Odin's temple shines,
Light issuing from homes
Bright with happiness.
We spent a happy, sunny day in Odense wandering around with Birthe and Ole as our tourguides. After waking up early in the morning, we were packed full of food (bread, meat slices, cheeses, two kinds of juice, tea) and given the opportunity to do our laundry. Although we're not far into the trip, we already recognise that this is a pretty special thing. :) We hung it outside on a line to dry, because Danmark is that sort of place.
The four of us piled into the car (Birthe asked if we had any requests for the day, and our only answer was "no cycling") and headed the 7 or so kilometres into the centre of town. We saw old parks, cathedrals, Hans Christian Anderson's home, and the old centre of Odense. I guess the photos will speak for themselves when we can get them uploaded--which should be soon since my mom managed to acquire a cable that I believe she will be mailing to us in Antwerp--so I'll just babble about the history and cool stuff we learned:
"Odense" actually means "Odin's temple," which is pretty awesome. It has been around for several centuries. It's the 3rd largest town in Danmark, and it got the country's first bike lane way back in 1898. It's a place where Hans Christian Anderson spent a lot of his time, and there's a museum in his old house and several statues scattered around the city centre that depicted some of his more famous characters, like the one-legged tin soldier and the woman with her chicken eggs perched atop her head. There was also a sculpture of the man himself.
One of the cooler techy things that we saw was a counter along a bicycle path that kept track of the number of cyclists that had passed for the day and year and previous years. We went by around 1430, and there already had been about 5300 cyclists. :)
After a couple hours of wandering, we returned to our hosts' lovely house for some cake and tea. The cake was this delicious Danish thing made from folding several layers of pastry with butter and OH MY GOODNESS IT IS DELICIOUS. Also the health of these people is amazing: we did some grocery shopping for Birthe's 100-year-old neighbour who still lives on her own. Then we spent a half hour or so doing all the bicycle things we didn't realise that we'd needed to do, like retightening the nuts holding on Evan's toe clip and putting batteries in our taillights and the like. Birthe, Evan, and I then went for a walk down to the creek nearby, enjoying the Golden Hour before the sun got too far down towards the horizon. Ole prepared some dinner, which we of course stuffed ourselves with, and then afterwards we had a delicious time with sake and Gammel Dansk and trip photos (Birthe and Ole went to India recently, and they also had loads of photos of Portugal and Praha). We closed the night with some music and dancing (did I mention that Birthe and Ole are adorable?) and piano-playing. Lovely, really.