Toby or not Toby

I met another one of my long-time-coming goals today with the help of my handy dandy credit card. Yesterday, I woke up three hours after a group I promised to accompany left for Kronborg (Shakespeares's "Castle Elsinore"). So I made a pact with Anna, my female Italian roommate, that we would go today.

We almost didn't make it after we saw that train tickets to the castle were more than 20 USD and I had the pleasure  of swiping my card only to see it declined by the ticket machines that operated with the ease of a Rubik's cube. Only after finding an ATM did discover that I had a modest 4 dollars left in my month's budget. I withdrew 60 bucks while closing my eyes and pretending the money wasn't digging me a trowel deeper into college debt.

I ended up getting lucky actually and managed to just buy a pass for my bike and use my "klippekort" (clip card) for both trips. Anna had the misfortune of buying a 25 dollar one-way pass that turned out to be nonrefundable. She blamed me for the mistake. After all, I did convince her to come back to the station when we were turned away from the machine the first time. I couldn't blame her for being bitter after I managed to dodge the same fate only by virtue of recognizing her tragic mistake. Whatever.

Luxury is spelled R-E-R (jk, lol)

We took the RER directly from Orestad -- conveniently placed a block from our apartment -- to Helsinor, a pretty seaside town of tastefully painted red and yellow houses and an epic fort that housed the inspiration for Hamlet. The RER is by far the nicest of the three trains that run through Copenhagen, replacing the discarded beer bottles and drowsy homeless with polished bicycles and young families on their way to visiting other young families. It feels like you're in business class, except with 3 more feet of leg room, even with a bike across the aisle.

Anna was done sulking by halfway though the journey. It was such a nice day, she would have had to be clinically depressed to even pretend not to enjoy herself. My sanity, on the other hand, was quickly fading by the the end of the journey. She has a hard time understanding English, and many native-English speakers have a hard time understanding me, so Anna has taken to my aforementioned habit of nodding and smiling whenever she doesn't understand me. She's exceptionally bad at it though, and laughs absently at me when I ask things like, "Where are we now?" or "What time is it?" 

Couldn't get a view this good outside a hot air balloon

The castle itself was good. Maybe just all right. I mean sure, it was cool; look at it. But after seeing so many Western European castles, all built in roughly the same time period, they begin to feel as captivating as a state capital building in the US. They're all pretty, and I appreciate how many peasants had to starve to death to fund such spectacular undertakings, but I'd be a lot more interested if they included a giant statue on the outside, or a big dome, something original. Maybe I'm just an ungrateful product of our easily-bored, wasteful generation. 

The inside, like every other castle, was packed full of luxurious furniture, intricate tapestries, and paintings of elderly men waging war in armor I know would have made my grandpa's knees implode if he ever had the opportunity and stupidity to equip a suit of plate mail. For a beautiful Easter afternoon in the dawn of tourist season, the grounds were surprisingly spacious. Only two groups of people asked me to take their photos, and I even felt patient enough to offer reshoots in case the origin photograph didn't capture their true selves. 

The only part of the castle I really enjoyed was the casements, which was a big basement used for storing items that needed to be held near freezing temperatures year-round. Anna, being a fragile Mediterranean girl, was in a rush to leave the area as soon as we left the tunnel leading to the empty exhibit. I wanted to bask in the eerie candlelight that brought back memories of the dripping ambiance of Cisterne. There was glowing writing on the walls that made bold, misspelled statements about heroism and the legend of a giant who sleeps under Denmark and will awaken when the nation is under threat.

After leaving the caverns Anna wanted to lie in the sun and found an excellent location near the beach in front of two drying fish carcasses. "It smells like shit here." I told her. She laughed and nodded at me. Being sick for the past few days, she didn't have the physical capacity to detect the violently offensive odor herself. I contented myself ignoring the bugs and the smell by sleeping until Anna grew bored and we left for ice cream before catching the train home.