Köpenhamn Igen

I went to Copenhagen again yesterday. We met the Rotary people at the train station and then went across the bridge on the train. After we changed our money from Swedish to Danish crowns, we went to the Strøget. That's the main commercial street in Copenhagen.

There were a lot of shops to see, one of the biggest was H&M. It was just this huge building that went on and on and on. It was like 5 city blocks of one shop. Another interesting one was a tobacconists shop. They had about 500 pipes. Then there was a puzzle and game shop. They had board games, juggling balls, rubik's cubes, dice and books on magic tricks. There was a magician there too. He could shuffle a deck of cards with one hand.

After exploring and eating lunch, we went to the National Museum. There had a tour guide who could speak really good English and he took us around some of the major exhibits of Danish pre-history.



We started in the Stone Age and he showed us flint tools and how people hunted. There was an aurok (prehistoric super cow) that showed evidence of being wounded with both a flint arrow head and a flint spear. There was also some amber jewelry and skulls with holes drilled in the tops. He told us how they used to work for ages and ages on a really nice axe and then throw it in a lake as a sacrifice. That was also the beginning of agriculture in Denmark.

Next was the bronze age, Denmark didn't have any bronze so they had to trade it from further south. There were some really interesting daggers and shields from that time. In that exhibit there was an elk which they used to hunt. He showed us a grave that had two people in it. They had ochre on their bodies which had some kind of spiritual significance. He also told us how they could tell how old a grave was by carbon dating and tree trunk rings.

Finally we came to the Iron age. That was when the Vikings came into power in Denmark. He told us how they never wore horned helmets. Ever. There was a huge cauldron which was apparently used to collect the blood of dying war prisoners so that their last spasms could be used as a way of predicting how the battle would go. Interestingly, it was from Bulgaria, which means that the ancient Danes would have had to gone a long way to get it. Some of the last things he showed us where some golden drinking horns, a ship, and the runic writing system.

That was the last thing on the agenda, so after we were done with that, we just wandered around until it was time to leave.