Day 3

It’s Adam today! Wake up call for today was 6:30am – although I woke up much earlier around 4:30 because of jet-lag and because that is the time that the sun comes up over here. We relaxed for a while and made some coffee before leaving. The plan for today was to go on a day trip outside the city of Copenhagen to see two castles and surrounding towns – Frederiksborg and Helsingor. As we were taking the train into the city, we noticed that the metro Line E was not in service today. This was a problem because it was the only way were aware of to reach the town of Hillerod where the Frederiksborg Castle is located. Luckily, we were able to somewhat translate the message board at the station and found out they had a bus that would take us the rest of the way. Once in Hillerod, we walked through the small town on our way to the castle.  It was another extremely nice day – perfectly clear, breezy with temps in the low 70’s. After walking through the town, we came to a small lake where we took some nice pictures of the castle. We walked around the lake to reach the castle entrance and went inside. We learned that the castle was built for King Christian IV in the early 1600’s. The castle was huge!  We walked through over 40 rooms – all which were completely decorated as they would been during the 17-1800’s.  Apparently, the castle has the largest collection of portrait paintings in Denmark, and we can attest to that because all of the walls were covered in paintings of various royalty and their families and even their pets. Once finished with the inside of the castle, we walked up to the castle gardens. The gardens were nice as well. We took some more pictures over here (maybe some selfies with my selfie stick), and then walked along the lake back into town. It was almost lunch time and we did not want to wait until our next stop before eating, so we found a local café and got some sandwiches to go. Back at the train station, we discovered that the trains weren’t running to our next destination Helsingor either, so we were directed to a bus that would take us to the closest train station that was operating so that we could complete the journey. On the train, we had our sandwiches (ciabatta bread, baked chicken, bacon, and veggies) and they were very tasty. It was a short train ride before we arrived in Helsingor. The city is right on the coast of Denmark, and since it was so clear, Sweden was easily visible across the Baltic Sea (the city is located at the narrowest point between Denmark and Sweden – 2.5 miles). We followed the signs towards the castle and got our ticket to go inside. Helsingor Castle is also known as Kronborg or Elsinore Castle. The castle is mainly known because it is featured in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Inside, they had actors all dressed up who were playing the parts of all the various characters of the play.  We were in the Great Hall reading the information panel on the wall when all the sudden we heard, “TO BE OR NOT TO BE” echoing through the hall. The actor went on to do the whole monologue for all the tourists. Most recently the castle was used as a fortification and prison. Once we were finished walking around inside, we walked outside to the beach, and found a good place to relax (and perhaps to drink a beer or two). The locals were fishing into the sea, but it didn’t appear that they were catching anything. Then we walked back to the town and through a couple of the city’s main shopping streets. Back at the train station we popped into a grocery store. There may have been an incident that involved me asking the store employees if I could borrow a mop and a broom in order to clean something up that had been dropped/broken on the floor, but Jessica won’t let me tell the full story.  The train back to Copenhagen was about 45 minutes. We didn’t bother going back into the city, we just took the S train straight back to our Airbnb. Too tired to go out for dinner, we stopped at the store down the street to get an assortment of meats, cheeses, crackers, bread, beer and wine. We are currently enjoying all of these things in preparation for our long day tomorrow.  Full day in Copenhagen before we hop on an evening flight to Zagreb, Croatia!  Goodnight!