Light Festival and Danmark

The last two days were pretty fun. Yesterday I went to the local Light Festival. It wasn't really any thing special, really just a boat parade down the middle of town on the river. The boats were mostly dressed up with lots of lights, but a lot had just a few strands of them, so it was nothing special at all. This was the first time for my host family as well and they were wondering why it was so popular, they didn't think it was that great either. (It was hard to get good pictures because I had to use an extended shutter time)
They did however have some live entertainment that was pretty cool. The only ones that I saw was of some African music and a fire dancer type guy. The African music part had four or five men playing on the drums, I think I saw two Djembe, and one guy singing and dancing. It was interesting to see this in Sweden. Apparently there are a considerable amount of immigrants in the Southern area. I think the number I saw online was that about 16% are foreign born. The Fire dancer was cool to watch, the first to parts of his act were not very spectacular, he was just swing some stick around that had their ends on fire. Anyone could really do it. The last part though was fun, he had two chains that were on fire and was spinning those around his body and such.
Afterwards there were some fire works, but we didn't stay for them. We did however see some of them from the house. The last two or three were large smiley faces. It was really cute. Good way to end the day.


Today we went to Danmark to visit Kronborg castle. Kronborg is the castle that Shakespeare based the play Hamlet at. It was really awesome. It's about 40min total travel time from Ängelholm to Helsingør, Danmark. Really simple too, just get on a train to Helsingborg, then a ferry to Helsingør. Kronborg was really cool, it was originally built in about the 1420s as a way to collect tolls from passing ships. Then in the 1550s Fredrick II rebuilt it as a more strategic castle for defense and kept evolving until about the 1800s. One fun little tidbit about the castle is the myth surrounding it. Holger Danske (Ogier the Dane)

According to his legend, he is the son of Geoffrey, king of Denmark. In La Chevalerie Ogier de Danemarche, he had a son who was slain by Charlot, son of Charlemagne. Seeking revenge, Ogier sought out and slew Charlot, and was only barely prevented from killing Charlemagne. He resisted Charlemagne for seven years but made peace with him to fight at Charlemagne's side against the Saracens, in which battle he slew the giant Brehus.

Currently he sleeps under the castle and will awaken of Danmark is ever in dire trouble to save the country. It was really cool to be able to walk around the tunnels beneath the castle, it was very dark with a lot of side rooms, so it would have been more fun to be able to crawl around for an hour or so just in the tunnels. We then walked around the upper levels of the castle through the Royal apartments. There were a lot of old paintings and tapestries. Some dating back to the 1500s. Most were on average 300-350 years old. It was very interesting to see all of the old furniture and decoration, very fun too. There was a flag bastion that over looked the sea in between Danmark and Sverige. It was a beautiful view too look over. You can really tell the significance of the castle's position on the channel when looking at the surrounding area.
The castle was great fun to go around and as a souvenir I got a mini Holgor for my desk, maybe if I'm ever in a lot of trouble he'll wake up and help me. After the castle was slowly made our way back to Sverige. Had some good Danish food and overall a real good time.