the next day. We went down the stairs to see the crypt church that was built in 1060 and which is still occasionally used for mass.
There is a courtyard and there we found a door with a sign in Danish that seemed to be saying there was another chapel that was open, but we couldn’t figure out how to open the door. When we returned to the main building a man there greeted us and asked if we had seen the chapel. We told him we tried but failed to open the door, so he led us back through the door and then gave us a really interesting tour and history of the church. He was a bit intense in the way he wanted to share all this information with us, and we learned a bunch, but he was so engaging that I never took a photo of the chapel!