Hamlet's Castle

On Saturday my friend Kari and I signed up to visit Kronborg castle, known all around the world as Hamlet's Castle. We first spent about 2 hours exploring the town Helsingør (Elsinor). It was such a cute little town with colorful buildings and winding streets. One of the shops we went into was the most amazing cheese shop I have ever seen. The had every kind of cheese imaginable and we tasted a few. After walking around for a while we stopped for lunch. This was the first truly danish meal I had had since arriving in Denmark. I ordered the warm meatballs and cold potato salad. It was served with 2 pieces of dense rye bread and i ate it sort of like an open faced sandwich. It was so delicious! I could eat that for lunch every day.

                                                                The Cheese Shop

                                                                  My amazing lunch!

 

After lunch we rejoined the group, reboarded the buses and drove 5 minutes to the castle. There we were split into small groups and taken on guided tours of the castle. The interesting thing about this castle was that the rooms were fairly small but the fire places were extremely big. This was because the weather was so cold. Our tour guide told us that when she was a young girl the baltic sea, which the castle overlooks, actually froze completely over and you could walk to Sweden on the ice. Unfortunately, it doesn't freeze anymore. Another interesting thing about this castle was that it was used at the royal residence at the time when Denmark also controlled Sweden and Norway. However, when Denmark lost those territories no king would live here because they didn't want to look at their lost lands.

Along with touring the typical rooms of the castle we also toured the doungeons/ military barracks which were located below the castle. They were really cool. The ceilings were very low and it was very dark. Our tour guide told us that being in the military was not a popular job and was filled mostly by people who could not afford a house or convicts using the military as a way to escape their sentence. This is also most likely the reason that Denmark lost most of their land battles, the military was not very motivated.