Kronborg Castle/Elsinore (Helsingor)

I visited Kronborg Castle and the nearby town of Elsinore this past Saturday (a week ago). This is the alleged castle that Shakespeare's Hamlet was based on, even though as we learned from the tour guide at the castle, it is technically impossible that it could have been the castle where Hamlet lived because the castle was not in existence when the story of Hamlet takes place. However, they still take pride in the idea that the play's setting was "based" on the castle, and they think that Shakespeare visited the castle at some point because his descriptions of the castle in the play are too accurate to come from someone who had not seen it himself.

The castle itself was actually rather anticlimactic on the inside (the outside was obviously really cool, as you can see in the pictures). It was basically the opposite of Frederiksborg Castle, where every room was decorated to the fullest extent. Here, the walls were often bare and the rooms very boring. The coolest part of the castle was definitely the dungeon, where we were allowed to go after the tour of the rest of the castle. The dungeons were basically under the entirety of the castle (i.e. it was the huge, extensive maze of dark corridors with low ceilings and seemingly unbearable conditions for anyone forced to live there).

One of the most fun parts of this trip was the fact that Sweden was so close and the town of Elsinore was so pretty. Check out the pictures: