Today was another day off. We all slept in a little bit and ate a late breakfast where we had a very interesting conversation with Kim's wife. They have an adorable 16 month old so we somehow got on the topic of maternity benefits. Now I've heard that the US is the one of only two countries in the world not to offer some sort of paid maternity leave but I had no idea other countries had it so good! In Denmark they get 6 months at full pay and 6 months at partial pay - and by partial pay they mean 70-80%. In Estonia they get 1.5 years! When I told her them if I were to have a baby I'd be paid for 6 weeks and have to go back to work in 12 weeks their jaws hit the floor. The conversation then spurned to the cost of living, health care and other "benefits" of living in different countries. That is one of the really cool things about these tournaments, you learn so much about other peoples cultures.
For our activity for the day, a number of the girls wanted to go shopping at a large mall that is close by. It is always funny at these tournaments, the European girls just love to shop! None of the North Americans really were interested in going shopping for two reasons. 1) Things are definitely more expensive here than at home and 2) I don't have much (if any) extra space in my suitcase! Katie and I decided we wanted to venture into Copenhagen again and Kaire decided to come along. We asked Kim and his wife to give us some ideas on what to do and they suggested we see the Rosenborg Palace if it was open. Apparently in Denmark they get 3 days off for Easter so many things are closed. We couldn't really tell online if it was open or not so we just decided to go for it and walked over to the train station to catch a train to Copenhagen. It was about a 40 minute train ride then we walked to the palace from there. Thank goodness for google maps! While I have my phone in airplane mode if you put in your destination when on wifi, the blue dot indicating where you are at that exact moment will still move once you are off wifi. It is really kind of creepy but very helpful.
We found the palace and fortunately it was open. It was really cool, it had pieces of history from all the various kings and queens dating back to the early 1300's. That is what is so crazy to me, they had pieces of art and gold that were 400+ years older than the United States! In the basement of the palace they have many of the crown jewels on display, including 3 of the actual crowns that the kings have worn. Apparently they weighed 3 kilos, or about 6.5 lbs. Can you imagine wearing something that was 6.5 lbs on your head?
After spending a few hours at Rosenborg we decided to check out the Carlesberg Brewery. Our initial plan was to take the bus, then we realized we had no Danish Krones so we took a cab instead so we could use a credit card. That is one thing that is a bit of a pain in Scandinavia, every country uses its own currency. The brewery tour was very different than the Heineken brewery tour I took in Amsterdam. This one focused a lot on the history of the brewery and the employees and less on the actual process of making the beer. It was intersting - the workers lived on the property and were given a 4 liter allowence of beer each day. Yes, that's right 4 liters! However I'd say the coolest part was seeing a collection of different beer bottles from around the world. They had over 200,000, organized by country. It was really neat.
After the brewery tour we made our way back to the train station. We didn't buy tickets on the way over because we were told our accredation was good on public transportation in Malmo but when we were on the train we saw all of these signs talking about fines of $100 euros/$1000 Krona if you didn't have a ticket so we decided to play it safe and buy one. Good thing we did because a conductor checked our tickets 5 minutes after we boarded! We had to switch trains at Central Station to get back to Malmo which was also a bit of an adventure. We must have ran up and down the stairs 5 times trying to catch the right train going the right direction!
We finally made it back to Malmo with about 30 minutes to spare before the entire group was going out to dinner. We went to this great little restaurant in an old wine cellar. The food was amazing, I had a filet with an awesome sauce that was cooked perfectly. It was a great night out with the group. We were all stuffed when we got back to the hotel and headed right to bed. Games start up again tomorrow and we are in the home stretch!
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