It Didn't Look That Old

This past Saturday we took the short day trip to Ribe, a town south of Varde, that is known above all else for being the oldest town in Denmark. The first documented evidence of the town shows up in the year 854 -- but archeological evidence puts it back to at least 710 AD. They are planning on celebrating their 1300th anniversary next year.

View Danmark in a larger map

We just barely scratched the surface here -- we didn't go in the old cathedral, nor one of the two Viking museums, and nope, not the other museum either. This is definitely a spot to hit with visitors (hint hint) so we saved a few things til then. The town is a great place to stroll with quiet cobblestone streets and not nearly as many tourists as we expected.

We did manage to discover the Ribe Bryghus (brewhouse) right before it closed and purchased a few bottles of my new favorite beer. We did have a good lunch at the Hotel Dagmar next to the Cathedral. It was a meal of (I think) typical Danish food -- again it followed our current opinion that, to us anyway, Danish food is 'weird but good.' The less adventurous, I'm afraid, will think it is just weird.

Skål!

Ice Cream With The Safety Off

The missus and I took a field trip yesterday to a nice little vacation area called Henne Strand, about 20 minutes drive north and west of Varde. Unless I am over-simplifying the translation, Henne Strand translates as something like 'near the beach' or 'along the beach'.



I think most of the housing in Henne Strand is what is classified as a sommerhus or "Summer Home". The biggest difference I know between these houses and a regular house is that, by law, we can't buy one. Even to buy a 'normal' house, we need special permission to do so. This is all because our visas expire in three years, making us temporary residents. These laws, I have read, have a lot to do with keeping folks from a certain nearby country from coming in with their more abundant cash (due to lower taxes) and turning these areas into German resorts.

Henne Strand has a small main street, with lots of shopping that was open even on Sunday. In Varde, almost nothing is open after 1 o'clock Saturday until Monday morning. I've been told that this is due to a law the excludes businesses from government-enforced non-working hours if they are within view of the coast.

Ice cream is the big item on the Henne Strand strip, and almost every ice cream dealer featured a concoction called "The Mexican". I broke out the Danish phrasebook and with some guesswork, figured out that the Mexican is comprised of a giant waffle cone filled with many scoops of different flavored ice cream, then a few swirls of soft serve ice cream (mostly vanilla and jordbær), then whipped cream (fløde?) and then jam to top it all off. How or why this came to be called, "The Mexican" is beyond me to understand.

When we were making our way back to the car, I noticed a sign on the sidewalk depicting something that just had to be an image of 'The Mexican.'


Huh. Is it supposed to look like a Mexican -- with a little whipped cream sombrero? Is this something you would get in Mexico? I never saw anything like this in all the time I spent there. Time will tell what the truth behind this thing is -- but I have already heard and seen some other evidence, both here in Denmark and in the UK (someone tell Domino's Pizza that 'peri peri' sauce isn't Mexican), that the Mexican culture is completely misunderstood in this part of the world. How else can you explain the lack of a good burrito place in an entire country? If only they knew what they were missing.

Skål!






“You can tell all you need to about a society from how it treats animals and beaches.” - Frank Deford, author (born 1938)