Tilbage til Nyord

While Anna and Steve were in Copenhagen we took a few days to head out of town and see a bit more of Denmark. There is only one real solution when the sole planning restriction is ‘low cost’, and that is primitive shelters. Hurrah!

After stocking up on nutritious car snacks (aka chips ‘med dill’ and a startlingly liquorice-heavy bag of pick’n’mix) we hit the road back to Møn. I’ve decided it’s an excellent place that everyone should visit – let this be a warning to future guests: if you stay with us longer than a weekend you’re at high risk of being forced to go there.

I had the feeling that with primitive shelters and guests it’s probably better the devil you know, so our first stop was Nyord again.

Turns out even a few months between visits can still yield surprises – namely that a nest of swallows had sprung up in the only available shelter. We were a bit revolted by it at first, and definitely convinced we were going to get a bird disease. This is a terrible photo that I took by accident, but it does give you an idea of the situation.

Having no other option we bunked down for the night, and in the morning were rewarded for our tolerance by waking up to the mother bird feeding her brood. At that point it was touch and go whether we’d die first of the bird disease or cuteness overload. Lucky we brought my new binoculars! (aka best present ever from Ant). You better believe we all laid in our sleeping bags passing the binos around to get a real close look at the action.

The ‘babies’ seemed more like demanding teenagers – I feel like they were milking this whole situation for as long as they could get away with it, and I have no idea how five of them all managed to fit in the nest. We decided that it was definitely worth copping a bird disease to wake up to this small miracle.

The rest of our night there was pretty awesome. We were befriended by two little Danish chaps – Fabian (11) and Hektor (8). Turns out my Danish is most effective when used on children, probably because they have endless time on their hands and still find someone speaking bad foreign-accented Danish a real novelty. We learned lots of useful things, mainly thanks to a lot of miming, including that swans are called ‘svaner’ and scouts are called ‘spejdere’ and that scouts here have dogs for some reason!? That might have been a translation error, but if that’s true then I want to be a spejdere. Hektor never quite clicked that we could not understand Danish well enough to make sense of anything he said, which was pretty amusing. All our confused nodding and awkward laughing didn’t seem to trouble him, and we all got a hug from him when it was time to leave.

We spent some time in the morning wandering around the town of Nyord and it remains the most sleepy, quaint little harbour-side village you’ll ever find.

As if primitive shelters weren’t enough of an authentically Danish ordeal, we went to town on some koldskål for morning tea. I went with the lemon flavour this time, and happily confirmed my theory that the pleasant sourness of the lemon glosses over the less-pleasant sourness of the koldskål…

OK, that’s enough about Nyord – please excuse me while I go and extensively google ‘pet swallows’…