Today was fairly busy. We started off with more baked goods, also excellent, and then walked over to the palace. It was a cool building with lots of artifacts from Danish nobility. Notably, it was largely post-Viking stuff and lacked any of the more traditionally Nordic motifs that we've come to expect from these countries. There were a ton of great paintings and sculptures in here that depicted a variety of scenes from throughout Danish history. They also had the crown jewels of Denmark and some other very fancy bits of jewelry in the basement below. On the whole, it was a good experience, but I will say that much of what we saw there did little to differentiate itself from any of the other Renaissance era royal stuff that basically every country in Western or Central Europe has. There was little to distinguish the art or style from, say, a Dutch equivalent, and I found that a little disappointing.

After this we went to the National Museum. The floors generally ascended through historical eras, and we started on the ground floor. These exhibits, covering from the initial settlement of Scandinavia after the Ice Age to the Viking Age, were excellent. There was a ton of interesting material and information that was well explained, clear, and comprehensive. I learned that once again, the Romans were immensely influential on prehistoric Denmark despite having never controlled any territory there. However, when we tried to graduate from Danish prehistory to the Viking era, it became clear that they had an enormous hole in their history. The main exhibits skipped straight to the medieval Christian era, which as I described earlier, isn't that exciting. There was a weird featured exhibit that required headphones and was largely very stupid. It was themed after some Norse saga, but the narration had you slowly walking through bizarre dreamlike rooms that had nothing to do with actual history. The final room was larger and contained actual artifacts from the Viking era, but it was very limited in scope and had really poor information on the displayed pieces. I'm not entirely sure how the museum managed to drop the ball on this section of their history, seeing as this is the only part of Danish history anyone actually cares about. It was worth it for the first floor alone, though, and since the museum closed at 5 we didn't have much time left anyway. I poked around some of the upper floors too, but they were showing off boring stuff from modern Denmark which is pretty much as pedestrian as you might expect (wow, a generic looking tv from 1985, but it was made in Denmark!). There was even a top floor that featured lots of Greco-Roman and Egyptian stuff, which was as impressive as always but seemed extremely out of place. I'm not entirely sure who bothered spending money to get all those pieces, since it's not what anyone is coming to see in Copenhagen.

I think we're trying to get out of the city tomorrow, which I'm looking forward to. I've spend so much time in major cities in the past month that something a little more rural sounds great. Then I'll head to Stockholm on Monday, and possibly Oslo from there because flights down south are prohibitively expensive from anywhere else up north. I'd've loved to take the trans-Baltic ferry to see Finland and maybe even Estonia too, but I don't think I can justify the cost or inconvenience of trying to get back on track from there.