Danish Food (for Amanda!)

This blog entry is for Amanda, who asked me to pay good attention to what Danes eat. Here’s what I’ve learned and experienced—all in the name of cultural exploration, of course.

Danish breakfast is often delicious, hot rolls served with lots of different toppings or accompaniments to choose from: cheese, sliced meats or sausages, sliced cucumbers, sliced tomatoes, butter (Danish butter is the best), very thin pieces of chocolate that melt into the hot bread, jams and marmalades. The pic below is the breakfast that we had Sunday morning.

Hotdogs are one of the cheapest foods you can get if you’re not eating at home. Danes eat at home most of the time b/c eating out is crazy, crazy expensive here. I had a couple of hotdogs from a little stand that was along the pedestrian street that is one of the main shopping areas of the city. Boy, those were good hotdogs! They were long, skinny dogs that hung off the bun on both ends and topped with sweet, hot mustard; ketchup; French-fried onions (like what tops a green bean casserole); and slices of sweet pickle. YUM.

Something else I’ve had that’s Danish is fiskafrikadeller. It’s a fish patty made with ground fish (a white fish of some kind, like cod?), eggs, and I don’t know what else. It looks like a salmon patty, but is more eggy in texture.

Coffee is made (and served) in a French press, not a drip pot or espresso machine like is more common in the States. Prepackaged sandwiches, like you’d see in a vending machine in the U.S., seem to be for sale in lots of places like on the train or in convenience stores. It seems to me that they’re more widely available here than I’ve seen in the U.S. Beer and wine are available in places you wouldn’t necessarily find in the U.S. either, like the snack cart on the train.

Those are all my observations so far, but we're going out to brunch tomorrow before I board the train to Copenhagen, so maybe I'll have further "research" on this topic to post in a day or so.

Aarhus Museums

In addition to spending time on campus, I’ve gotten to go to a couple of museums and see a bit of the city. It’s a really pretty city with lovely, old-looking brick buildings with white-framed windows, shops on the ground floors and apartments above. The harbor is very industrial-looking, though not smoggy or stinky. In most places the sidewalks have bike paths on the half nearest the street, and you have to be quite careful stepping off the bus b/c you step directly onto the bike path, where bikers are whizzing by with little regard for pedestrians. You’re supposed to look to the right as you step off the bus so you can see if a bike is coming and step quickly to the pedestrian half of the sidewalk.

On Tuesday, I went to an open air museum called Den Gamle By (with “den” pronounced more similarly to “dun”; “gamle” is GAHM-le; and “by” rhymes with the French “le”). It is a history museum with old buildings that have been moved from various areas of Denmark and restored in a little town that reflects life in the 1700s and 1800s. There is a cobbler shop with explanations of how they made shoes, along with actual tools and shoes from the period; homes decorated in the “latest style”—Victorian or Baroque--; bicycle repair shop from when bikes were the new thing; a milliner shop set up in a private home as was common in Denmark then; a tobacconist shop with a drying barn out back. In some areas, there are people in costume, carrying out their “daily lives” in costume who will ignore you and move around in the kitchen, cooking and washing dishes like you’re not right there watching them, or doing laundry in tubs outside or caring for the horses in the barn. It is SO COOL.
Today I went to the Women’s Museum, one of the few museums in the world dedicated to the lives of women through history. It was fascinating. One floor had an exhibit about the lives of boys and girls in Denmark, with clothing and daily hygiene items and school supplies and household items that boys and girls used at various historical periods.

There were also a couple of rooms meant to encourage imagination; these were really interesting. In one, everything was white: walls, floor, ceiling, big floor pillows. There were lights hidden behind the frosted transparent ceiling that would slowly, subtly change color so that the whole room seemed subtly blue and then…green…then yellow…then red. Children are meant to lie on the pillows on the floor and imagine things in this room that is a creative blank slate.

In another room, the floor looks like a blue sky with clouds, and there are cloud-shaped white floor pillows. The ceiling looks like a floor and has a bed and dresser. There are stuffed animals tied with invisible fishing line, upside down, from floor to ceiling on one side of the room. Children are meant to lie on a “cloud” in the “sky,” looking up at the furniture and toys, and question the ways things are and experience them backwards. It’s kind of cool and certainly reflects what seems to be a Danish value of questioning things and trying to assert your own mindset and creativity.

The floor above that had the women’s exhibit, which was also very interesting. It had artifacts, clothing, and history that painted a picture of women’s lives, place in society, and contributions from prehistory to the present. On the top floor of the building was a temporary exhibit of art, mostly paintings, by famous Danish women artists and a permanent exhibit of the town hall set up as it was when the first woman was elected to the city council. I really wished that I either spoke Danish or that everything was available in English because the audio portions of all the exhibits were unintelligible to me though the plaques, labels, and booklets were available in English.

How the lecture went (hooray!)

Well, I’ve had a wonderful time in Aarhus, and it’s about time to head home. Tomorrow, Friday, I take the train to Copenhagen and fly back to Seattle on Saturday. I’ve got some time to kill before the activities class today, so I’ll write a few blog entries to get posted in retrospect about what I’ve done this week.

