This was my first time visiting Denmark; a little country sitting in the Baltic Sea, of the Atlantic Ocean, between Germany and Sweden and Norway. A country which is made up of lots of islands and, like Holland, is very flat.

It's common for Scandinavian's to have a summer house on the coast near beaches or lakes (and sometimes a winter house in the northern parts of the countries / Europe for when they want to go skiing or ski-doo-ing) and to spend a reasonable amount of their summer vacation time relaxing in these summer houses. Scandinavian's seem to be expected to take quite large chunks of vacation all in one go - which definitely seems to have its benefits.

It was one of these summer houses on the East coast of Denmark, only a stone's throw away from the beach, that we were fortunate enough to be able to borrow for the weekend.

The summer houses in Denmark were quite unusual because there wasn't really any uniformity between them - other than the fact that they tended to only be one story tall - there was a vast array of different shapes and designs of summer houses lining the coast.

Other than the number of unusual designs of summer houses, the other thing that struck me as quite unusual was the number of houses that had large flag poles outside of their houses and were flying big, Danish flags.

I've seen a similar thing on the coast of Sweeden too.

Quite sweet and patriotic.

There wasn't a huge amount of beach and the sand had patches of vegetation poking through in places, so it's not your typical beach holiday spot, but on the flip side it was really peaceful and relaxing.

The sea was incredibly flat, with hardly any waves at all - which I think probably goes on to explain why there isn't very much sand or beach.

The water was a lovely clear, aquamarine and was very shallow for a long way (if you've seen my #beachWednesday pictures then you'll understand just how far out you could walk without the sea level going above your knees) - whilst this meant that it wasn't really a great place for swimming, it did mean that the water was lovely and warm.

As some people might know, the downside to warm water can be that Jellyfish come closer to the shore to feed as the water warms up and some of them can give you quite a nasty sting. It seems that the ones that are pretty much completely clear, maybe with faint white stripes are fine, but the ones with red-ish orange stripes are the ones to watch out for (as often is true with nature, it's pretty good at giving you a visual warning that it's not to be messed around with!).

If you look very closely, you'll see a jellyfish in the picture...

Fortunately, it's not one that would give me a nasty sting - even though I could have sworn that it had a tint of orange to it... must have been the light...

A summer holiday to the beach wouldn't be complete without ice cream!

And a holiday to Scandinavia wouldn't be complete without "salty liquorice" - it's not to everyone's taste, but I happen to really like salty liquorice and take the opportunity to buy and eat far too much everytime I visit. In Denmark, I found a type that I've never tried before called "Haj Haj" - which would literally translate as "shark shark".

I really enjoyed them - and trying to recreate the movie Jaws too "there's a shark in the water....." 😂

No sharks, just a few fish, jellyfish and ripples in the clear, warm water.

A trip to the nearby town of Kolding topped off the weekend nicely.

When I'm this close to the sea, I like to make sure that I eat local, fresh produce. I wasn't going to turn up a chance to eat fresh Mussel. On the menu, they were advertised by the French name "Moule Frites", so I was expecting the potatoes to be a lot more like fries/chip and a lot less like potatoes, but the food tasted excellent!

I had a really nice weekend on the East coast of Denmark, but next time that I go I will have to pack sun cream or buy it sooner because as you can see in this picture, after a long day of exploring the scenic coastline and beaches I got sun burnt. 😞

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