We just returned from a short Easter break, which we spent in the Copenhagen area. Mary has been wishing for some time to holiday in `the big city´, so we decided at last that she should get her wish. We set off the Wednesday before, late in the afternoon, and around 8p.m. arrived at our youth hostel in Lyngby-Tårbaek.

The central youth hostels in Copenhagen have around 500 beds, which we felt would be a bit overpowering, so we had chosen a much smaller hostel close outside the city. We were delighted to find it was in a wonderful location, in the heart of a national forest and recreation area, but still only about 20 minutes from the city centre. We were also delighted with the weather: Thursday dawned bright and sunny, the first warm day of spring, and temperatures rose close to 20 degrees! We headed straight into the city, for Mary to see the shops.

Well, we saw the shops indeed, but that was about it! It turns out that `Pink Thursday´ as it's called here, is a pretty major holiday in Denmark, and almost all the shops were closed. Safest time to go shopping, in my opinion, but Mary was a bit frustrated! However, we did enjoy strolling down Ströget, Copenhagen's most famous pedestrian street, and even though it was a holiday, we saw plenty of street entertainers.

The ubiquitous Dubliner has made it to Ströget too, but wait a minute, what's that beer their advertising on their awnings...?

Instead of shopping, we settled for a long lunch in Nyhavn, harbour-turned-restaurant quarter, and enjoyed eating outdoors in the sunshine for the first time this year!

On Good Friday, we expected most of the city to be closed, but we discovered that the museums were open as usual. So we decided to visit Louisiana, a mansion extended into a modern art gallery, on the coast some way north of Copenhagen.

One of the nicest things about Louisiana is the garden, which is full of sculptures, including a number of Henry Moore's. The sculptures made a tremendous impression on us when we first saw them in the mid eighties, and I still think they are the best thing about the gallery. John Desmond likes sculpture also, especially when it is warm to the touch as they were on this day! The texture and sound interest him.

The guest exhibition was called Cities on the Move, and was supposedly about cities in the Far East. It suggested, for example, that statues of Western prostitutes might be placed in Chinese villages, and become a part of the landscape there. Um, well, yes. Outside, in the garden, they had placed a kind of watch-tower with megaphones at the top, playing continuous recordings of Shanghai beggars cursing their Western oppressors. Except that, since they were cursing in Chinese, the Western oppressors mostly failed to notice. Over my head, I'm afraid.

Louisiana also has a permanent exhibition of modern art, including two Picassos, a Kandinsky, and two Warhols. That was well worth seeing. It also has its oddities, though, such as 10000 individual works of art, which consists of 10000 small green objects about 3 inches long, laid out on a big rectangular table. The objects are cast from moulds taken from roughly round household objects, such as lemon squeezers, and every object is cast using two moulds back to back, so they look a bit like grenades. With 100 different moulds, you can get 10000 different `works of art´. Ho hum.

After lunching in the gallery café (delicious sandwiches), we took the boys down to the garden lake. There they have build an eldorado for children: a strange castle like structure with tiny passageways to creep around in, a tunnel of branches, tree houses of various sorts. Liam thought it was the best thing in Denmark, so our visit was judged a success by all!

On Saturday, the shops were open again, so we returned to the city and Mary had a second chance. Copenhagen has a very rich selection, not least different from the Swedish one, and Mary loves to explore it. Here she is shopping at Illums Bolighus (Illum's Home Stores?), which I think is her favourite Copenhagen store -- at least for window shopping! They have everything conceivable for the home: furniture, porcelain, glass, bedclothes, saucepans, gourmet food, wine, you name it. Actually even I like to go there: you could say the shop contains several exhibitions of art glass, ceramics, etc. It's unfortunate we don't have the wallet to match!

In the end, though, the pickings were confined to two small bowls and a jar of jam, and a Lego Batman for Liam. But I suppose it's not winning that matters, it's how you play the game.

On Sunday, of course the shops were closed again. We spent the morning exploring the surroundings of the hostel, strolling through oak and beech woods. According to the warden, they were planted around 200 years ago to meet the navy's needs, and the oaks are only now ready for shipbuilding. I've read about similar plantations here in Sweden that were managed under contract by the State Forestry Board, and reached maturity recently. Of course, the Forestry Board couldn't just take the trees -- they didn't own them -- they just had to call the navy and ask them `Your oaks are ready now; what shall we do with them?´ It sounds silly, but apparently in Denmark many of these trees are now spoken for -- they're needed to repair the surviving sailing ships.

