36 Hours in Aarhus

 

Our visit to Aarhus is short, but it's been sweet.  Starting with finding the shuttle bus that is right outside the airport arrivals door, a cheap and easy way to get into the city.  Then finding that once we had arrived at the bus station, our hotel was only a couple of blocks away!  We have a nice suite with a balcony, which helps with the heat (unusually hot again), and it turns out that we are adjacent to a park and to City Hall.  There is entertainment to be had just watching from our room, as the City Hall has in front of it a statue that is very iconic of Aarhus, Agnete og Havmanden. 

The tale of Agnete and the Merman is a traditional Danish story that was originally passed down by oral tradition. As the story goes, a young woman named Agnete was passing by the sea when a remarkably forward and decisive merman emerged from the waters and offered her his hand in marriage. Being a spritely and impulsive girl herself, she dropped what she was doing and went to live with him beneath the waves. The couple had seven little mer-kids and things seemed to be going great until Agnete heard distant church bells ringing from land. She left her mer-family to pay a visit to her old life, promising to return. However once she was reacquainted with her old life Agnete decided not to return to the sea, leaving her merman to be a single dad, forever pining for his lost love.

The reason this statue is so entertaining is that traditionally, the city's newly minted students and other fresh (or drunk) Aarhusians party and bathe in the pool in the summer – often with large amounts of bubbling bubble bath.  This seems to be happening every half hour or so. 

We have wandered the area, and visited Aarhus cathedral, a small but interesting Viking Museum, and the ARoS, Aarhus' art museum, that has a unique "rainbow panorama" from which you can get an overview of the whole city.