Today started off early in Nykobing and we traveled to the beautiful little town of Sakskøbing.  We walked around that town and got to see the house in which my great-grandmother was born, and then the church where she was baptized.  I was fascinated to learn that in every Danish church you enter, there is a ship hanging from the ceiling, pointing in the right direction to head to the altar.  

After Sakskøbing, we drove back toward Nykobing and stopped at a little church where my great-great-grandparents were married, and outside I experienced for the first time a Danish "cemetery."
These cemeteries are a very interesting thing the Danes do that I had a little difficulty understanding. Surrounding the church, it looks like there are so many mini gardens, but really the area is divided into little plots of land that families of the deceased pay for and then put a gravestone that is surrounded by a hedgerow or bushes.  They also add flowers and other statues and even benches for when people visit the site.  After the family stops paying for the plot of land, the gravestone can either be kept and put in another place where they are much more closely placed, or broken down into little stone.

Once we got back to Nykobing, we went to "Middelalder Centret," which is an equivalent of a Renaissance fair.  There we learned what it was like to live in Denmark in the 1400's, and I actually was selected from the crowd to help launch the "trebuchet,"the Danish equivalent of a catapult.  (They can obviously spot the Americans in the crowd, and then enjoy trying to get me to figure out what to do from instructions in Danish- needless to say, it was still a great time)!  After the Trebuchet firing, we watched a jousting tournament in which our knight won!

We then walked around downtown Nykobing for a little bit of time and then boarded a train, and went all the way to Skanderborg, on the mainland of Jutland.  This train ride really exposed me to just how much Lolland and southern Jutland (as far as I can tell) is countryside.  Everywhere you look there are fields for miles all golden with wheat, some of which are being harvested, while others are in the process of being harvested.  Another Here we met my mother's cousin, Jesper, his wife Helle, and his two children Emma (11) and Tobias who just turned four today!  By the time we arrived it was almost 21:00, but we still had a late dinner of smørrebrød, or open faced sandwiches.  On the bread, we had frikkadeller, which is a "Danish meatball" but doesn't have any actual pasta sauce on it!  It was a long, fun filled day, and we will be up tomorrow for another one!

til imorgen!
PS, I finally figured out how to add pictures so hopefully they help where my descriptions are lacking)