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Travels in Denmark

A dual citizen of the USA and Denmark, Kay Xander Mellish is documenting her travels in Denmark in preparation for a future book.

Take our “How to Live in Denmark” Helsingør self-guided audio tour

Visiting Denmark? Take our fun new self-guided audio tour of Helsingør, aka “Elsinore”, the setting of Shakespeare’s great tragedy “Hamlet”.

Designed in co-operation with VoiceMap Audio Tours, this is a GPS-triggered tour, so you can put your phone away and focus on the sights and sounds of this fabulous medieval city while I tell you amusing stories.

🏰 Walk the ramparts of Kronborg Castle, where the opening scenes of “Hamlet” take place, and hear about the king who built it and his 14-year-old bride.

✝️ Explore the streets of medieval Helsingør, and visit a quiet 15th century religious cloister that was once used to store tourists’ horses.

🚢 See the shipyards where giant ocean-going ships were built and enjoy the great Street Food market in one of the old shipyard halls.

🧜‍♀️ And meet the “Male Little Mermaid”, a 2012 version of the better-known female icon. It has a sensor one of its eyes, so it occasionally blinks at you.

Check it out here: Self-guided audio tour of Helsingør or access it via TripAdvisor.

(You can also take the tour virtually if you’re not in Denmark at the moment.)

Other Helsingør attractions

I can also recommend the M/S Maritime Museum if you have a full day to spend in Helsingør. Although you walk past it during this two-hour audio tour, the tour doesn’t take you inside.

Designed by the Danish celebrity architect Bjarke Ingels, it’s an exciting and colorful contemporary museum, even if you don’t think you care about ships.

The museum offers fascinating exhibits on the history and art of tattooing, the women who supported sailors both at home and abroad, and the Danish slave trade.

Vintage shopping

If you love vintage clothings or antiques, I can also recommend putting aside time to visit Helsingør’s many charity shops.

Although it’s a working-class town, Helsingør is quite close to the “whisky belt”, Denmark’s richest area. Rich people tend to have great giveaways.

Visit Sweden

Finally, Helsingør is a great jumping-off point for visiting Sweden. There’s a public ferry at the Helsingør train station that will take you there in 20 minutes.

You’ll land in the Swedish city of Helsingborg – similar name, but a very different vibe. It also has a great small hotel made out of an old bank vault.

Coming soon: an update of my Self-Guided Danish Design Tour of Copenhagen.

July 2, 2024 by Kay Xander Mellish

Podcasts, Stories about life in Denmark, Travels in Denmark

How to Meet a Dead Viking: The mummies of Denmark

Many people who visit Denmark are fans of the Vikings, the familiar name for Scandinavians before the medieval era, although technically speaking the Viking raiders were at their peak in the years 800-1100.

There are plenty of opportunities, especially now during tourist season, to see modern-day Danes dressed up as Vikings, building wooden ships, cooking over open fires, and fighting with swords and shields. Exhibitions like this are very popular with visitors from overseas.

Viking ‘mummies’

What they might not know is that you can see actual Vikings in Denmark, or what’s left of their bodies. It was common in the Viking era and before to toss sacrificial items and people into peat bogs, which, it turns out, preserve bodies and clothing and hair very well.

So there are several places in Denmark where you can see actual humans from the Viking age, more than a thousand years old, and sometimes their clothes and hairstyles, sometimes even the last food they ate, reclaimed from their stomachs.

Some bodies are so well-preserved that they still have fingerprints.

August 1, 2023 by Kay Xander Mellish

Stories about life in Denmark, Travels in Denmark

Randers is not a joke

Every country, it seems, has a city or region that is the butt of jokes. The rest of the country makes fun of the locals’ abrasive accents and supposedly low-end behavior.

In the United States, it’s New Jersey. In Sweden it’s Skåne, the area close to Denmark that includes Malmo. I’ve been told that in England it’s Essex, in Scotland it’s Aberdeen, and in Ireland it’s Kerry.

In Denmark, it’s Randers.

Randers is a city in Northern Jutland, about a half hour away from Aarhus. It used to be bigger than Aarhus, and bigger than Aalborg too, but it was a manufacturing town, and when manufacturing fell apart in Denmark after the Second World War, so did Randers.

Today, the stereotype of Randers locals involves muscle meatheads, possibly criminal, possibly in some sort of motorcycle gang, with a rough, gravelly accent, and lots of tattoos and leather.

