Some long-overdue photos, part the second

So, the second part of my recent European adventures took me to spend a very pleasant couple of weeks in Denmark, for a little bit of work and a little bit of touristing as well. I hadn't really expected Denmark to be a really touristy destination - and in particular I hadn't really expected Aarhus, which is a city of about 300,000 people, to have all that much to offer in terms of attractions for the tourist market. Yes, I'm a big-city snob, and sometimes have been disappointed in cities of this size (e.g. Newcastle, NSW; or Champaign-Urbana, IL). However, I'm glad to say that both the country and the city managed to prove me wrong, in spite of the Scandinavian autumn weather... although, to be fair, it wasn't even all that cold, and the sun was out for at least a few hours most days. I'm going to split my Aarhus photos across a couple of posts, partly to make the most of the fact that I (for once) have some actual content for this blog and want to spread it out a little bit. Yes, that's cheating - but I'm allowed to, it's my blog.

Before the photos start, a few comments about my impressions of Denmark in general:
- they don't use the Euro, they use the Danish Kroner, which is to all practical intents and purposes pegged to a constant exchange rate against the euro. I'm sure an economist somewhere can explain why they think this is a good idea, but as far as I can tell all it gains anybody is a few extra chances to skin people on currency exchange fees. It also means that it takes a lot of mental arithmetic to figure out exactly how much things cost, which is probably a good thing because a lot of stuff is quite expensive - so in the end I just gave up calculating and paid what people were asking, which it turns out is a much better way to be happy with how much things cost.
- the countryside is very picturesque, and has a huge number of little towns and villages sprinkled through it (at least when viewed from a fastish-moving train) - but it's incredibly flat, with the highest point in the whole country being only a couple of hundred metres above seal level. This seems to lead to a certain amount of windyness...
- given all I've heard (and seen) about northern European food, I wasn't actually expecting all that much in the way of culinary delights - and boy was I wrong. Yes, Danish food tends to be reasonably heavy (and makes me gain a certain amount of weight) - but it's based around the combination of meat/fish, potatoes, and gravy/creamy sauces... which is just my style, I must say. Definitely a step in advance of the German/Czech sausage-and-cabbage offerings, too. Oh, and the oven-bake pizzas are way way better than their Australian or US counterparts.
- there is a department store in the city centre of Aarhus which sells excellent Italian-style ice-cream at very reasonable prices. If anyone is in the area, the peach and pina-colada flavours in particular come highly recommended by a wandering Australian icecream-lover


Anyway, enough meanderings and onto the photos... (there may be more meanderings in the second post with the rest of the photos, I can't promise an absence of ill-founded opinions this far in advance!). The first half of the photos are of the town of Aarhus in general





And now some of the exhibits and scenery around the Moesgard viking museum, which is mainly open-air and out on the edge of town. It's a really well set up museum, with a bunch of stuff that proves the Vikings weren't just barbarian hordes who went around looting and pillaging all of Europe for giggles, as well as a really well preserved example of a bog body. This was particularly spectacular - someone who lived over 1000 years ago, but who was buried in a peat bog and so almost perfectly preserved for gawping tourists to take photos of...