Skiing in Sweden! Also the rest of my week.

Wow - it's been a really busy week, and it's looking like the busy-ness will simply continue! Wheee!

The week started off well, with a visit from some other Mac kids - Anna Frye and Ella Bandes. I actually had never met Ella, but she and Anna are on the same program in France and had a week off, so they were in Copenhagen. Ella's friend from elementary school is Danish and lives in Copenhagen, and she showed us around. It was a really cozy time - we got hot cocoa at a really sweet cafe, ate at a shwarma place in Nørrebro, and then went to a bar/cafe in Free Town Christiania, where there were free crepes and ice cream, as well as interesting people-watching - awesome. I'm hoping I'll get to see Christiania in the daylight before too long - it's a really interesting place, and when I know a little more and visit again I'll probably do a whole post about it.

Tuesday was also really lovely, with the first beer-tasting session of the semester. One of my (non-academic) goals for the semester is to learn a lot about beer so that when I get back home I can impress everyone with my expertise. Or just know what to look for for beer-lucks. The beer-tasting was at Nørrebro Bryghus, a microbrewery in Copenhagen. The owner/master craftsman of the brewery is actually our guide for all three sessions, and is super knowledgeable. He also makes super great beer!

The rest of the week was a little calmer and a little less fun. I found out that I didn't get a Lilly fellowship, and apparently a lot of people want to work at the Mac library, so I might not even get to work there over the summer - I'll find out the first week in March. I'm hopeful about that though, since I worked there last summer and know what the summer routine is like.

But this weekend was really great - I went skiing in Sweden with DIS! There were only 17 of us on the trip, and most of them all knew each other, so it was a bit awkward at first, but I shared a cabin with three really sweet girls from Hamilton and got to know them and their friends from St. Lawrence University. It was hilarious to watch them all make connections - apparently everyone on the East Coast is connected, especially if they go to smaller colleges, so a lot of their parents and relatives knew each other in college!

The skiing was excellent and really fun. On Saturday I did downhill skiing, then I lost my lift ticket so I decided to switch to cross-country. It was quite an adventure trying to find the trail head, but I found it and skied for a little while. Then I got super lost coming back, walked down a really steep and difficult downhill slope and ended up taking a t-lift up to the top of the mountain after I struggled to explain the situation to two confused Swedish lift operators. They were really nice once they understood what I was trying to say, though. That night we had a really fun dinner and mild party in our cabin with the kids from the cabin next to us. Today I did cross-country all day. It had snowed so much I had to blaze a trail myself. I skied about 5 kilometers - it was a 2.5 k trail, but I did it twice, once to make tracks and then again just for fun! The trail was just gorgeous - the trees were so heavy with snow, it was unbelievable. Oh - and I (finally) got my camera back right before I left, so I was able to take this picture. I only took like one other picture this weekend, but I'm going to try to edit the Jylland post and add pictures from the trip there.

Some Things I've Noticed

My camera has been found! Unfortunately it hasn't been returned to me yet, but when it is, I'll be sure to let you know and edit the Jylland post to include pictures!

This week has been a pretty standard one. I'm starting to settle into a routine, which is nice. I've also been here for nearly a month now, and I've made some interesting observations about what is different and what is the same here. A lot of the differences are small things, but they're just different enough to notice: baby carriages, for example, or the toilets. Nearly every baby carriage I've seen looks roughly like this. Some of them are double-wide, to carry twins. There are also A LOT of babies here (Denmark has one of the highest fertility rates in Europe), and people generally just leave the carriages outside of stores while they're inside shopping, sometimes with the baby in it, which is really startling to see! Our Danish teacher says people usually lock them or have an alarm system, but she also says it's just a sign of the tremendous social trust people have here. I just can't imagine anyone leaving a stroller outside in the US, much less one with a baby in it! Although in the US people also seem to stay home with their babies, whereas here the babies are brought along everywhere.

Babies aside, there is a definite difference in the attitude of society here. Everyone, and every social system, seems more focused on the community or family. A full time job is 37 hours a week, and though some people work more than that, it seems pretty rare. Compare that to the US, where most people work at least 50 hours a week, generally more. Another difference is in the costumer-business relationship. Whereas in the US, most of our economic system is really focused on the consumer, here it's focused on the worker. I was speaking with one of the DIS interns the other night and she made the comment that costumer service is very lax here, because companies want their workers to be happy more than they want the costumers to be happy.

