Denmark: From New Zealand to old Zealand

So after finding a seat on the train (from Hamburg to Odense), I got talking to the person I was sitting next to, and the two people facing me. I was sitting next to a rather attractive German girl, and the two guys were older Australian men (whom I can only assume were gay, as one was camp, but not OTT, they were travelling together, and had a ridiculous amount of luggage). It ended up being quite a good conversation regarding travel, languages, accounting, New Zealand, and Australia. Once we crossed the border into Denmark, we had to change trains, the men struggled a little with all their luggage, meanwhile me and the German girl went and found a seat - which worked well for me, as then I had her conversation all to myself.

I got off the train at Odense, on the Island of Funan, and had a bit of a look around before being met by my friend Peter - which was interesting, as we hadn't seen each other since 1994.

We went to have a look at the train museum, but unfortunately it was closing in a short while, so we went to check out Hans Christian Anderson's house - which we saw from the outside, but again was almost closing time. So we headed back to Peter's house - which was across the bridge on the western side of Zealand (the same island as Copenhagen, but Copenhagen is on the east coast).

The next two weeks are a little bit of a blur chronologically, but I do remember that on the first day there I took the dog for a walk through the local woods, admiring the local landscape - which was rather flat, and strangely looked like the default wallpaper of Windows xp. That afternoon Peter came home early, and took me to the viking village museum nearby. The other things I did in my time there included:

- Going to Helsingor - aka Elsinore - Hamlet's castle - which you can see Sweden from - in fact my phone got a little confused on the far side of the castle and told me I was in Sweden. - Peter took me to Roskilde - to the viking ship museum.

- Peter's dad took me for a bit of a drive, including a stop at an ancient tomb, and to a lighthouse on the Northwest tip of Zealand, which through a telescope, had good views of the bridge that crossed the Great Belt (the channel between Funan and Zealand.) - On one of the Fridays Peter took me down to some chalk cliffs which were on the South east of Zealand, which were cool, it was also interesting to see an old watchtower/radar station that was put there during the cold war to keep an eye on Ocean traffic (that would be coming from Russia)

-The middle weekend I went back to Odense and went to the open air museum, which was cool, as I got to see the inside of a watermill and windmill (we had visited several windmills, but none were open, due to it being winter.) From there I walked into town and went to the train museum. - several times I went with Peter to his work, and then made my way to Copenhagen, and saw almost all you could see there, including the little mermaid, the outside of Tivoli gardens (shut for the winter) the palaces, Christiania free town- which was an experience in itself - rather scary - its basically a squatter's village, but the police leave them alone as long as there is no trouble, so they sell marijuana openly - but not my type of place, seemed like I'd walked into a gang headquarters or something.The last time I went to Copenhagen, I went over to Malmo (Sweden) for the day - checked out the town, and went to the Clogg museum (small ships). I came back to Copenhagen and stayed the night at a hostel. I went out to a Karaoke bar by myself, it was relatively quiet, so I sung a few songs, quite liberating when you can have no shame like that.

After two and a half weeks I flew back to London Gatwick, arriving approximately 2 months and 2 days after I had first set off to Spain.