Travel Plans and Western Denmark

For the past week or so I've mostly been preoccupied with making travel plans for my spring travel break (3 weeks long with a DIS organized trip the first week) and a couple of weekend trips. Making these plans has taken a lot more energy and has been a lot more stressful that I originally thought and I've realized that I really need to prioritize where I want to go because I don't have time to do everything. I decided to travel with a good friend from home who is studying in Barcelona for the second week and a half of the break and we spent several hours talking on skype and figuring out what we wanted to do and making plane tickets. The DIS lead trip that I am going on goes through Germany and the Netherlands and ends in Utrecht. So from Utrecht I will take a train to Amsterdam, spend a day and a half in Amsterdam, then take a train to Brussels where I will stay for a day and then fly to Barcelona. I'll stay in Barcelona for several days with my friend before we both fly to London for several days, then we'll fly to Zurich and see some of the Swiss countryside. Finally, we'll take a night train from Zurich to Budapest, spend a day and a half in Budapest and then go on to our final destination in Prague. So the break will definately be full and will involve lots of traveling but I'm really excited to see everything. However, it is a little unfortunate that we managed to pick every country that is not on the Euro!

This next weekend (the 13th thru the 16th) I am going to Berlin with a friend. Since we decided kind of late to go, plane tickets were expensive so we're going to take a night bus there and an early morning bus back (there are no night buses from Berlin to Copenhagen which is kind of annoying).

I am planning on taking two other weekend trips, one to Stockholm and one to Vienna. Planes are by far the easiest and cheapest way to travel and to make reservations but there aren't any really cheap flights out of Copenhagen. Probably the most difficult thing about making travel arrangements is finding information about trains online and it seems to be impossible to book any train tickets online, and to get a reservation you have to go to a central train station.

I spent most of the early part of the week working on travel arrangements and I found it kind of addicitive and I just wanted to keep trying different travel sites and different date combinations. However, fortunately i was forced to take a break because I had a short DIS study tour from Thursday Feb. 5 to Saturday Feb.7.

The tour consisted of half of the architecture students (around 40 students,the other half went on a different bus) and we went to three cities on the Jutland Peninsula in Western Denmark. For those of you unfamiliar with the geography of Denmark, Copenhagen is located on the eastern most part of the island of Sealand. Directly west of Sealand is another island, Funen and west of that is the Jutland Peninsula, which connects to northern Germany.

On Thursday, we first stopped at a recently completed church, Hellig Kors Kirke in Jylling, about 45 minutes west of Denmark. It had snowed the night before so it was really pretty to see all of the unspoilt snow and I think we got a different perspective on the church because of it. This church was one of the coolest buildings that we saw on the entire trip and it had a really interesting shape and a lot of attention was paid to natural light and the building's realtionship with the landscape, which seems to be a very important part in Danish and nordic architecture. Unfortunately, we only got to stay at the church for 15 minutes because we had to make sure that we caught the ferry to Aarhus, the second largest city in Denmark, with a population of around 250,000.

The ferry to Aarhus was pretty cool. We drove into the ferry on the bus and then left the bus and walked up to the sitting area where they also had a restaurant and a little store where you could buy food. The trip on the ferry wasn't that interesting because it was so foggy that you couldn't see anything except the water. Also, the Danish coast isn't that interesting to look at from far away because everything is so flat.

In Aarhus, we saw the Aarhus Radhus (the City Hall), designed by Arne Jacobsen in 1938 who seems to be the most famous Danish architect. The building was very clearly influenced by the Bauhaus but what was amazing was that they managed to build it during WWII and the German occupation of Denmark. The city hall also had a tower (which I thought was kind of ugly and didn't really fit the rest of the building) but we got a great view of Aarhus. I also saw the ARoS art musuem, which was just a neat modern art museum with a staircase that was similar to the Guggenheim. Also, there was a statue of a giant little boy in a crouching position that was 15' high. I also walked around Aarhus a little bit and it wasn't that different from Copenhagen, just smaller and a little more industrial seeming. Later Thursday night we drove 1.5 hrs up to Aalborg, on the northern end of Jutland.

In Aalborg the notable buildings we saw was the recently completed Utzon Center and the Nordjyllands KunstMusuem, a modern art museum designed by the famous Finnish architect Alvar Aalto. The Utzon Center was built to honor Jørn Utzon, the architect who designed the Sydney Opera House and who grew up in Aalborg. The Center used Utzon's inspiration of ships and sails for the design and included information on Utzon's work. It also had a really cool light display that is really hard to describe but was very neat. The Aalto musuem was also pretty cool and again there was a lot of attention paid to capturing natural light. Friday night we drove two hours to Kolding, a smaller town in southern Jutland.

Friday night I walked around downtown Kolding with a couple of people and it was a much smaller town than either Aarhus or Aalborg and was very cute, although there was not much going on. We did find an English bar (recommended to us by a friend on the other architecture tour, which had stayed in Kolding the previous night) and when we went in, we were by far the youngest people there. We had also been told to try the strawberry beer, which we did and found that it was really good. It tasted basically like a liquidy strawberry smoothie with a faint beer taste. The pub did get to be pretty crowded and there was an interesting mix of older people, younger people and then all of the students from DIS. Saturday we saw another modern art museum, a library, a traditional Danish church and a restored castle which was also really neat.

Both Thursday and Friday nights we stayed in hostels. Although I didn't have any hostel experience, they seemed to be pretty good and clean. They were both DanHostels, which I think must be some kind of organization kind of like Best Western. Also, I think a lot of Danish families stay in hostels when they travel so the hostels have to be a bit nicer.

All in all the trip was pretty good and it was nice to see a part of Denmark that I wouldn't otherwise have seen. Also, since the trip was an architectural study tour we were told to keep sketchbooks where we were supposed to sketch the buildings and to make notes on their important features. I have never done this before so it was a bit intimidating because there were other people who obviously had done this a lot, but i think i got better and more comfortable with sketching as the trip went on.