My Birthday, Roskilde and Work!

Saturday was my birthday, so after sleeping in, Fadia and Thomas made me breakfast and we sat at the table for a couple of hours talking. This seems to be a very common thing to do. Fadia also made me a cake which was really good but very different from American cakes. As far as I could tell, it was made from scratch and was a pretty dense cake with lots of nuts in it. It was also not as sweet as American cakes and it didn't have frosting. They also got me a little book about architecture in Copenhagen which was really nice. That afternoon I had to do to school to work on a studio project that was due in a week. After working on the project I went to a friend's Kollegium, which is kind of like a dorm for Danish students. However, unlike American dorms, kollegiums are not associated with any university and are not located at a university. A couple of my friends from Haverford had made me a surprise cake and bought me a beer in celebration of my 21st b-day. Then we went out to get pizza and stopped at a kiosk (a corner store) and bought several different beers and had a little taste test.

Sunday I went on a tour of Roskilde Cathedral and the Vikings' Ship Museum in Roskilde. The tour was organized and heavily subsized by DIS so it only cost 50 kroner (around $9) for the transportation to and from Roskilde and guided tours of both the museum and the cathedral! Roskilde Cathedral was begun in 1167 as the seat of Denmark's archbishopery, holds the burial sites of all the Danish royalty. Roskilde was very different than the other cathedrals I've seen, mostly in France. the entire building is made of bricks, and most of the interior wall surfaces are white painted brick. Although one chamber did have a lot of wall paintings, the surfaces in the nave are pretty plain. However, the white paint also makes the inside seem brighter and more inviting than the more heavily painted or stone interiors of the French cathedrals. We got a guided tour of the Cathedral which was nice because the guide was able to give us some of Denmark's early history and was also able to point out interesting facts about the church.

After seeing the church we went to the nearby Vikings Ship Museum which was built to hold the excavated remains of 5 viking ships found in the Roskilde Fjord. The ships were originally sunk in the 900s to block the entrance to Roskilde and they were discovered and carefully removed from the ocean in the 1950s. However, since they had been underwater for so long, most of the wood had disintegrated and so some of the reconstructed ships were more complete than others. We also got a guided tour for this museum and learned a fair amount about the Vikings and their different kinds of ships for trading and for war. The ships designed for trading had wider hulls to allow them to carry a greater load but were much slower than the narrower and longer war ships. The guide said that in these ships and with favorable winds, the Vikings could have reached England in only 3 days and Greenland in as little as 3 weeks!