Aarhus - Day 2

We're awake around 8:30am and out the door by 9:30am. We're craving a regular (to us) breakfast (aka not just bread, jam and cheese, some protein, pleassseee!), so we're headed for a café in the Latin Quarter. The Latin Quarter is cobble stone streets and colourful, older buildings and is just charming. Along the way we spot a good looking games shop and pop in. Jeff has been on the hunt for Viking Chess (Hnefatafl) and he's in luck. He promises it will be a good game to play while travelling and packs away small enough (bags are starting to groan at this point).

We reach our breakfast destination and we have hit the jackpot. We order what they call a buffet plate each, which consists of scrambled eggs, bacon, avocado, prawn salad, salami, 3 kinds of bread (of course), cheese, yoghurt, muesli and banana bread. We stuff ourselves, it's great.

We waddle off down a nearby shopping strip and Jeff spots a Denmark soccer shop. We hit up the sale section and he scores a well priced pair of shorts. Onwards we go, our destination is Marselisborg Deer Park! We walk through to the other side of the city and into a neighbourhood with some fancier looking houses. We walk until we reach the Marselisborg Palace, which is the Danish royal family's summer house. La di da. They are not there at the moment so we are able to wander the well manicured grounds surrounding the palace. The pool is covered still, so we guess it's just not summery enough yet. There are quite a few gardeners and maintenance people working to get it ready (we assume) for the arrival of the family. Seems like it would probably be a full time job all year round and maybe a nice one?

We continue our walk through a forest type park which is green and lovely and finally reach the deer park. We are met with deer as soon as we step into the park, so that is promising. Turns out the place is lousy with deer. We sit for a bit as we don't want to scare them and then we start pulling some branches of leaves to feed them. This is the good stuff. A few of the braver ones make a bee line for the branches we're holding and pull them out of our hands. It's awesome. There are stacks of birds around as well, including the grey and white magpie type crow we've been seeing around. A few of the cheekier ones even land on the deer's backs! We're loving this. We don't see too many other people around, so it's really nice and peaceful in the park. We sit for a bit more, wander around for a bit more and head back to town, this time along the beach. It's pretty windy and grey with some drizzle, so Jeff decides this is not the place he will be swimming in Europe.

We have a few more things to tick off in Aarhus, next one being the Domen or Dome café. It's a glass dome and it's all about sustainability here, with community gardens surrounding it. Its a rejuvination project where they have taken out heavy industry and hoping to have this area nice and wild again one day. It is still being worked on but you can see it's going to be a really cool spot to be in summer, on the harbour, when it's all done. We need to kill some time as our next stop doesn't open til 4pm (a brewery), so we take 5 over an OJ and cinnamon bun, which we agree we have both now had our fair share of on this trip.

We push on and it's a short walk to the Hantwerk brewery. We step up to the bar and the bar tender gives us almost every beer on the menu to try. They are all really good, but the tasters have come so thick and fast we have no idea which one was which in the end. We make our choices then grab a table to play our first game of many of the Viking Chess we just bought this morning. It's great timing because it has just started to pour down outside. We have a couple of pints and a few games.

We've decided we're going back to where it all started in Aarhus for us, the food market. There's plenty of different food options, so we don't feel like it's too much of a cop out going back to the same place. And we're not wrong. It's heaving tonight, almost every table is full and it looks to be full of locals. This time we settle on the Turkish Grill, Jeff with a wrap, Courts with meat on chips with some salad. We wash it down with the sugar free version of the Danish soft drink Faxe Kondi (lemonade and orange flavours). We've made good choices.

We've got an early train to Berlin tomorrow, so we head past the Lidl grocery store to grab breakfast for the journey and head back to the apartment to snooze.