The life and the house of Hans Christian Andersen

  Hamburg, Germany
Sunday, August 30, 2009

Today started out again with rain! So we got in the car and headed out for Denmark. Both decided that we were not really interested in seeing the Little Mermaid or anything else that Copenhagen had to offer we headed for Odense, the boyhood home of Hans Christian Andersen. Just as we pulled into town the sun came out and it turned into a beautiful day. The only problem being that when Bruce wanted to take my picture with the statue of Hans my a** got pretty wet. The museum was quite interesting with a few interesting unknown facts (to me at least). First of all, he was considered a homely man and did not have many friends, he suffered most of his life with dental pain and the most interesting is that the story The Nightingale writen in 1944 is about his unrequited love affair with Jenny Lind (The songbird of Sweden) in 1943.  Americans thought a lot of Hans Christian Anderson when his books we translated, but some children in America thought that he was very poor and had no money so they collected about $200.00 and sent it to him along with a book about America. We purchased a book with some of his fairy tales that we didn't know and proceeded to read them aloud to each other on our ride. Quickly moving out of Denmark, we progressed on to Hamburg Germany for the night. We pulled into McDonalds and booked a hotel. One thing about McDonalds, you get clean bathrooms and free internet. We arrived at our hotel "the only Irish hotel in Hamburg" (as it was advertised in the lobby) which was quite quaint with a nice bar/restaurant with excellent food. as I walked in with my cane in hand the hotel clerk wad aghast. She had given us one of the last rooms on the 4th floor and the elevator was broken. We were offered the use of the employee elevator a big silver box, which we had to walk up almost 2 flights of stairs and out into a parking lot to get to. After that though the hotel was very accommodating with bringing our dinner to our room without room service charge. Again it really was another day of driving! Both of us anxious to get to Aachen, but, an interesting one with an interesting stop in Denmark and covering three countries in one day!