I don't suppose they'll be felling the forest we walked in for shipbuilding, though: it's altogether too valuable as a recreation area for Copenhagen. Liam found all manner of things to entertain him, from feathers, through `precious stones´, to the kind of makeshift huts children build out of branches. The rest of us enjoyed the songs of all the returning birds, watching moorhens on the marsh, etc.

In the afternoon, we visited another art gallery just a mile or two from the hostel. This one, Ordrupsgaard, is the former home of a wealthy collector who turned his house into a gallery. He collected Danish painters, who were unfamiliar to us of course, but all the more interesting for that, and then fell in love with French impressionism. The collection is fairly small -- you can see it comfortably in an hour or so -- but very striking. My favourite spot was a room full of paintings by Gaugain: beautiful!

Our enjoyment was all the greater thanks to the lunch we had beforehand in the gallery café, which I think must have been the former lodge of the estate. I ate smoked salmon with horseradish sauce and bread in the heat of a blazing sun: very refined.

Easter Monday was our last full day, another day with the shops closed. We spent it in Roskilde, about half an hour west of Copenhagen. Roskilde is the home of the Viking ship museum, where we spent the morning. In the sixties archeologists brought up the remains of a wreck in Roskilde fjord, and discovered that rather than a ship sunk in the 1400s, as local legend had it, they had found no less than five Viking ships. The theory is that sometime between 1000 and 1050, the merchants of Roskilde sank five of their own ships, to block the navigable channels in Roskilde fjord and keep the Norwegians out! (The Vikings obviously practiced their raiding on each other!) The wrecks made a permanent barrier, but of course they left a gap, which could then be blocked with a floating barrier.

When the archeologists brought up the pieces, they discovered that they had five different kinds of ship to boot, so they have learned a great deal about Viking shipbuilding from this find. They have reassembled all five, and they are on display in a museum by the waterside. There are small fishing and trading boats, large and small warships, and an ocean-going trading vessel of the kind that sailed to North America. Believe it or not, pollen analysis shows that the latter was built in Dublin!

They have reconstructed the small trader, and by testing her at sea, shown that the Viking ships were in some ways superior to modern sailing boats. Their current project is to recreate the Viking woollen sail. There's much more to that than you might think: they have had to analyse fabric fragments at the Department of Textiles in Manchester to discover what kind of sheep the wool came from, how tightly the threads should be spun, how many threads per inch there should be in warp and weft, how the sail was impregnated (with tar and suet -- yeuch) etc etc. If you want to recreate the Viking sail exactly, then there's a lot to know. Thank heavens for EU money! Amazingly, preliminary trials show once again that the woollen sail is superior to a sail made from modern materials: that is, the Viking ship goes significantly faster with the woollen sail than with the other!

Liam was in his element, of course; he wanted to look at everything in the museum, and have every placard read to him. He even wanted to watch the Italian-language version of the film showing the raising of the wrecks! Here he is on the full-scale model ship they've built for children to play on. He was very taken with the idea of carrying sheep and goats on the deck, and building a fire on a pile of stones for cooking at sea.

After the ship museum, we visited Roskilde Cathedral, which is where almost all the Danish kings and queens have been buried since about the year 950. King Harald Bluetooth and Svein Forkbeard are names to conjure with, aren't they? The only thing is, there have been a lot of kings since that time, and of course, all of them have to have a grand coffin. So the cathedral is just packed full of coffins: there are chapels with half a dozen kings in them here, there, and everywhere. The part for services is almost insignificant in comparison. It may be a World Heritage site, but to me, it felt more like a mausoleum than a cathedral.

A short stroll through the charming, but closed streets of Roskilde finished our day.

On Tuesday, the weather turned lousy, and fate seemed to be telling us to go home. We set off for Göteborg in the morning, with only one major stop on the way: to buy cheap Danish booze! Thanks to the EU, we can even bring significant amounts in Sweden nowadays, so we have wine and excellent Danish beer to last us for months, I should think. After an excellent lunch at a motorway service station which only serves salmon, we arrived back home around 4 o'clock, tired but happy!