Obviously, the "welfare state" also indicates the importance of community. It's based on the idea that "the broadest shoulders carry the heaviest burden." Thus, my host parents, who are pretty well-off, pay 60% of their income towards taxes. Most folks pay around 50%. But minimum wage also is roughly $22, and even though they only get $11 after taxes, that's still around 50% more than most similar workers in the US get. Plus, those taxes provide for a lot of the basic needs of the society, such as health care and education, and I assume some basic housing and food for those who are unable to work or afford it otherwise. My host mom was baffled when I told her how much we pay to go to Mac, and I get a large amount of financial aid, too.

Although the system should provide for everyone, you still do see people begging sometimes (I mean, I've seen like one). My Danish teacher said that some people don't want to get money from the government, and others are mentally ill (which made me wonder how much the health care system covers mental health, though I'd heard they were quite good at that.) Another group that one sees begging, according to my teacher, are illegal immigrants, because it's basically impossible to get a job or assistance from the government (obviously).

The difference between the US and Denmark is really in the national history, though. If you think about it, Denmark and the US have followed kind of opposite trajectories up to this point. Denmark just keeps getting smaller and the US has gotten larger. We also don't have a past that includes Grundtvig, who started the Folk High School movement in the 1800s under the premise that education should be accessible to everyone, including farm workers. Nor do we have a past that includes losing a large part of our area due to humiliating losses which led to a much more peaceful foreign policy until the mid-20th century. The US also industrialized earlier than Denmark (most places did), so there's this image of Denmark being built on the shoulders of farmers, since it was largely rural until quite recently. While the Danish system would never work in the US, given the differences in history, as well as the fact that Denmark is much smaller and much more homogeneous (with an immigration process even more difficult to navigate than that of the US), I can't help but feel we can learn a lot from it. Like, socialized medicine isn't the devil, for example. And that everyone deserves a good education. But our national narrative is so wrapped up in "The American Dream" of pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps that there isn't room for the narrative of community members supporting each other. (Narrative is basically the theme of my semester, I've discovered. I think we talked about it in all of my classes except one this week!)

Jylland!

Edit: Photos have been added!

This past weekend I took a trip to Jylland (Western Denmark) with my core course. Every program spent Thursday through Saturday in various places around Jylland. It was a really enjoyable trip, though I apparently lost my camera somehow on the way back. I'm hoping it will be found in the tour bus so that I can share the awesome pictures that I took.

The trip started early on Thursday morning. We took a bus from Copenhagen to Jelling, which is where the "birth certificate of Denmark" is found: a runic stone inscribed by Harald Bluetooth which reads that he put this stone there to commemorate his mother and father, and that he united Denmark and made Denmark Christian. Harald Bluetooth also had a gigantic mound built to bury his father in, but then instead of the mound (which took slaves four years to build) he decided he wanted to bury his father in a church instead, so he made slaves build a church. Then another mound was built, seemingly for no purpose other than to make the church more central. The visit to the museum in Jelling was great: the tour guide was really excellent.

After Jelling, we went to Vejen, a small town with very little significance other than that it is the home of Hansen-Jacobsen, a wonderful Danish symbolist sculptor. There's a quite excellent museum there with Hansen-Jacobsen's work as well as the work of his friends and fellow symbolists. The sculptures are really quite stunning and awe-inspiring. They are generally not pleasant, per se, but are very well crafted and really make you think about what they mean.

Then we continued on to Sønderborg, where we stayed for the night. The evening included a concert of Beata Bilinska (a young Polish pianist) performing Chopin with the Sønderborg orchestra. It was really great music, and the concert hall itself was quite beautiful. Chopin is such a storyteller, I think, and there's this incredible air of longing to his music that Beata Bilinska captured really well. After the concert, our leaders took us out to a cafe/bar place, which was also really fun.

The next morning, after a great breakfast provided by the hostel, we went to the Dybbøl Banke, a museum which commemorates the war of 1864, in which most of Southern Jutland (Schleswig-Holstein) was taken by the Prussians (Otto von Bismark). This place is the site of the final battle. I think it's a really interesting historical moment, but the museum was a little bit dull and involved a lot of sitting in darkened rooms while either a huge, lit-up diorama was explained or a documentary was shown. The final stage was probably the best, in which letters from soldiers were read. I thought that did a really good job of portraying the challenge and humanity of wars and battles.