The main reason I came was to give a lecture to a class in the business school on Monday, and—thank goodness!—that went great. I forget how much I like teaching when I’m not regularly in a classroom… It was a good-sized lecture hall, and the class is 90 students, though not every student was in attendance. Still, it was a different sort of setting than I’m used to. I had to use a mic to be heard. Wild. Anyway, my slides looked fine, and the students seemed attentive. In fact, I could see most of their faces pretty well, and they were interactive enough that I could pause and look at a student and ask if she had a question when she looked puzzled, and she’d speak up and ask for clarification. That was great. I hate presenting in a vacuum. During the lecture, there were a few times that I asked the students to identify examples of the concepts I’d been discussing, and people spoke up readily. I really appreciated that. Afterwards, Connie (the prof who invited me here) said she had “nothing but effusive praise” for the lecture, and her teaching partner said that it was exactly what the students had needed to hear, so I was thrilled.

After class, a few of the girls who sat right down front stayed to talk about how to apply some of the lecture concepts in their class project, and the teaching partner and I chatted with them for quite a while. It was pretty fun to brainstorm and discuss things with students who are really interested. One of the girls asked me why I’d come to Aarhus, and I told her that I’d like to get a job at the university here when I graduate, and she said, “Oh, great! Then if we get our Master’s degree, you could be our teacher!” Of course that made me feel like a million bucks.

Day 1 in Denmark

Well, I’ve safely arrived in Denmark and had a good full-night’s sleep. It was great. I arrived in Copenhagen yesterday morning and had very detailed notes from Connie, the professor who invited me here, about the train system. Thanks to her, I bought a ticket for the right train, the one that would take me to Aarhus without requiring me to navigate a change of trains at the big station two stops down (thank goodness!). I was feeling fine but bleary, since I couldn’t really sleep on the plane. Tony and I had gotten up at 3 a.m. to go to the airport, and then I had a 4-hour, 20-minute flight to Atlanta, 5-hour layover, and 8-hour 30-minute flight to Copenhagen—all with no sleep.

I hopped the train and had a really beautiful 3-and-a-half hour ride to Aarhus. The trains are really comfortable, with cushy seats, overhead racks for big bags, and tables in front of you. I just stared out the big train windows for most of the ride. The Danish countryside is lovely, with lots of fields (though the only crop I recognized was corn), rolling hills, horses, isolated farm houses, and little towns with old-fashioned looking buildings. Most of the buildings I saw, including the farmhouses, had fairly steeply pitched roofs with red tile, grey tile, or wavy corrugated metal. One of the prettiest sites I saw was a field sloping up to a big hill with a building and a small brick lighthouse. I thought it was beautiful but weird in the middle of a field til I saw that it was the edge of a field. On the other side of that hill with the lighthouse was water as far as the eye could see. It was so pretty.

Once I got to Aarhus, Connie met me at the station, and we rode the bus to her house outside of the city proper. The bus system here is really great even compared to Seattle. I asked her if she ever had trouble getting out here, and she said that if it’s past 6 p.m., her choices of bus routes shrink, and she could be waiting as long as 20 minutes for the next bus. I thought, “wow, the bus that connects me to school only runs twice an hour until 6:45 when it stops altogether!” She and her husband have a lovely small house in a little collection of homes that are close together and connected by sidewalks instead of on a big street. Very few people can afford cars here, so it’s assumed that most people will get home on foot once they get to the housing group. Their house has has three bedrooms and one bath and is quite a bit bigger than our apartment in Seattle though would be considered very small for a three-bed house in the U.S. It’s lovely and very efficiently laid out with lots of cabinets and bins, wood floors and a really pretty wooden ceiling.

Once we got to the house, Connie showed me around and then we had a cup of tea with a slice of German plum cake that a friend of theirs from Germany had made for them the night before. It was really delicious. Her husband joined us, and we all chatted for a while, and then he suggested a walk. It was just the thing to keep me awake til dinner. The weather was gorgeous; they said Denmark was showing off for me because it’s not usually so warm and sunny, especially at the end of September. But it was all blue skies, bright sun, and short-sleeves weather when we took our long walk around the area. There is a walking trail and biking trail that leads through a little woods, some rolling fields with horses, some garden homes that people build themselves and live in only from April-October (by law, these homes can belong only to apartment dwellers from the city, which keeps costs down and provides a nice place to escape to in the country for city apartment dwellers), and a lake with ducks. It was a wonderful long walk, and the area where they live is really nice.

Connie and her husband told me a lot about living in Denmark, maneuvering the housing/rental market, what it’s like to teach here, etc. It was great to hear so much and get a better feel for life in Denmark. There are many wonderful things about this area. After our walk, we had dinner, and then I was done for. I called Tony, took a shower, and went to bed. I got just a few verses into Luke and put the Book away. I was out like a light.

So that’s day 1! I’ll let you know how the rest of the time goes and will take some pictures. I was stupid-tired yesterday but could have kicked myself for not taking the camera on the walk around the neighborhood! They said we could walk again, though, so it should be fine. More from me later!