Copenhagen! As a Tourist!

So I've spent this second week of spring break doing some of the touristy things around Copenhagen that I haven't had a chance or time to do earlier this semester.

On Tuesday, I went to Malmö in Sweden. It's just a thirty-minute train ride from Copenhagen, and it's absolutely beautiful. It might just be the fact that it's spring, but Malmö felt beautifully green and clean. I mostly just wandered because I didn't want to spend any money (read: I was too lazy to either exchange Danish kroner to Swedish kroner or find an ATM), but I did go to Malmö Konsthallen (The Malmö Art Hall), which is a great free art museum. It's small, but it was great. There were two pieces that really spoke to me. One was called "100 Years" and was an entire room with a line of portraits arranged around the sides of the room. The portraits featured a different person in each one from every year from newborn to 100. It was really striking because of the variety of faces and apparent age - some folks in their 60s looked like some of the folks in their 40s, and some looked like some of those in their 80s. It was interesting to imagine the differences in their lives that may have made them seem so much older or younger than they actually were. Another piece I really liked (which I can't remember the name of) featured carousels of ordinary objects - one was a small model of the Statue of Liberty, another a crane. These carousels had mirrors for bases and the piece was in a darkened room with light shining on the objects, creating a really cool shadow effect. It really made me think about the way consumerism effects a person.

The next day, Wednesday, I went to see Rosenborg Slot and Statens Musuem for Kunst. Rosenborg Slot houses the Crown Jewels, among many other old, rich objects. It was a beautiful day, and I enjoyed a picnic lunch in the Royal gardens at the foot of Rosenborg Slot. It was a really interesting place to visit - it's one of the oldest museums in Denmark, as I understood it. It's been a museum since the mid-1800s. I thought what was particularly interesting was the reverence displayed for the beautiful objects. It really made me think about the values of modern society. Yes, these objects are beautiful, of course, but more importantly, they are expensive! The treasury, which is underground, felt almost temple-like: visitors were instructed to remain very quiet. Statens Museum for Kunst is huge and free! One of the best parts of Statens Museum for Kunst (The State's Museum of Art) - other than the fact that it was free - was the wide variety of art that it held. I don't think I saw near everything, but I started to get exhausted by the end of the day just from all the looking and thinking I'd been doing. And quite a bit of walking, too. The new picture up top is of Rosenborg Slot now that it's springtime! Yay!

Thursday brought a slightly different sort of entertainment. Rather than going to an art museum, I went to the Carlsberg Visitors' Center. It focused very much on the history of beer and specifically Carlsberg beer. Carlsberg is one of the largest - maybe the largest? - brewing companies in the world! I didn't actually realize that before I went. It was quite fun, and ended with two free beers (or rather, two beers were included in the price of admission) so I can't complain! They also have the largest collection of unopened beer bottles in the world (shown in the picture). A friend who visited there earlier thought it was a bit of a waste of perfectly good beer - but it's a fun collection to look at nonetheless.

Yesterday, I had planned on going to Christiania, but I think I'll save that visit for a time when I can go with some friends, since there isn't exactly a museum to go to or anything like that, and I thought I'd be a bit more comfortable wandering about with other folks. Instead, I just went into DIS and checked out The Kalevela. I'm excited to read it! I've just started and I'm really enjoying it. This semester has made me really enjoy and appreciate old sagas and stories derived from oral tales. I shouldn't be surprised, after all, three of my classes revolve around that concept! I took the book and sat in Rådhuspladsen (Town Hall Square) for a little while, reading and enjoying the people watching and the great view of the town hall and Palace Hotel. It was a bit chilly, though, so I left after reading the foreword and went to sit in a nice little coffee shop and drink hot chocolate. It was a fun, calm day.