The entire region has a really interesting history. In Southern Jutland/Northern Germany, there's always been some overlapping of Danes and Germans, obviously, especially before Germany was united. And, due to this overlap, there's also been a lot of tension about the border. This is one of the issues we are really exploring with the course, since our course focuses on memory and identity in the Czech Republic, which has a much more violent and contentious history around the borders than there is in Denmark. In Denmark, the borders have been drawn and re-drawn a number of times (notably after 1864, when something like 1/3 of Denmark became German), but finally, after World War I, the border was put to a referendum, asking the people if they felt they were Danish or German. Now, the border is where there was the most definite split. There is still a German minority in Southern Jutland, and a Danish minority in Northern Germany. This is what we were exploring in depth on Friday.

Our next stop after the Dybbøl Banke was Frøslevlejren, a prison camp from World War II. When the Germans invaded Denmark in 1940, the government adopted a position of collaboration, which meant that they maintained sovereignty, at least in name. Because of this, they were able to persuade the Germans to allow them to maintain their own prison camp for political prisoners in Denmark, and insisted that all Danish prisoners be kept in this camp, which was considerably less terrible than the German camps. These prisoners, it should be noted, were mostly not Jewish. Most of the Danish Jews escaped to Sweden shortly after Denmark was invaded, and the ones who didn't or couldn't (mostly very old people) were sent to the concentration camps in Germany. What is also interesting is that after the war was over, the prison camp was used for people who worked closely with the Germans during the war. Of course, many of these people were from the German minority, who felt like they were German and it only made sense for them to collaborate closely with the Germans in Denmark. The person who gave us a lecture at the beginning of our tour of the prison camp was very interesting, and seemed to feel a need to be defensive about the camp, especially about its use after the war.

After the prison camp, we went across the border to Flensburg, a German harbor town that's maybe one or two kilometers from the Danish border. We had a walking tour and then had some time on our own to explore the town. I felt a little bit like our tour guide, while giving us interesting, amusing snippets of town history (especially about merchants and how the trade system used to work and does work now) didn't necessarily give us information pertinent to our course's aims, namely what it means to be a border town with a Danish minority, although she pointed out some signs that have both Danish and German on them. What was interesting was that it felt quite different, even just a kilometer or two from Denmark. Not least because I was utterly unable to communicate with most of the shopkeepers and because they use the Euro and not the krone. It was a lovely town, though, with lots of really neat old ships and buildings.

Next on the agenda was Ribe, the oldest town in Denmark (1300 years old!!) where we stayed for the night and spent most of Saturday. We had a "birthday dinner" for Ribe with the ECH group that is traveling to Germany. The birthday dinner was apparently traditional Danish celebratory food, and was super yummy. After the dinner, some new friends and I decided to stop by a pub for a drink and then head back to our hostel. The pub we went to was very small, and it was obvious that everyone there was a "regular." One of the other students, Scott, and I chatted with the bartender for a little while when we got our beer. She was really nice, and she was curious as to what a bunch of American students studying in Copenhagen were doing in Ribe on a Friday night. Americans apparently don't really come to Ribe, and when they do it's usually in the summertime. We also met an Englishman who has lived in Ribe for a while, and it was fun to hear what he thought about it. Shortly after we sat back down with the other three students we came in with, a stocky old man with white hair sat down right next to Kyle, who has been studying here for a year now. We were a little unsettled by the sudden appearance of a friendly, incredibly drunk Danish man, but the bartender explained that he was the owner of the pub. The old man kept giving us free drinks and trying to speak in four different languages at once: Danish, German, Spanish and English. Although he was very hard to follow, he was also very friendly, so we didn't mind, even though it was a rather strange cultural experience. After he gave us each two free drinks, we decided it might be time to head back. We had a lot of fun laughing about it on the way back to the hostel, and the other two girls and I stayed up late talking (mostly because Kelley doesn't drink alcohol and had gotten two free Cokes instead, and was thus quite caffeinated).

