We recently spent nearly three months in three Nordic countries: Sweden, Denmark and Finland. We volunteered in and explored south-west Sweden, toured the area of Jutland in the north of Denmark and ended our trip in Helsinki to visit family.
Volunteering
We volunteered for a small grassroots NGO focused on empowering women and marginalised communities through education and social entrepreneurship. We love to travel ‘with purpose’ in this way, to meet people from different backgrounds and listen to their stories, and to keep growing. We were based in the south of Sweden in a tiny village called Hästveda, around 100km NE of Malmö.
Our tasks involved gardening...
...and building compost bins from spare pieces of wood scattered around.
The lakes around our new temporary home were stunning.
The night skies were also spectacular once day turned into night at around 10.30pm
In our leisure time, we would take walks/bike rides around the lakes, play Durak - a Russian card game - with our lovely host and watch films projected onto a white bedsheet.
Sweden Travels
Our trip started in Gothenburg which is a beautiful town thanks to its botanical gardens, parks, canals and spectacular archipelago. We took a boat trip to the island of Vrångö and walked on one of its trails.
We took a nice boat tour on the canals to see the town's main sites, including its 'fish church', a fish market designed in 1870's as a neo-Gothic church. The tour guide was hilarious - she told us that Gothenburg citizens are nicknamed Glenn: during the 1980s, the local football team had four stars, all called Glenn, hence the moniker.
The town's Museum of Art was special, with famous pieces by Rubens, Picasso and the impressionists,. This 'Cat Hunting Birds'- painted in 1874 by Bruno Liljefors, Sweden's foremost wildlife artist of the time - reminded us of a few petsits when cats have brought us bird and mice 'presents'.
While in Gothenburg, we gave a talk about our experience volunteering in Ethiopia back in 2018 when we first started this chapter of our lives.
One of our favourite days was on the island of Venn - small enough to walk around its perimeter and see neighbouring countries across the water.
Venn has a brilliant museum celebrating the life and work of Tycho Brahe - the official astronomer of Emperor Frederick II of Denmark - who lived on the island between 1576 and 1597 inventing new instruments to observe and measure stars and planets before the telescope was invented.
We visited Helsingbourg for its moving Wallenberg tributes...
...and we drowned our sorrows with 'Fika' at the town's Bruket Kaffebar. Fika is a part of Sweden's wonderful culture to take a break and celebrate life with a hot drink and a sweet treat. Maybe that's why we felt so at home in Sweden?
Denmark Travels
At the end of our volunteering, we went on a 1000km+ road trip around the north of Denmark. It was spectactular!
We loved some of the road signs en route and were sorely tempted to turn left at this junction.
And back in Sweden, this bus driver clearly must have had a bad day.
The Louisiana, close to Copenhagen, is one of our favourite museums of modern art - we had seen it on a previous trip to Copenhagen and always planned to return.
It even had a temporary exhibition of one of our favourite modern artists, Sophie Calle, who mixes art forms with meaningful, perceptive and sometimes funny text.
Kronborg Castle, in Helsingør and overlooking the southern coast of Sweden, is most noted as the setting for Hamlet. Legend has it that Shakespeare's actor friends visited the castle and witnessed its infamous festivities and reported them back to the bard.
The castle has a 25 metre long banquet room which would have been heaving when guests arrived for banquets. At other times and when the weather was rainy, the Queen would use the room for walking.
Some of the paintings in the castle looked vaguely familiar 😉
The town of Helsingør was itself magnificant, full of untouched medieval streets and buildings.
Den Gamle By (The Old Town) in Aarhus just won European Museum of the Year for good reason. It opened in 1914 after saving glorious 16th Century buildings and their interiors from demolition and moving them all into an open air museum.
The museum also displays the actual buildings and interiors of 1864 and 1974 which were of course very nostalgic. It has cleverly also recently saved all of the decor and products of 2014 which will in time become nostalgic to future generations.
It is touristy but good fun and interesting as the museum deeply respects the past and appears authentic in its bakery, using historic ovens and old recipes to make the pastries it sells today.
We discovered a great story in a display of old clocks. In 1744, a Dutch ship carrying longcase clocks ran aground in Bornholm, where local islanders salvaged and studied them and learnt to make them cheaply with the result that Bornholmer clocks (like this one made in 1800) soon became widespread in Denmark.
We had no idea what a treat Denmark would be but Skagen was the one place we knew we'd love. It is located at the northernmost tip of Denmark where the Baltic meets the North Sea. It's pretty wild to see the seas bouncing against each other. It's a place for poets and artists.
In the 1870s, the wild and remote location attracted lots of artists who became known as the Skagen Painters, not so much because of their art form, but because of the subject matter: like French impressionists, they painted 'en plein air', but they focused on the precarious living conditions of the local community. We were told in the local museum that this painting of a drowned fisherman and others like it were not posed, instead the artists painted from real life.
Our final stop was in Odense, the birthplace of Hans Christian Andersen. We had so much fun in the museum, revisiting our favourite stories!
Fun facts we didn't know about Andersen: he spent 9 years of his life on the road visiting the likes of Hugo in Paris and Dickens in London, and he had a passion for making paper cuts like this one.
On top of of all the cultural riches of Denmark, it will probably be the colours of its gardens we will remember most.
We clearly weren't the only ones attracted to them.
And the wide open colourful spaces weren't restricted to the living, as the cemeteries were like gardens too.
Helsinki
This was our third trip to Helsinki, one of our favourite cities for its designs and serenity, and of course for the beautiful family we have there.
