We checked in, then drove downtown, and spent a long time searching for a parking spot whose rules matched ours. As we walked downtown, we saw a young man dressed in only shorts, ziptied to a road sign, surrounded by people who were presumably his friends. It seemed they had thrown eggs at him, using them as glue to keep on the cinnamon they then covered him with. It is apparently a custom in Denmark, or at least Jutland, to do this on one’s 25th birthday if one is not married. On one’s 30th, they are said to throw pepper. Wikipedia says this practice originated with spice traders, who traveled too much to find wives. Danes are traditionally very serious about reproducing.

The church was closed by the time we got there, and it wouldn’t be open to the public on Sunday. All of the nice restaurants seemed to be $200 tasting menus. We went to Aarhus Street Food, inspected the little booths, and settled on one dish from Traditional Danish Food (some meatballs and rice and curry sauce), and one from Uganda (a wrap with calvados-marinated chicken), and a bottle of water (why should they give it away?)

In the morning, we found a bakery with some pastries with the most intensely caramelized sugar I can remember having. We got there maybe at 9:45, and at 10:00 they changed everything for some reason; both the pastries we’d gotten had been taken away and replaced by other I suppose lunch-friendly offerings.

Then we gave up on Aarhus and drove first to Horsens to find a statue Ray’d seen on the internet, which was stupid in person, and then to Jelling to see a World Heritage Site: a pair of Viking mounds with some stones covered with drawings and runes. There was a museum with the latest in technological displays. My favorite was a large table video display showing an aerial conception of the site. At the corner was a knob that let you choose from six points in time, including the time of Harald Bluetooth’s reign at the site, when there was a wooden wall surrounding it. There were other instants earlier and later, including the modern day. Birds would fly overhead then, planes would fly overhead now. There were also signs explaining how the symbol for the Bluetooth standard is formed from the runes HB. We walked to the tops of the mounds, saw the rune-covered stones, and visited the church between, whose geometric pattern in black on the orange floor had one short section in silver indicating where a Viking named Corm is buried.

Then we left to go to Lübeck, not far from Hamburg in Germany.