And that’s just the women. The men are the same, but with shorter haircuts.

September 21, 2022 by Kay Xander Mellish

Stories about life in Denmark, Travels in Denmark

The Bridges of Denmark

I don’t do a lot of stock market investing, but if I did, I’d want to go back in time and invest in companies that build bridges in Denmark. This country is on a tear when it comes to bridge building. Over the past decade, there have been 5 new major bridges in Copenhagen alone, and at least one new major one is planned.

And because this is Denmark, and people love design, each bridge has its own special look. You can’t just put up a few bridge supports and a deck on top for traffic. You need style, and you need a colorful name.

Consider, for example, the multicolored Kissing Bridge in Copenhagen. It’s not named that because you’re supposed to kiss on the bridge, although you can if you like. It’s named that because it breaks in half on a regular basis to let ships through, and then it’s supposed to come together again like a kiss.

The Kissing Bridge has needed to visit a relationship counselor, however, because there have been constant problems getting it to kiss. It wasn’t quite aligned the way it was supposed to be.

It seems to work now, although it’s rather steep and a difficult ride for bicyclists, which is rather a shame, because it is a bicycle and pedestrian bridge only. There are no cars on it.

Bicycle Snake and Brewing Bridge

The Bicycle Snake and the Brewing Bridge a little further down the harbor are also just for cyclists and walkers, and so is the Little Langebro bridge.

The Little Langebro bridge is currently the newest bridge in town, just a couple of years old. This is a neighborhood I don’t go to often, and I remember coming home from a late night engagement to suddenly find a new bridge in front of me, all lit up and ready to serve.

Whoa! Unexpected bridge. It was like a dream.

August 30, 2022 by Kay Xander Mellish

Stories about life in Denmark, Travels in Denmark

On returning to Denmark: Swimming in Copenhagen harbor, picking wild blackberries, and admiring Danish law and order

I’ve just come back to Denmark after some time away, and I’m happy to be here, particularly since the Danish summer weather has been lovely this year.

Of course, this creates problems of its own – Denmark is built for cool weather, not hot weather, which means that air conditioning is rare, even in the fitness center. Lifting barbells inside a room that feels like a toaster oven with thirty other sweaty people is really something. And not something good.

Still, it’s nice to be in Copenhagen during summer. The sidewalk cafés are open, and you don’t need a blanket to sit outside and enjoy your coffee.

I don’t think there’s a prettier city in the world on a lovely summer day, which is something you have to remember on one of those days in November when pelting grey rain angles into your eyeballs.

Swimming in Copenhagen harbor

One of my favorite things to do is swim in Copenhagen harbor, a formerly industrial waterway that has been cleaned up enough to become a giant swimming zone, although you’ll still see some seaweed and barnacles on the pull-up ladders.

There are spots set aside for swimmers as opposed to boaters, and these areas can get pretty crowded – lots of exposed pink flesh on display. Although, contrary to what many might believe, Copenhagen swimmers are not nude and the women are not topless.

An American journalist called me recently to ask about nude bathing in Denmark. In Copenhagen, I don’t see much of it, and the few nudes I do see are mostly men.

August 17, 2022 by Kay Xander Mellish

Podcasts, Stories about life in Denmark, Travels in Denmark

Tivoli vs Bakken: How two amusement parks show the two sides of Denmark

It’s spring in Denmark. The sunny days are longer, the daisies are popping up through the grass, and the sidewalk cafés are full again, even if you have to sit there with a blanket, which many cafés provide.

And Denmark’s amusement parks are opening up for the summer. Denmark has several amusement parks, including the original Legoland, but the ones I know best are the ones in Copenhagen – Tivoli Gardens and Bakken.

Tivoli and Bakken show two different sides of the Danish character.

Tivoli is the sleek, confident, high-end image that Denmark likes to present to the world: it has exquisite flower gardens, fancy shops and restaurants, and a theater that hosts world-class performers. Bakken is more homey, more quirky, a little shabby, and a bit more hyggelig, under my own definition of hygge as “unambitious enjoyment”.

The difference between the two parks also illustrates the class differences in Denmark – even though Danes like to pretend there are no class differences in egalitarian Denmark.

