~balise's blog (powered by TTBP)



22 june 2024

Some meta commentary: I wanted to fix a couple of typos in a 10-day-old post. The documentation of TTBP indicates: "however, changing old entries might cause strange things to happen with timestamps. the main program looks at the filename first for setting the date, then the last modified time to sort recent posts."

So I dug a bit into the source, and my conclusion on that is:

Caveat: no idea what happens on gopher. But, it seems to have worked well enough on main engine and on HTML file generation.

More meta thought: pondering whether I can/I should write a smol script that generates a paginated blog from feels entries, rather than a Very Long Page™.

Today was a good day, despite the "back from holiday" fatigue.

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21 june 2024

I am back home and typing on a physical keyboard rather than an Android phone! 'Tis better. But, let me finish my travel log for this trip :)

Travel log

Today was the "fly back home" day, but our flight was at 3PM, so we had some more time to spend if we wanted to. We decided to go visit Helsingør (also known as Elsinore), which is the closest town from Sweden in Denmark. We could indeed see the Swedish coast quite clearly, including buildings! The town is very pretty, a lot of older buildings. At first, I was a bit puzzled by the amount of liquor shops in the main street... until I remembered that is was probably a smart commercial move considering the regular ferry from Sweden!

We visited the Sankt Olai (St Olaf) church, which had a lot of very elaborate and very gilded decoration, and a great looking organ (I really liked that one!). It also had a small kids table in the entrance, with a box of plush toys labelled "Noah's Ark", which, I'll admit, made me chuckle.

After our parking adventures in Aahrus due to the half-marathon, we were quite amused to find that Helsingør had a half-Ironman planned for this week-end; that one didn't bother us that much, but we were impressed by the amount of organization and infrastructure involved.

We walked around the Kronborg castle, which is the location of Shakespeare's Hamlet, but we didn't feel like we had time to actually visit it.

We could have, though, because by the time we were at the airport, past the security... we were still two hours before our flight (which got delayed an extra half-hour too.) Bah, we took the opportunity to finally have smørrebrød - it would have been a pity to leave Denmark without having that.

The flight was a bit delayed, a bit bumpy, but we finally arrived in Zürich around 6PM; luggage was long to be delivered (and super wet) when it arrived, but we made it home.

And now for the "back to the regular program" of this blog (well, as "regular" as this thing can be with its young age, I guess):

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20 june 2024

Travel log

For our last day before going back to Zürich, we went to Copenhagen!

We decided to go by train because a/ trains b/ driving sucks c/ parking sucks more. The Danish train company recently introduced a check-in / check-out mechanism in their app, which worked well enough for the tickets (it felt more clunky than the Swiss equivalent, but still alright.)

The first train was a diesel train going through the forest and crossing multiple foot paths (and hence honking once a minute or so). We changed to a S-tog (equivalent of our S-Bahn, we supposed), which brought us to the center of Copenhagen.

First (almost) mandatory stop: the statue of the Little Mermaid around the port. As expected, somewhat underwhelming, but there was still many many tourist buses around! We took the opportunity to put on some sunscreen (hadn't done that yet), and someone asked us for some (we were happy to help :) )

Then we walked some more around the port, looked at the opera house from the other side of the canal, saw a lot of boats (including a lot of sailboats, a gigantic cruise ship and a very large yacht), and arrived around Nyhavn, known for its colorful facades.

From there, we took the metro to try and have a look at the Church of our savior, which looked pretty cool from the outside (in Copenhagen, the spire slays you), but was unfortunately closed to the public this afternoon.

We took the metro again and went to spend some time in the King's Garden (and have a peek at the Rosenborg Castle. We finished our day in Copenhagen by going for coffee (and strawberry lemonade) and eclairs in a nearby salon.

We took the train back to Gillelege; we made some snarky remarks about the Hillerød train station, which has tracks 0, 1, 3, 4n, 11, 12, 14 and 16, and tracks 0 and 14 are, obviously, next to each other. I may or may not have fallen asleep on the train :p and I'm now typing this as Pierre went for a run before dinner.

Dinner at the hotel, packing for tomorrow and reading.

Books

Finished Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology and really enjoyed it.

Now back to The Left Hand of Darkness! (I like it so far but I'm not sure I'm smart enough for that book ^^;) Or more precisely to keep track of that amount of proper names.

Added https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Pyyy-BAIYQ to "watch later", looks interesting

Read https://www.thecut.com/article/memory-people-who-remember-vs-forget.html about remembering: it does seem memory ability varies depending on people. As a probable "forgetter" (in the terms of the article, and despite the warning against rememberer/forgetter essentialism), I can't say I'm surprised.

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19 june 2024

Travel log

Today was indeed mostly a travel day: we left Blokhus at 930 and arrived in Gillelege around 1630. It didn't help that we arrived two hours early for the ferry and decided to check-in as we arrived... which kind of blocked us in the ferry waiting line. Oh well.

The travel, including the ferry, was uneventful, despite somewhat more traffic than we had seen so far.

Our hotel room has a fantastic view over the sea - and we can see Sweden from the window. (Later this evening we also saw the MSC Virtuosa sailing away, which was fun.)

We walked to the train station and back, walking on the beach on the way to the station and on the path above the beach on the way back. The beach is very different from the one in Blokhus: less surface, less sand and more pebbles, and also no cars!

Had dinner at the hotel (salmon rillettes, veal and potatoes, chocolate fondant), and went outside again for the east-er and hence earlier sunset - which was actually not a total fail, we did see the sun dive in the sea, even if it was behind clouds! It was actually very pretty (but windy.)

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18 june 2024

Travel log

Sunset yesterday was cloudy, so we technically didn't see the sun set. But the light was nice and it was still good times.

Today we both needed a somewhat chiller day, as we're starting to get tired!

We started the day with a late-ish breakfast at the hotel, and then we went to the next town to visit their sculpture garden. We had seen when driving past it that they had sand sculptures, and they didn't disappoint; a lot of impressive works on the general theme of scientific progress. The rest of the sculpture garden was also delightful; a lot of themes, a majority of wooden sculptures, and overall a nice place to spend some time. We may or may not have dozed off on a bench :)

There was also a small wax museum - the "fictional" characters (a bunch of superheroes, mostly) worked better than "real" people, even if they were represented by their usual actors.

Finally, there was a large art installation over several small rooms and corridors, with material from the forest and the sea. I was particularly moved by a room representing the sea - the waves were structure with shellfish glued on them, particularly mussels, and the overall effect was absolutely striking.

After that, we moved a grand total of 600m to go visit the museum of paper arts, a small museum with some origami and more impressively cut paper silhouettes - those were really impressive in their scale and level of detail. There was also a table with some origami paper and some instructions - I left a very badly folded crane there.

We were quite tired still so we decided to have a break back at the hotel.

After the break, we followed the suggestion of the sheet that was on the breakfast table and drove to the Børglum monastery. A very interesting place, with a lot of different things to see, both historical and cultural. The highlight of the visit was probably the full reconstruction of the Tapisserie de Bayeux - a fantastic work that is exhibited in a nice, long room. It took these 9 women 15 years to achieve that, and what an achievement indeed (more info here: https://www.bayeuxtapetet.dk/welcome/). There was also a nice garden, and a windmill nearby. Really a nice place to visit.

Came back to the hotel, went for pizza and tiramisu at one of the local Italian restaurant (was good, but not extraordinary), popped by at the beach where the wind made us come back to the hotel pretty quickly.

Tomorrow we're back on the road to reach the last hotel of the trip.

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