Samba Tranquile

seen at 9 on a saturday in the center of Kobenhavn.

took a bus out to Roskilde for a visit to the LEGENDARY Roskilde Viking Ship museum

"The Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde is the Danish national museum for ships, seafaring and boatbuilding in the prehistoric and medieval period.
Around the year 1070, five Viking ships were deliberately sunk at Skuldelev in Roskilde Fjord in order to block the most important fairway and to protect Roskilde from enemy attack from the sea. These ships, later known as the Skuldelev ships, were excavated in 1962. They turned out to be five different types of ships ranging from cargo ships to ships of war."

-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_Ship_Museum_in_Roskilde

the largest and most well-preserved Viking ship bow ever

the fjord. awesome place and an awesome word.

my professor Morten Warmind (the gigantic Viking in the jacket)

not only a good teacher but a great museum-guide-tour-person

baby viking diorama dwellers

more fjord

and more dioramas

favorite picture from the museum, which I had been secretly, nerdily waiting to visit for months.^

The coolest thing about the museum turned out to be the fact that when they found these ships, they had no way of accurately preserving them, because they had to be removed from the water they had been in for hundreds of years. So they developed a form of wax that replaces every particle in the wood where water was with super fancy future wax that is supposedly exactly like water. Morten told us that this method is now considered the best and most-used form of museum-object preservation.

I think thats cool.

they had a model of one of the ships stocked with all the stuff that would have supposedly been on it in the Viking Age. Bears included.

fake bird, fake sky

Morten insisted someone try on the chain mail so yeah this happened.

Ben was excited.

they sold Mead under the "Viking Blood" brand name. More on that later.

P.S of course I almost bought some. but I found out that you can buy it in HEALTH FOOD STORES here for mad cheap so that's happening.

the working reconstructions that were hand-made by the museum using Viking-era techniques.

They sailed one of these from Roskilde to GREENLAND.

Three weeks on the open ocean, ten dudes, viking garb.

Think about it.

G.I Joe'd out

wind-farm

then we visited a pre-Viking burial mound.

one of the cooler things I've ever been inside of

dude is like seven feet tall, he insisted on taking us all inside

i was throughly enjoying myself.

The pre-Viking age people that used this mound would dismember their dead before placing them in the mound in order to dis-associate their bodies from their souls.

This picture shows where they would place the heads.

tiny entrance but worth it.

view from the top of the mound

the manner in which they dragged the formative boulders that make the mound.

It took 50-60 men two summers of 14-hour work days to construct one of these.

And that's how they did it.

rocks and ship settings somewhere else in Denmark...I forget where. Naps on bus-glorious.

the great hall-the real-life setting of beowulf (?)

Viking-reconstruction Mead Hall and fortress

That sentence makes me so happy.

more Morten

p.s we're going to Iceland together

mead hall

built to reflect Valhalla

the Mead throne

and Me

this is where Morten broke out the Viking's Blood and the party got crazy

it was delicious.

the stones mark where the buildings were-

this fortress was once home to one of the largest and most formidable Viking armies.

standing atop the barricade

it was cold up there.

and then we went back to Copenhagen.

Many more posts to come.