Helsingør

Sunday afternoon, Jael and I went to Helsingør.  Helsingør (Anglicized as Elsinore but if you forget how to pronounce the Danish word and say "Elsinore" then people look at you funny for a second and then say "Oh, you're American . . .  Helsingør."),  Helsingør is the setting for Shakespeare's Hamlet.  Helsingør is actually a city on the Danish coast at a point where there the Øresund, the passage between Denmark and Sweden, is only 4 kilometers wide (about 2.5 miles).  The city on the Swedish side is called Helsingborg.  The castle is actually called Kronborg Slot (or Kronborg Castle) and it was the seat of Danish power for a few centuries in the middle ages and early modern era.

Theoretically, Helsingør is easy to get to from Copenhagen.  It is just a straight shot north.  However, for some reason (possibly, we discovered later, because the Danes like to do train track repair and concurrent train track shut-downs, over Easter week), without warning, we found out we couldn't take the route I had carefully looked up and written down the day before we left.  Instead, we had to go a round-about way and change trains a couple of times.  While this caused us a little temporary discomfiture, it did mean that we had time to zip up to one of  the ubiquitous 7-11 stores, which was in the station and get some bottled water before we set off on our great adventure in culture and history.

The red line is the route we should have been able to take, with no stops on the way.  The blue line is the route we did take
and the little circles are around the little "towns" we stopped in to wait  so that we could change onto other trains

It was a really pretty ride out to Helsingør.  It was really different from the Netherlands.  Here, everything is flat and tidy and in itty-bitty fields and patches.  Up there, it was a lot more scrubby.  There were little rolling hills, giant swampy bits, pine trees, and white birches.  In fact, the landscape looked like a slightly rolleyer version of Northern Minnesota.  It did have a distinctly Scandinavian feel, however.  There were lots of low buildings with shallow eaves and all of the buildings looked like tidy and simple and piney.  It looked like an IKEA kind of place, inhabited by an IKEA kind of people.

Once we got to Hillerød, we checked the schedule, found the next train to Helsingør, hopped on, and sailed away, expecting to be at a magical castle very soon.  I had Shakespeare's Hamlet on my little Kindle (Samuel gave his old one to me as a combined birthday and Christmas present for the last several years, when he couldn't think of anything good to give me (Thanks Samuel!  The Kindle is AWESOME!) and sent it to me, with Jael, when she came.) and I looked through that for some good, pithy quotes to say when we got to the castle.  I had not realized until then that there are not really that many quotes that lend themselves to being said publicly but not in  a play.  If you stand on the edge of the battlements and say "To be or not to be!" (Hamlet, Act III, Scene i), people might look at you funny and they also might try to stop you from jumping, which would be awkward.

In any case, despite my literary struggles, Jael and I noticed that, when our train stopped, they said the next stop was going to be Hillerød.  Which was the place we had just come from.  So, after a little panicking, we got off the train and hoped we hadn't mis-read something.  It turned out that, while all the trains listed their destinations as "Helsingør, via Fredensborg", every other train only went as far as Fredensborg and then returned.  So, we would be hanging around in Fredensborg for about half an hour.

It was cold.  Really quite cold.  And, since the station was closed, we had no way to verify our deductions about a train coming to take us the rest of the way.  And also, nowhere warm to sit.

Jael was cold and sad.

We did, however, meet a very nice little old couple who are doing approximately the same trip we were doing.  (We ran into them again, the next day, when we were visiting the Viking Ship Museum, too.)  They had come on the same train from Hillerød as we had done and were equally as confused.  So, we spent a fair bit of time walking back and forth across the train tracks (this was a tiny train station and it only had a level crossing to get to the second platform), staring at the Danish train schedule, asking the other two people on the platform if they knew the train schedule (that wasn't us, that was the husband of the couple), and generally trying to decide if we were about to hang around in the cold for a long time, just to get back on a train to Hillerød.  While the husband was talking with the other folks (one of whom turned out to be very obviously disturbed or inebriated), Jael and I talked to the wife.  They are from Spain, from Barcelona, actually.  I love how real Spanish people say that--"Bar-tha-loe-na" with a soft "th" instead of a "c" sound.  (Well, I presume they were real Spanish people.  They spoke Spanish to each other but they could have been faking.  But they still said "Barthelona" wonderfully.)
It was something of a sad story, however, as it had been around 80 when they left home.  So we had a lovely time commiserating about the Danish spring weather and the idiocy of the Danish people who insisted in running around in their shorts and shirt-sleeves when it was below freezing.  (Actually, with the exception of their winter wardrobe choices, we found the Danes to be quite charming.  Well, also with the exception of the one bus driver.  And also with the exception of that one guy who almost certainly tried to rip me off, on purpose, with the "wrong change" ploy.  But other than that, the Danes were totally nice.)

Eventually, just as we were about to give up hope, the train came.  And it was going all the way to Helsingør.  And we were off--we made it to the city, eventually found out which direction to go to find the castle (I knew we needed to go north and that it was on the edge of the Sound so we just started out in the direction that felt the "northest").  We got there a bit later than we anticipated but, as I mentioned to Jael, it is way more fun to have good stories about ending up in the wrong place than it is to go, tamely, to and fro, without adventure.

Those are the kinds of things you shouldn't say at the beginning of a trip.  It's asking for trouble.

Helsingør City Hall

A pretty fountain on our walk through Helsingør.

Helsingør Domkirke (Helsingør Cathedral)

Helsingør Train Station

The Kronborg Castle area and the touristy part of the city of Helsingør are in the middle
of a major renovation so there was a lot of construction going on.  This is their plan.

The Danes have fancy, florescent, mini-lighthouses.

Our first view of Kronborg Slot (Kronborg Castle) across part of the giant, protective battlements/moat that protects it.