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.