cdybedahl | Bed'n'Breakfast of the Beast (Reply)

Day One

This is being written on the evening of the 22nd. We've driven all the way down from Stockholm to some 50 kilometers south of Copenhagen, where jegra had booked rooms for us at a B&B place she found via the net. So we had no idea what it'd be like, and I worried. I mean, it could be just any sort of dump, really.

It's not.

The place is adorable. It's beautifully situated in the Danish countryside. It's an old place that the current owners, one of whom is a professional artist, bought as a ruin back in 1990 and has spent 15 years restoring and improving. My room was meant to hold me and Jenny (who stayed home to take care of jegra's sick horse), It's big, bigger than our bedroom back home. It's got a four-poster bed. It's got paintings on the walls done by the hostess, and they're actually not at all bad. The garden is huge, and a friendly little dog jumps around in it. There's a suprisingly friendly cat mom and her three insanely cute kittens living in the bathroom. We've had a lovely dinner cooked by the host, largely out of local ingredients.

At this point you may be wondering what the subject line of this post is on about.

Well, this place is number six along the road (situated, logically enough, between numbers four and five). And for some reason someone has decided to put up the house number three times at the side of the house. So, there are three little signs, all in a row and all reading "6" in old-fashioned curly fonts and decorated with flowery stuff. I hope jegra takes a picture of it before we leave here tomorrow.

Day Two

I intensely dislike Germany. The people are rude. The roadsigns use the bait-and-switch principle. The traffic sucks. The gas stations have never heard of VISA or MasterCard. A pox on all its houses!

After Germany, Fryslân was a breath of fresh air. Suddenly the road signs made sense. We could talk to the people. We could fill up the car without carrying wodges of cash.

And it's flat. Like, flat. As a board. I thought Skåne and Denmark were flat, but they have nothing on Fryslân. It was almost surreal. A computer model of the place wouldn't need any third dimension.

Day Six

Used the rest day to go off site to see a botanic garden. Which was basically nice, if a little touristy and with a few depressingly sad animals in cages. On our way back we got confused by Netherlandish lunch habits ("What do you mean you only serve hot food after 5pm?"), but eventually got something to eat.

Day Nine

I hate Germany with the burning passion of a million fiery suns.

How this place can claim to be part of the developed world I do not understand. They drive like insane guinea pigs on crack. Which may well be necessary to get anywhere, since they also don't seem to mind to cripple a twenty kilometer long chokepoint through one of their major cities with roadworks. One of the traffic jams was sixty kilometers long.

Sixty. Fucking. Kilometers.

Note "one of". All in all we spent over a hundred kilometers inching along at an average speed of about 20 km/h. More than five hours later than planned we finally managed to escape that festering pustule on the face of the planet into civilization, in the form of Denmark. The experience was similar as when we entered Fryslân a week ago. Suddenly the road signs were helpful rather than misleading. Instead of counting loads of pieces of paper one can swipe a card and enter a code. The people may still be a bit hard to understand, but at least when there's a communication problem they cooperate in trying to solve instead of just shouting. We could drive almost 120 km in one hour.

Plus, we're staying in the same place as we did on the way down, and have just had a simply marvellous meal consisting of garlic and herb-roasted lamb followed by a delicious plum pie.