Aalborg

Well as they say..."you don't know what you don't know" and we don't know what we missed in not going to Skagen as scheduled but, here we are in Aalborg, Denmark's fourth largest city, albeit for just a few hours, before we sail again mid-afternoon.

Again the Viking shore excursions team have done an extremely impressive job of rescheduling the tours planned for Skagen to comparable tours in Aalborg (i.e. castles for people who like castles, museums for people who like museums and walking tours for people who like walking tours). The logistics of achieving this actually blows my mind! At each port there are generally up to 25 guides and the attendant buses, bikes, minivans, etc. required to educate/transport 900-odd people. Consider these need to be cancelled in one port and then organised for a completely different port with less than 24 hours' notice. I'm sure they are quite used to doing it but by all accounts, 3 times on one cruise is quite a bit of scrambling in a short period of time.

So, being in the group that like walking tours, we have been scheduled to take part in a tour of the city with Wolfgang, our guide. And over the course of the next couple of hours, we learn....

Aalborg was founded by those industrious Vikings in the late 900s as a trading post and has a history as a wealthy city which is evident in the very impressive architecture (largely Renaissance we are told) as various merchants did their very best to outdo each other in terms of both the size and grandeur of their respective homes. The below photo shows Jens Bang's house which was built in 1624, in its' day it was a stately home, now it's the site of cafes and souvenir shops...

Equally as impressive is the collection of timber houses which have somehow, miraculously, survived both a multitude of fires and all efforts to tear them down over the last couple of centuries in favour of newer, less flammable, options. Today these are amongst the most sought after properties in the city and, what were once the houses of the working class, are now inhabited by wealthy Danes wanting to live close to the centre of Aalborg.

In stark contrast, we visited the Aalborg Musikhus which was completed in 2014 and was included in our tour because it provided an insight into the emerging modern cultural element of Aalborg, a lovely view back to the ship and, importantly, toilets...always a highlight on a walking tour for many it seems! We are learning that free public toilets are a rarity in Scandinavia - nobody minds paying but very few people are in possession of the appropriate amount of Krone needed for the country you are in at the time.

The chance to amble around the city after the tour ended took us past a number of other photo opportunities:

Once back onboard we, once again, had the ship largely to ourselves for an hour or so before the museum and castle groups returned.

Of no real interest to anyone I'm sure but, importantly for us, this also provided an opportunity to do a load of washing/drying in the guest laundry whilst there weren't too many people vying for the washers and dryers. It felt good to replenish the supplies!

As we sail away, I'm very happy to have spent the day in a Danish city but am equally looking forward to our next port, Oslo, Norway.

(If the above looks vaguely familiar it was designed by Jorn Utzon, the same Danish architect who designed the Sydney Opera House)