Evening Sun...

When the weather is as nice as it was yesterday in Denmark, you have to make the most of it, as I promise you it's not going to last that long. In a country where the weather is usually pretty bad, or at best dull for over half of the year, you will notice that a high proportion of it's population favours a bright orange hue thanks to sunlight addiction (whether manufactured or real), and at the first sign of the real stuff at this time of year, they are all out in it soaking up the rays (as are we!)...

Picking up my daughter from a friend's house in Rungsted yesterday evening (we have been here long enough now to know you have to make the most of it when it first arrives), we went straight to the harbour there (Fiskerikajen not open yet - after Easter hopefully!), where we managed to get a table outside for a pizza on the seafront. R was telling us that she had been crabbing here at a summer camp she attended last year. She swore blind that the food that caught the most crabs was pieces of seal. I am pretty confident she actually meant sild (herring), but there is no arguing with this child sometimes, and she got quite irate with her parents (which considering the topic was quite amusing), and drew a couple of bemused looks from the orange folk around us. On the way back to the car we happened upon a bucket of crab fishing rods outside a shop and bought our own for future expeditions. No "seal" to be had though, but we found a bit of icecream cone, which of course floated at first! However I am married to engineer, so he soon came up with an ingenious pebble weighting system and the crabbing began. It turns out that crabs don't like ice-cream cone, but it was a beautiful evening and one I will remember. I am very glad we made the effort, you can just guess what the weather is doing today...

Isak Dinesen

My mother has always been a big fan of Karen Blixen, so we paid a visit to the Museum in Rungsted Kyst. The Museum is actually based in her family home, a beautiful old former Inn by the sea with impressive gardens. The private rooms are opened on a daily basis, and are kept just as they were then. The screen Karen described to Denys in Out of Africa is by the fire in the parlour, and the rooms are filled with beautiful flowers fresh from the gardens, something she took great delight in (and if I had such fabulous gardens full of them to choose from, I imagine I would be passionate about flower arranging too!). I didn't actually know all that much about Karen Blixen beforehand, but I found it really really interesting (definitely not one to bring children to though! It was lovely to be able to wander through the exhibits without so much as a "I need the toilet" or an "I'm hungry"!). As well as being an accomplished writer, Karen Blixen was a pretty decent artist, and studied at the Royal Academy of Art in Copenhagen. Her paintings are everywhere throughout the house, although she wasn't encouraged to paint by her family, which is a huge shame. Her life was actually quite tragic and I found the whole place moving. She is buried here, underneath a huge beech tree in the gardens. It was quite apparent that the Hollywood film Out of Africa wasn't rated that highly by the Foundation, as it wasn't considered to be true to the book. I am not sure that I will ever be able to watch it again either, if only for the reason that Meryl Streep's Danish accent is (I realise now)just plain hilarious. I wonder what the Danes thought when that first came out?

Afterwards we went for lunch at Fiskerikajen in Rungsted Havn for the most beautifully fresh Stjerneskud (freshly fried place on homemade rye bread with mayonnaise, prawns and lemon - delish when done properly!). We sat overlooking the boats in the harbour. This place makes an English seaside fish and chip shop look so basic. It has an amazing fish-mongers tacked onto the side, complete with racks of freshly hot-smoked salmon. It is still Krebs (crayfish) season at the moment here and they had buckets of them piled outside, no doubt my husband will be back here to investigate in the near future!