Our Trip to Denmark….Day 3 (August 25, 2013)

Mark wanted to go to the Vikingship Museum while in Copenhagen.

To get there we took a regional train to….

….then a short bus ride and walk….

….to the Vikingship Museum grounds.

The weather was beautiful, and combined with the landscape…. 

….made for a beautiful day.

Upon arriving, we found that there was a Viking Festival taking place on the museum grounds that day.

We walked around the displays and watched people prepare foods, crafts and other necessities, that demonstrated the Viking lifestyle.

This lady was amazing as she knitted with thick yarn made from animal hair. I immediately thought of my niece and her daughter who love to knit.  

It was enjoyable watching this lady create thick and heavy clothes and blankets.

We climbed onto replica Viking ships….

A blacksmith making tools and using them to make crafts and other articles.

The Vikings were quite resourceful...

….burning peat to extract iron that had accumulated in it….bog iron.

The Vikings were industrious….

….and had to work hard to prepare a nutritious meal.

Preparing to bake bread outdoors….

A tasty meal of roast poultry on two of the spits, and some other animal on the first spit.

This young lady tried to get me to buy a special hand made hat…especially when she found out we lived in Poland.  

On an August afternoon, it was hard to think of needing anything like this to keep my head warm.

The homemade hats were fun to try on and would have been warm….but I have enough hats.

More sewing....

Knives and tools used for a number of Viking tasks….

….including perhaps the skinning of animals.

We were treated to some fun Danish music…

It reminded us of Texas festivals….but this time we were at a festival in Denmark.

Because of the Viking Festival outside, we had been on the museum grounds for a few hours and our feet were tired….but we hadn't gone inside the museum yet. 

We finally went inside and joined a museum tour in English.  The tour was interesting and our guide was amazing….she spoke very good English, was very knowledgable about even small details, and explained everything very simply and clearly.

Who were the Vikings?  I had thought they were just pirates from the middle ages….but we learned there was so much more to their lives and existence.

The Vikings came from the Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Norway and Sweden in the 8th - 11th centuries.  They did raid and pillage, but there was more to their lives.  They were fisherman and farmers who lived off the land….then in the summers they used the long wooden ships to explore, raid, trade and settle new areas.

The Viking Museum had found the remains of five original Viking boats called "longships"….they put thousands of pieces together like puzzles and have displayed some of the ships in the museum.

It was a good few hours of learning in this northern region of Copenhagen.

We soon boarded a city bus to go back to the train station.  After several minutes we realized we were traveling in the wrong direction!  

But since we were almost to the end of the route, the driver told us to just stay on the bus for the return trip.  So our mistake enabled us to see more of the Danish countryside and neighborhoods….and soon we were back at the train station.

We ate dinner in the train station.  Normally a meal in a train station would not be memorable….but the wooded utensils made it a unique experience. 

After arriving back in Copenhagen and walked back to our hotel, we saw the Danish flag….there was something about the flag that made us want to take pictures of it.

The trip to the Vikingship Museum had been enjoyable.  We hadn't known about it before arriving in Copenhagen, but were glad we adjusted our plans to see it.