Visiting Bakken

Bakken is clearly the more working-class of the two and opens every year with a huge convoy of thousands of motorcycles roaring through the city. It happens every April – I hear a huge mechanical growl in the distance, and then I realize, ahhhhh, Bakken is opening today.

April 28, 2022 by Kay Xander Mellish

Stories about life in Denmark, Travels in Denmark

The Tunnel to Germany

Getting to Sweden from Copenhagen is easy: you take a quick trip across the Øresund Bridge in your car or on the train. Getting to Norway from Copenhagen isn’t too hard: there’s a ferry that runs every day from Nordhavn.

Getting to Germany from Copenhagen, on the other hand, is a headache.

If you don’t want to fly or take the long way around through Jutland, you need to head for the little Danish town of Rødbyhavn, on the island of Lolland. Then your train or car or truck drives into the belly of a giant ferry. Then you get off on the other side in the little German town of Puttgarten and continue along your way.

The giant ferries are fun. Up top, they have duty-free shops and game arcades and restaurants where you eat very quickly, because it’s only about a half-hour trip.

But, as of 2029, the trip will be a lot quicker and a lot easier.

That’s when the tunnel between Denmark and Germany is scheduled to open.

September 26, 2021 by Kay Xander Mellish

Stories about life in Denmark, Travels in Denmark

How to Live in Denmark On the Road: Copenhagen’s Harbor Bus, “Havnebussen”

One of Denmark’s cheapest and most colorful vacations is a few hours riding back and forth on Copenhagen’s big yellow harbor bus, or “Havnebussen”, a commuter ferry designed to transport ordinary citizens between downtown and the urban islands of Christianshavn and Amager.

For those of you who have no summer vacation plans yet, or who don’t have the cash to go very far, the harbor bus can take you from tourist trap to high culture to party culture, from shabby little wood shacks to neighborhoods of chic glass apartment houses with their own private beach.

All for as little as 14 kroner, or 2 euro, if you pay with Denmark’s popular rejsekort, or nothing, if you’re a tourist with a Copenhagen Card. (Beware – you cannot buy a ticket onboard, although you can pay with with the DOT Tickets app on your phone.)

You can start at any of the currently operational 7 Havnebussen stops, but let’s start at Nyhavn, in part because it’s the easiest stop to find if you don’t know Copenhagen well.

June 25, 2021 by Kay Xander Mellish

Stories about life in Denmark, Travels in Denmark

How to Live in Denmark On the Road: Visiting Esbjerg, Ribe, Fanø

When I mentioned visiting Esbjerg for a few days off this spring, many of my friends in Copenhagen said – why? Esbjerg doesn’t have a reputation as a vacation spot, even though it’s the fifth-largest city in Denmark and the youngest big city.

My daughter, who is more clever than I am, told her Copenhagen friends that we were going to the “West Coast of Denmark” making it sound like we would be relaxing on one of the west coast beaches.

For Copenhagen snobs, Esbjerg is a fishing town, which it was 50 years ago but isn’t really anymore. It’s an oil and wind energy town, industrial but very modern.

Still, I think the city has a bit of an inferiority complex.

May 19, 2021 by Kay Xander Mellish

Podcasts, Stories about life in Denmark, Travels in Denmark

Danish beaches in winter: White light and bitter wind

It might seem like a counterintuitive time to talk about beaches, in the middle of a long, very cold winter.

But in these times of COVID, beaches are one of the few places in Denmark you are currently allowed to meet up with family and friends.

Beaches, parks, frozen-over lakes, these are the big social meeting points at time when cafés, restaurants, bars, shops, gyms, schools, theaters, museums, places of worship, and hairdressers, barbers, and nail salons are all closed.

February 11, 2021 by Kay Xander Mellish

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Kay Xander Mellish is a US-DK dual citizen. She grew up in Wisconsin, USA, but has lived in Denmark for more than a decade. Kay is a popular keynote speaker on Danish working culture and offers practical advice to international professionals navigating Danish work environments.

In addition, she helps Americans and Danes avoid misunderstandings and improve their cross-cultural teamwork.

Kay is the author of "How to Work in Denmark" (2022 and 2018), "How to Live in Denmark" (2017 and 2014), "Top 35 Mistakes Danes Make in English" (2016), "Working with Americans: Tips for Danes" (2019), and "Working with Danes: Tips for Americans" (2020). All of her books are also available in audio format.