Our first stop was two hours away in Fakse, DK, at Royal Unibrew, the number 2 brewery in Denmark (number one being Carlsberg). Here we had a meeting with one of the employees who assigned my group a project for the semester. Then we had a tour of the facility and learned more about the brewing process and saw where the beer gets bottled and how the deposit system for the bottles works.
In Denmark, they have machines that you place your empty cans and bottles in. These bottles are shipped back to the distribution centers to be cleaned and refilled.
After Royal Unibrew we drove further north to a smaller brewery called Fuglsang. It is a small regional brewery that actually produces their own malt and sells some of their malt to the larger Danish Breweries and other Breweries in Europe. This brewery was probably the best academic part of the trip. The guy who showed us around was a direct decendent of the man who started the brewery. The family does not technically own the brewery anymore because the inheritance tax in Denmark is so high. They have to set the ownership up in a sort of trust. Now the family members work there but they don't have the power of ownership, just the Fuglsang name.
After seeing the brewery and all the different processes they use to make the beer we had dinner with the Fuglsang family. They prepared a classic Danish meal. It consisted of lots of bread, butter, and an assortment of deli meats.
They also brought out lots of boxes of their beer and encouraged us to try all the different kinds they had. After about an hour my table of 6 had killed over 40 bottles of beer and Mr. Fuglsang was sitting with us discussing the American drinking age of 21 and how he thought it was ridiculous.
After dinner we drove another few hours north to a small rural city and stayed in cabins at a hostel. We drank some more free beer that Fuglsang gave us and went out to a small bar in the city.
The next morning we woke up and continued on our journey to Arrhuse to visit the headquarters of Dansk Supermarked. The Dansk Supermarked is the company that owns a bunch of different stores all over Denmark and Northern Europe. Netto is one that is like a convenience store, Fotex is kind of like a supermarket with some clothing and stuff, and Bilca is like a small version of Wall-mart.
We learned about their distribution system and their information systems that are used to make sure deliveries are on time every single day.
Then we went to lunch at some restaurant in Arrhuse and got pretty fancy cheeseburgers and fries. After lunch, we went to the Aros art museum which was actually really cool. There was a room that was filled with fog and the fog was colored by neon lights on the ceiling. It was a sort of sensory overload when you went in because you couldn't see more than a foot in front of your face.
We left Arrhuse at around 6:30 pm and drove south to Odense. Odense is the third biggest city in Denmark and it is on an island called Funen. We stayed in another hostel, this time it was more like a regular hotel. You just had to bring your own linens and stuff to sleep on.
We went out in Odense that night and I had the great idea to go to a karaoke bar. We finally found one at this club called ARCADE. Arcade is a five floor club which each floor having a different sort of theme. One of the floors was dedicated to karaoke. The bouncers told us at the door that we had to pay a cover charge of 180 danish Kroner. That is roughly 40 US dollars. The cover was because they were having a concert at 1 am. We asked them who was playing and he told us that it was the number one singer in all of Denmark. We convinced them to let us in without paying because we had never heard of the singer and we assured them we would be leaving before the concert began.
We did some karaoke classics and agreed that we made a really great decision.
The guys and girls all got separated and we found out the next day one of the girls (from Loyola) and another girl (from Goucher) had gotten locked in some back room while looking for the bathroom. This room had a set of stairs which the loyola girl accidently fell down and got a black eye. After all the commotion one of the bouncers found them and started yelling at them and picked up the girl from Goucher and threw her against the wall. Both girls spent the night in the ER. So that was pretty eventful.
We went to the Hans Christian Anderson museum for a little the next day. It was really boring. We departed Odense and started on the journey back to Copenhagen. About half way back we went down some really rural road and pulled over to play paint ball.
Paint ball was awesome. Everyone was really tired from the night before and no one really wanted to play but once it began everyone agreed it was a lot of fun.
We finally got back to Copenhagen around 7 pm and it was a really early night.
Today is the 10th anniversary of 9/11. RIP to all those who died that day.
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