A Day with Hans Christian Anderson

Hans Christian Anderson was born in the town of Odense. Incidentally, it's pronounced Oonts (or something like that). It seems Danish words are never pronounced like they are spelled. I asked a young American who was studying the Danish culture and language at the folk school where we were lodging about that, and he said Danes don't pronounce about half the letters in any word, and the trick in speaking the language is to figure out which ones to skip.

This is the Anderson house - it was very small when he lived here, and it's now been enlarged and incorporates a very nice museum. There was a life-size statue of the man, and one of his suits of clothes - he was very, very tall. In addition to telling stories, Anderson liked to amuse children with paper cutouts - below are a few samples of his work. Some were intricate and others were just silly. These are some nearby streets in the older section of the town - colorful buildings and narrow cobblestoned streets. In the modern new section of the city, there's a statue of Anderson surrounded by restaurants, clothing stores, tourist shops, etc. There's also this wonderful sculpture nearby which children (and teenagers) love to play on. No city square is complete with its church.And from the sublime to the ridiculous, this is where I got an ice cream cone (right near the Anderson statue). And to round off a wonderful day, we found a flea market set up along the waterway, and I got to shop for an hour or two.