Hello everyone!
You may also associate Denmark with little plastic blocks which have raised stubs on their top, allowing them to interlock together to create things. Possibly the most boring way of describing something which can be lots of fun…
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| A Lego Ferrari - unfortunately, you couldn't drive it |
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| Lego is derived from the Danish phrase leg godt, which means "play well"
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Lego was first founded as a company shortly after the end of the Second World War. It is from Denmark as it was invented by a man called Ole Kirk Christiansen, who transitioned from making wooden blocks in his workshop in the 1930s to using plastic in the late 1940s. It is now one of Europe’s biggest and most successful companies, and the largest toy manufacturer in the world by sales.
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| Mount Rushmore statues...made of Lego bricks |
The company’s expansion from humble bricks has taken them into a wide variety of fields, including movies, clothing, games…and theme parks. There are eleven Legoland parks globally, in places ranging from the USA to Malaysia. The original was built near the original Lego factory in an otherwise unremarkable area called Billund.
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| The park currently receives an average of over 1.5 million visitors a year |
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| A Thai temple made of Lego bricks |
I really liked Lego as a kid. I still enjoy having a play with it if I’m with kids. I was staying near the spiritual home of the humble plastic brick. I was going to Legoland, even if it would be slightly strange for a middle-aged man to go there on their own.
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| If you squint, you can see me loving life on one of the rides |
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| Fries which look like Lego bricks! |
I get the feeling that a lot of people either stay at the on-site hotel or drive to get to Legoland. Public transport involved a train from Odense to Vejle, then a bus going to Billund which stops outside the park. I timed my walk to Odense’s train station…badly. Well, unluckily. My phone also hadn’t predicted a biblical storm which resulted in my shorts becoming see-through and me being quite cold for the rest of the day as I stomped around in soaked socks and trainers.
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| There was also lightning zipping around in the sky |
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Unrelated to the weather but connected to getting wet, this ride had to
temporarily close because one of the boats sank. Not my boat, to be clear. |
I arrived relatively early, only about 15 minutes after opening time. This meant that the lines for rides, which could have potentially been enormous on a weekend and in the Danish school holidays, were actually quite short. The longest I had to wait, a roller coaster called Flying Eagle, was only 20 minutes.
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| All rides had Lego structures around them |
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| Flying Eagle |
I say ‘roller coaster’. This is a park aimed at children. Nothing is going to be out-of-this-world hair-raising or scary. But I actually did find some of the rides more thrilling than I anticipated. Polar X-Plorer, for example, goes quite quickly, enters a tunnel, pauses…then drops the car and the track 5 vertical metres.
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| Polar X-Plorer |
By far the coolest ride was one which you create yourself, called Ice Pilots School. In this, you put in your preferred difficulty level, which out of 5, before then selecting a series of moves. I didn’t really understand what was going on so bashed the screen for a bit. You then take the swipe card to a platform which is surrounded by 5 robotic arms. You enter the seated harness at the end of the arm, strap in…and then get flung and spun by the arm in all directions and rotations. You can’t complain because it’s merely doing the move you asked it to do on the screen! Really enjoyable.
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| The arena |
As much as rides, Legoland is famous for its creations using their plastic bricks. Many of their parks have a ‘Miniland’ which accurately creates towns, buildings or other things using Lego. Here they had created the nearby airport, Amsterdam and an area of the Scottish Highlands. What made it even better was the fact that many of the transport pieces actually move around the buildings.
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The plane was slowly moving down the runway.
Having it take off would probably be too ambitious... |
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| The boats move along the canals by being pulled by a track under the water |
One exhibition they had was about some of the world’s tallest buildings. Each had been made to a scale of 1:150 - they don’t have that many bricks! I really appreciated the detail in the grand clock of Mecca.
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| Taipei, New York, Mecca, Shanghai and Dubai are represented |
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Incredible detail which took 1,597 hours
to build and contains 119,614 Lego pieces |
Billund is on Jutland, the main landmass of Denmark and the one which is connected to the rest of continental Europe (Germany is below it). I had travelled to Billund from the country’s third-largest city of Odense, which is on the island of Fyn, sandwiched between Jutland and Copenhagen’s island of Sjælland.
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