Denmark Is Full Of Slots

The place we are currently residing in is a bit cramped compared to what we were used to both in England and in Chicago. No lawn, three rooms, and a windy dog. Yeesh. It doesn't take much incentive to go somewhere on the weekends.

On short notice, we decided to head to Svendborg for the night, a small coastal town on the next big island to the east of us, Funen. It was a quick 2 hour drive to our hotel that was very conveniently located right on the harbor (map markers near bottom right.)


View Danmark in a larger map

Saturday night it was too late to do much in town, so we wandered around a bit, grabbed some dinner, and wandered some more. Despite being on the water, not much was open in town.

Sunday, though, we got up early and made our way south to Tåsinge, an island connected to Funen by a bridge. You can also drive to Langeland, another island, via Tåsinge, but we didn't get around to that. Tåsinge is home to the first of two castles we saw on our little trip -- and the word in Danish for castle, by the way, is "slot".

Valdemars Slot was commisioned in 1644 by King Christian IV as a home for his son, Christian Valdemar. That didn't work out, though, when the young Christian died in battle with Poland in 1656. The castle was then given to Admiral Niels Juel in payment for victory in a key battle with the Swedes at Køge Bay. His family still owns it. It is the largest private home in Denmark. The grounds now also house a mini-golf course, a toy museum, and a yachting museum. We really enjoyed this place -- there were few other visitors and it was wide open to explore.

From here, we set out north, back to mainland Funen. About 25 minutes drive led us to the second Slot we visited, Egeskov Slot or "Oak Forest Castle". This place was built in 1554 in the middle of a lake. The builder, Frands Brockenhuus, leveled an oak forest to underly the castle's foundation, hence the name. It is now a hodge-podge of various attractions, including the castle itself, a car museum, a motorcycle musuem, something that had to do with Dracula, an award-winning rose garden, and a bamboo maze. If I had kids, I would take them there. Boo found the place hot and lacking sufficient bowls of hundvasser (that's my attempt at Danish for "dog water") -- but she did like that the only place she couldn't go was inside the castle. A very dog-friendly destination, she was allowed in the museums and restuarant.

Skål!

Everyone Knows About Venice

The final destination in our mini-tour of northeast Italy was Venice. We stayed at a hotel near the airport and then rode the cheap 20-30 minute bus in to the town. Venice is an amazing place to walk around -- the surreal setup with canals instead of roads was a wonder to behold.

All that said, I would avoid going again during any festival period or on a weekend, and definitely not when there is a festival on the weekend! With each hour, the Saturday crowds got thicker and thicker. That night, there was a fireworks show starting at around 11PM. At 5PM, there was a steady stream of people flowing to the sides of one of the big canals. By the time the fireworks started, leaving Venice was no longer an option. If you are even remotely bothered by crowds or have any sort of claustrophobia, this was an awful situation. We tried to leave about halfway through the fireworks so we could catch our bus back to the hotel and simply could not. Every passage was packed with people. I had never quite understood how people get killed in the stampedes at Wal-Mart the day after Thanksgiving, but now I have a much better understanding of how that sort of thing gets started. We missed the last bus and had to find a taxi -- luckily we didn't have to wait too long.

Food in Venice was hit and miss. We tried for a nice dinner Saturday and had one of the worst meals I've had in quite some time. Thankfully, the pizzas we had for lunch were excellent -- mine had truffle oil on it -- nice. Sunday before I left, we had a good lunch at a newer restaurant in the Jewish Ghetto -- really good eggplant!

The pictures say the rest... salute!

“Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.”
Henry James quotes (American expatriate writer 1843-1916)

I've Lost My Mojo

On our tour of northern Italy near Venice, our second stop was Verona. Verona has a long and sorted history going back to around it's first written record around 550 BC. In 300 BC, it became Roman territory. Then for about 2000 years, it was a centerpoint of battle between feuding families and battling Italian city-states. A bit later, around 1797, it was held by the French (Napolean), then Austria, then finally in 1866 the Austrians left town and it became, at last, an Italian city.

Verona is well-known for the Roman architecture and other historical buildings that still stand. For this, it is listed a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Large portions of the original Roman city exist in tact a few meters below the surface of the modern day city. It's also the setting for Shakespear's Romeo and Juliet.

We spent the last hours of the day here, wandering around the cobbled streets. A storm was passing overhead -- we had to take refuge underneath the large umbrella's of a small café for about an hour at one point. Once the storms passed, we found a small restaurant just off the main square and had a good dinner (truffled mortadella to start -- fantastic!)

Our drive back from here to our hotel near Venice was a nightmare --- for some reason, most of the signs for off-ramps on their recent highway renovations are posted well after you would have already need to taken the ramp. This, combined with a very confused GPS navigation, caused me to miss the right exit over and over -- at one point forcing us to go about 20 miles before we could turn around. Finally, we got off in the right direction to get caught in a drenching down pour that, combined with a construction truck blocking a lane on a bridge for no obvious reason, brought us to a halt for over an hour. Not cool.

Salute!

There is no world without Verona walls,
But purgatory, torture, hell itself.
Hence-banished is banish'd from the world,
And world's exile is death.
—William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act III, Scene iii