Sankt Hans Aften

June 24th is known as Sankt Hans Aften in Denmark, or St. John's night. In other places, it is celebrated as the feast of St. John the Baptist who, according to the Bible, was born six months before Jesus. Here in lovely Denmark, it is celebrated not with mass baptisms, but with mass burnings of witch effigies. It's festive.

Behold, the pyre in the background.

Prior to the fires, we had a barbecue on Amager Strand. Despite the spells of rain, and a relatively brief, yet dense and terribly annoying infestation of gnats, it was a great time.We then wandered down the beach, looking for the biggest pile of brush. When we came upon it, it was surrounded by a rather older looking crowd, all listening to a rather boring sounding speaker. As we rather quickly found out, we had stumbled upon the witch burning being held by the Danish Communist Party. We may all be on a government watchlist, but they were nice enough, and their bonfire was large, so we stuck around and their band played a medley of Beatles songs while the witch went up in flames. A nice extra touch were the noisy fireworks added to the fire for semi-realistic sounding screams.

The lighting in this country will never cease to amaze me.

As a celestial preamble to the bonfire, the sky decided to grace us with not one but two very vivid rainbows. After experiencing a double rainbow in real life, I now understand how that guy on YouTube got so excited about it. Unfortunately I was only able to get a good picture of one of them with the camera on my phone.

The evening was graced with rainbows.

A very vibrant rainbow.

Apparently Danes are the treasure at the 
end of the rainbow.

Burn witch, burn.

That's the ticket.

Sunset at 11:00pm. Or as we locals like to say, 23:00/

Yup, that'll do. The cherry on top of a great week.