Day Tripper

A cool aspect of living in Århus is that you can nip off on a four and a half hour train ride to the third largest port in the world (next to London and New York). Nine hours of trains for a weekend trip might sound rather intense, until you consider how long is a bus ride to Swartz Bay, a ferry across the channel, and a subsequent bus/train ride to downtown Vancouver. Here one might not see orcas nor eagles, but the rural Danish/German landscape has its own charming appeal.

Andrea and I both love visiting Germany. The cities are overwhelmingly large, and it seems that everything else is correspondingly large, as well.  For 1.89 euro, you can find Ritter Sport bars the size of a dinner plate.  Cups of ice cream come with three flavours and a mountain of whipped cream.
And there's always a spectacular Botaniske Have.
In Århus, we live beside the Botaniske Have, and it makes for a very pleasant twenty minute walk to make one's way around it's perimetre.  In Hamborg, we ventured through for about 90 minutes, from roses to cacti to olive trees, and still missed the majority of what was to see.  But we had little choice, if we were going to walk the hundreds of rooms of Picassos and Cezannes at the kunsthalle before it closed.

So, really, given the nature of these cities, it's good that we're only there for a weekend.  Even by the end of that, we're starting to feel a little "groß" (pronounced "gross") ourselves...

PS. Can you spot the difference between these two photos?

Nürnberg, Oct/2011

Hamborg, Oct/2013