Then, today, I went to the Louisiana Art Museum, which has a large collection of modern art. First of all, it was quite the adventure getting there! It is a long way away from my host family's house - I traveled through 6 zones in the transportation system (that is, just as many as it takes to get into Copenhagen)! Once I got there, though, it was lovely. They had two special exhibitions going on: the larger of the two was "Color in Art" and focused on (what else?) the way that art uses color. One of the very coolest parts of that exhibit was called "The Eternal Light of the Souls" or something like that. It was a small room which the viewer stepped into and then closed the door behind them. The room was entirely covered in reflective surfaces and hung with balls of light which changed colors. It was beautiful! Another favorite part of Louisiana was the other special exhibit - "Homo Sapiens Sapiens" This was an installation piece and was a movie which was projected onto the ceiling. There were cushions scattered around the floor to lay on, and you just lay there and looked up and the bizarre and beautiful video with dozens of other people around you. The video itself was really cool and focused on the body very closely, but also had elements of nature as a sort of backdrop - leaves and grass and fruit. It really plays with the way one sees the human body. Louisiana also has a great sculpture garden, and a view across the sound to Sweden! It was a really fun outing.

The Holiness of the Inhospitable

Wow, I'm sorry I haven't posted in such a long time. That last week in March was full of midterm papers and such, and then I've been in Iceland for the past week - which is what I really want to talk about. Hopefully I'll get a chance to write a more detailed account of my classes soon - they're really cool and I want to tell you all about them. But first things first: ICELAND!

I think that the past week has been one of the most amazing trips of my life - and I've been on a lot of great trips! It was a combination of many awesome things: we had a great, small group of students (there were 11 of us), we had amazing leaders and guides, there was a lot of excellent (and surprising) food, and everything we saw and experienced was positive; I can't think of a single low point of the trip, and it's hard to pick out any one highlight. We saw the volcano erupting (from a safe distance), saw the Northern Lights twice - once when we were at the volcano, went horseback riding on Icelandic horses through lava fields, saw many glorious mountains and waterfalls and hot springs and a geysir erupting three times, we went to the Blue Lagoon, we ate delicious food, and most of all we shivered and tried to comprehend how the Vikings could have possibly settled on Iceland. You can see the best pictures I took here.

The landscape of Iceland is so barren and unlike anything I've ever seen before. When we first arrived and were driving from Keflavik airport to our hotel in Reykajvik, I honestly thought we could have been on the moon or Mars! If I hadn't been able to see the clear blue sky and telephone poles and road we were on, I wouldn't have known where to look. I think that is one of the single most startling things about Iceland. The landscape is entirely uninviting - beautiful, but very uninviting - and the weather was really harsh while we were there. It was so hard to imagine the settlers arriving from Norway and carving a life out of these desolate rocks. Granted, the landscape was very different when they arrived: there were trees, for example, and the climate was warmer then. Human habitation has not been kind to Iceland.

Despite the strangeness of the landscape, though, everything felt holier in a way that is hard to describe. It's easy to see why many Icelanders believe in elves and otherworldly creatures. On Tuesday, when we did the "Golden Circle Tour" - the tour almost every tourist goes on of the geysirs and waterfalls and the Althing - we made a stop at a small church. The church is where the bishop's seat used to be (it later moved to Reykjavik). When we went into the church, the light from the stained glass windows was casting the simple white sanctuary in a brilliant red and yellow pattern of lights. I felt when we entered that this church, of all the churches I've visited this semester on tours, was the only one that felt properly holy and sacred. Even as we took our pictures and my travel companions posed, I felt like this was a sanctuary that was actually sanctified. I felt a little bizarre taking pictures, but I did anyway, trying to capture the way the light fell and hallowed the space. I think, even though Icelanders, like Danes and most Scandinavians, no longer practice Christianity to a great extent, the barrenness of the landscape combined with the simple, elegant beauty of the space made this small church feel worshipful in a way the cathedral in Ribe - with its tourist information desk and large, numerous tour groups - could not.

There's a lot more I could say about Iceland, but I think that was what I drew most from the trip: the delicacy and preciousness of life in an inhospitable, difficult setting feels much closer than in a place where it is easy to live.