Ramblings

Last month, my wife and I vacationed in Denmark. It was our first visit, and we enjoyed the culture, the food, the architecture, and the palaces. We strolled along the Copenhagen waterfront, took the train to Kronborg Slot (Castle), then took the train to Aarhus and Aalborg. It was the museums that were perhaps the most memorable, from the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum, through the Museum of Seafaring built into the walls of an old drydock, to the one that deserves some special mention, Moesgaard Museum.

Moesgaard wasn't even on our itinerary at first (not that we had much of an itinerary to begin with; we kind of make it up as we go along). It didn't have prominent listings in the guidebooks, and we hadn't included it on the list of possibilities. But then, as we were checking out of the hotel in Copenhagen and mentioned that we were taking the train to Aarhus, the receptionist lit up and said that she was from Aarhus and that we should definitely see Moesgaard when we were there.

So the next day found us taking a cab twenty minutes out into the countryside to this unusual place. Your first impression is the building, which is massive yet recessed back into the hillside so that it blends with the landscape. The roof is covered in grass and is sloped so you can walk from ground level to the fourth floor. You enter at the third floor and walk down stairs to the exhibits, passing life-sized, realistic figures of genus homo from the Australopithecus Lucy to the Stone Age Koelbjerg Man. You enter the hall of exhibits, which tell the story of Nordic settlement from prehistoric hunters, the Stone Age, settlements and farming, the Viking age, up to early modern history. I've never seen anthropology so beautifully and engagingly displayed. History was told through the stories of the people who lived it, but never in the same way. Each section had a style appropriate to the era. The stories were sometimes written, sometimes spoken, sometimes enacted. We ended up crossing off most of the other activities we had considered and spent nearly the entire day there. I would almost go so far as to say that it's worth taking the trip to Denmark to see Moesgaard. The Royal Palace is just a bonus.