Helsingör and Soccer in Helsingborg

Actual date: July 3. What a great way to celebrate our anniversary! Beautiful weather and a ferry trip to Helsingör.

This is the ferry we took from Helsingborg (Sweden) to Helsingör (Denmark). It was unfortunate that the trip lasted only twenty minutes: not enough time to enjoy the cafe and the tax free shops, but there was enough time to go up on the deck and take a few pictures.

Soon we got close the the goal of our day trip, Kronborg Castle. This castle was made famous to theater lovers all over the world by Shakespeare. You probably did not know that the play Hamlet - Prince of Denmark is set in Kronborg Castle in Elsinore, which is the English name for Helsingör. So why is Hamlet Danish? Well it seems that Shakespeare's Hamlet is based on an old Norse legend about the Danish prince Amled or Amleth. This legend was then rewritten by Saxo Grammaticus in Latin around 1200 AD, and then Thomas Kyd (1558-1594) wrote an Ur-Hamlet which was played in London during Shakespeare's time. It is fortunate that nobody thought of intellectual property rights back then! The original Amleth is supposed to have lived in the 7th century, and he was, of course, a viking.
This picture is from a performance of The Saga of Amled in Ramsgate.

So, after a short ferry ride and a 15 minute walk, we are ready to take a tour of the castle.


The tour guide told us about the historic importance of Kronborg as a fort to control the entrance to the Baltic Sea. Sweden and Denmark had many wars over the forts on either side of the sound. At one point Sweden conquered the fort and moved a lot of artifacts to Stockholm, which obviously upsets Danes still today.

Here we can see the canons of Kronborg directed at Sweden on the other side of the sound.

After the tour and a swim in the Öresund we went to the city center to eat a late lunch. This is how hungry Alfred was.

Thomas was a bit calmer.

At Kronborg Cliff bought these earrings with a viking ornamentation as an anniversary present.
This is how the Swedes loaded up in Denmark - whole shopping carts with hundreds of beers.

As if the day was not long enough already, we (Thomas, Alfred, Cliff, and I) went to a soccer game. Helsingborg played Gais, a Gothenburg team, and won 1-0. Here is the team star Henke Larsson warming up.

We spent the next night in a hostel in Landskrona, while Birgitta, Arne, Ellinor, Fabian and Alfred went back to Stockholm. Thomas and I toured this citadel in Landskrona, and it was a really interesting tour. The citadel had a long history as Danish fort until Landskrona became Swedish in 1658. Then it was a Swedish fort for a few hundred years. After that it was a prison, and then for the last 100 years or so it was a prison for women. The tour guide gave us so many insights to the individuals who had been prisoners there.
This one is for Benjamin.