I will write honestly: We treated the Kingdom of Denmark rather as a country to check off the list. We took a short trip through Germany, Denmark to Sweden, but we treated this trip more as a small getaway, to see what the south of Scandinavia looks like than a dream trip. And Denmark really delighted!
It’s hard to even say what exactly. Copenhagen is beautiful, like many European capitals. The roads are good, as they are with the Nordics. But there is some peace there, something as if time had stopped but not in the form of poverty or primitivism. We went for a walk in some village in Jutland… horses graze in the meadows, the houses are old but very well-kept… we rarely see a fence or a fence… Nobody is in a hurry. There is a lot of greenery, such intense greenery. It is clean, tidy but at the same time a bit wild.
No description or photos will show it, but there are places that calm us down, where nature dominates, where you don’t feel pressure, where we are surrounded by some form of bliss. And that’s Denmark.
I once read that when the Nazis attacked Denmark, the king was riding a horse, and six soldiers died in the defensive war. I can believe it!
Cities… actually, I’ll point out two. One is of course Copenhagen. Relatively small for a capital, modern but with accents of old buildings, majestic but intimate and very well-kept. The second city you can’t miss is Ribe. It is considered the oldest city in Denmark, dating back to 860. Generally, walking around it, we have a strange dissonance. A kind of open-air museum that is still a city. We pass old but very well-kept houses or tenement houses (I don’t know how to describe it, because the buildings are low, often wooden but big-city), but someone lives in them. They seem old, but when we look out the window, we see modernity inside. Something along the lines of: we don’t have to brag about what we have, so it can be antique on the outside, and the inside is already the 21st century.
In addition, Denmark has fulfilled my dream from years ago. I used to be fascinated by the crime series “The Bridge over the Sound”. In many scenes, interludes, they showed the bridge on the Danish-Swedish border over the Sand Strait. And finally we crossed it! For some it may seem childish, but when we drive over the bridge that we admired in the great series, we feel shivers. And we can hear the music from its theme in our ears.
Finally, culinary: Danes like to eat sweet things, they like to drink coffee, so it’s a great place for a getaway for those with a sweet tooth, and not very good for anyone on a diet. But those fresh sweet buns… mmmmmm….