The next day we spent in Ribe, wandering around the town on our own in the morning, visiting the Viking museum, and then seeing the cathedral. The Viking museum was really interesting, and I had a lot of fun after we were given a small tour of the museum (our tour guide was a bit difficult to follow) talking with Kyle and our trip leaders about language and history and how future historians will have a much rougher time of it than we do now, considering that nearly all of our information is preserved electronically now, and when the technology becomes obsolete, it will be impossible to salvage. This is of a lot of interest to me as I intend to be a librarian or archivist, so the question was fun to consider. After the museum we had a group lunch, and then had a tour of the Ribe cathedral. The cathedral is incredibly old, dating from the 1100s (which is about 200 years after the Danes were Christianized, to put that into perspective). It's an interesting mixture of architectural styles, with its Romanesque base and Gothic and historicist additions. Ribe's cathedral has been being modified and changed and used for years, and that continues to this day. For example, there is artwork painted behind the altar and stained glass windows which were added in the 1980s. The cathedral is also HUGE. It dominates the landscape, and really shows something about what was important to the people who built it. We also got a chance to go up into one of the towers (that was quite the workout, by the way, climbing all these flights of stairs) and look around. You can see for miles from the tower, since Western Denmark is incredibly flat. It was really a neat place to visit, though Scott and I were discussing, once we got down from the tower, how strange it is that people now appreciate the cathedral in a very different way than it was initially used. It felt a little bit like we were profaning a space that was meant to be holy.

Overall, though, the trip was wonderful! I think one of the nicest things was getting to know some fellow students better, and having some great stories to share with them.

What a Weekend!

I really enjoyed this past weekend. It was just the right mix of excitement and relaxation (though maybe not quite enough homework-getting-done).

On Saturday, there was supposed to be a rugby practice, but the field was covered in snow and ice, so that was canceled. Tomorrow, I think I will actually be able to make it to a practice for the first time. I'm hoping I will anyway, since I've been anxious to play since finding out that there is a rugby club here.

I did get to spend some time outside, though. Erling is part of a running club, and he took me with him to a municipal park, where he and his friends ran around a skiing loop and I walked. It was really fun - there were a lot of skiers out and about, some of whom were very young, which was fun to see. The weather was beautiful! The woods reminded me quite a bit of Wildcat Mountain, except they're right in the middle of a suburb rather than a rural setting.

Saturday night, Bronwen, Owen and I met up in Copenhagen and went to The Dubliner, an Irish pub on Strøget, one of the main "walking streets." It was really fun to just sit around and chat and have a couple of beers. It's so funny that what they consider cheap beer is so much better than cheap American beer (also, not that cheap, at least not at The Dubliner). But we had a lot of fun talking about differences between Macalester and DIS and other such things. Owen and I also got hot dogs at one of the stands (they're open until 6 am!!) The hot dogs were basically like the foot long hot dogs that I sell at the Minnesota State Fair. In other words, the best, longest hot dog you'll ever have! The ketchup was weird, though, so I think in the future I'll avoid that.

On Sunday, I went on a trip to Esrum Abbey, which was incredibly fun! We took a tour of the Abbey, and then we made teams to participate in medieval games and challenges. My team, which consisted of three boys, another girl, and me, was called Bad Romance. Our battle cry, as you might guess, was "Rah-rah-ah-ah-ah, Roma, Ro-ma-ma, Ga-ga ooh-la-la, Want your Bad Romance!" Here's a picture of my team:

We did a lot of fun things, including swordfighting with an ex-Danish-Army-Recon-man who fought in Bosnia and in Afghanistan and is the master swordfighter in Denmark. Our swordfighting game was an imitation of the games that would be played at a medieval tournament. We "won" by hitting him in the head five times. I found the best strategy was to avoid thinking, let the rage take over, and aim for his head. It was quite fun. We also launched a trebuchet (using cabbage as ammunition), climbed a siege ladder, did some weightlifting, jousted, threw javelins, and shot a medieval-style bow and arrow.

Then, we retired to the abbey to taste the famous Abbey Ale, which is brewed using an interesting combination of spices (including lavender) that are grown in the abbey's garden. When monks actually lived there, water was of course unsafe to drink, so they brewed beer. It was quite good, and rather unusual tasting. I also, strangely enough, was sitting by two other folks with pumps: Sarah-Anne, who I met on the first day here but hadn't seen until Sunday, and Phillip. We talked about diabetes for a while, and marveled at how many people with pumps are doing DIS. Sarah-Anne has met 7 so far, which is more than 1% of DIS students.

Overall, though, it was a great weekend, at probably the most fun I've had so far, when it's all added up.