I was determined to take our tour today so I propped Fred up and took him along, conscience or not.
Just joking. He’s fine but this picture is hysterical. He looks half dead. The photographer just got him at the exact right time. Even the clerks at the photo store were laughing at this one.
Today we are in Arhus, Denmark, the second largest city in the country (after Copenhagen of course). As you might be able to tell from the picture, it was raining and chilly. We had a 3 ½ walking tour, great planning on our part, I guess.
We walked up and down hills and stairs quite a bit and Fred did great. All kidding aside, he’s fine. Though I had my head on a swivel the whole day.
One of the first stops was the Dokk1 building. It’s a community gathering spot and library all rolled into one. The fascinating thing about this building is its parking garage.
In the pictures you see the lady with her car and she’s at a kiosk, then the door closes and her car disappears. They have an automated parking system. It is so cool. After the pictures I included a YouTube link if you want to see it in action.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4jYDfOzrjY
The building also had an amazing sculpture on the ceiling. That's an upside down city-scape.
Several years ago we were in Cologne Germany and needed to store our bags for a couple of hours between trains. The train station had an automated bag storage. We just put our bags in an open storage locker type thing, pay for the length of time you want and it disappears. You get a receipt and when we returned, we just inserted the ticket and the machine retrieved our bag from who knows where and we were off.
After we were dazzled by the garage we moved onto the rest of the town. It was originally settled by Vikings back in 700 AD. It has undergone many transformations since then, most recently (in the last 20 years) they have improved the waterfront area to make it accessible to all Danes. There is a massive condo development going on at the end of the peninsula that will house 12,000 people eventually.
Of course, when you ‘improve’ an area, people can lose their jobs and this happened to many dock workers, so they put up a statue to honor them.
It's hard to get the true picture of an area when you’re looking out from under your umbrella the whole time but it looks like a very livable and well- run community.
We took a break from the rain in a little chapel and the guide answered questions. A lot of the questions were about Denmark’s very high taxes. This ALWAYS comes up when Americans are in the group, always, without fail. The guide explained that they do have high taxes but then they don’t have to worry about anything after that, medical, school, retirement is all taken care of. ‘But don’t you have to wait a long time for a medical procedure’, is always the follow up question. Yes, he said, unless you have cancer or something life threatening and then you have to be seen within two weeks. I feel like I’ve heard this all before LOL.
He was then asked about the potential threat from Russia. He said it’s talked about, but people don’t think about it on a daily basis. He noted the listening post they have on Bornholm Island. This, NATO believes, would be the first thing attacked if there was a problem. We’ll actually be on that island next week for a visit. Fred and I knew all about the base there because we got an email from a friend asking if we would be close by (shout out). We felt pretty smart, no one else knew about it.
The city was very nice as you can see in the pictures below. They do have a city hall they are proud of (the rain was coming down too hard to get a picture). If you think Boston’s City Hall is attractive, you’ll like Arhus’ too. That’s all I’ll say.
Tomorrow, is our first stop in Germany.
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