Århus

Thursday evening

We were picked up at the train station by a friend of my mom’s, Gitte. She was SO nice as to let us abuse her hospitality and spend two nights at her place. They’re a really sweet family, and hilarious, as well.


The family dog was also really sweet, if a little insane.


Cozy!

In the evening, the older son Anders showed us the Danish film Adam’s Apples (Adams Aebler). It was so bizarre, but also very good. Danish films are certainly unlike the ones I’m used to.

Friday

I thought my cold, which I had contracted the day before our adventure, was finally going away. I woke up with less of a sore throat and I’d actually been able to breathe half the night. However, twenty minutes in the cold outside, and my throat was on fire, my head was congested, and I felt terrible.

Still, the day wasn’t all bad. Gitte left out an amazing breakfast – simple, just bread and cheese, but the bread was oh so amazing, and the cheese, too. I tried to get similar bread when I got home, but the bread I bought just tasted plain :( And Aarhus is, like every town so far, adorable.









We walked through Den Gamle By, the Old Town. It’s an area of reconstructed buildings, some from Århus, but also many from other parts of the country that were dismantled and rebuilt there. It’s really neat, especially when you think that you’re walking through a building that was built five hundred years ago. In the spring and summer, it’s more lively, with people dressed up in old clothes and making crafts, but we did manage to find one man making wooden barrels in the old fashioned way.




As I took this photo I had an overwhelming sense of deja vu, and a flashback to ten years before when I had taken a similar photo, but with a film camera.









Elyse and Theresa went out with Anders and his friends that night, but by that point, I was feeling pretty terrible, so I ended up just going to sleep early and taking the Nyquil that Theresa so luckily had with her. I did get a phone call in the middle of the night from the girls who had lost Anders and needed the address to get home, but I had told them they could call for whatever reason.

Saturday

I hate waking people up. Nobody ever wants to wake up, and people usually make a huge fuss of it. It’s not really fun being the designated waker, but I guess someone has to do it.

I think Elyse and Theresa didn’t mind waking up so much when we discovered Gitte had laid out a full-fledged Saturday breakfast, complete with boiled eggs, rugbrød, other bread, cheese, juice, coffee, tea, and pastries.

Gitte decided she wanted to come to the museums with us, so she first drove us to Moesgård, a prehistoric archaeology museum.



Interesting in its own right, but the crowning glory and my real motivation for wanting to go was that it has the Grauballe Man, according to the museum, the best preserved of the bog bodies. Also, it seems there is a poem written about the Grauballe Man, which seems odd.





The area around is a place worth visiting as well.





We then switched from prehistoric to contemporary when we went to ARoS, the art museum in Århus. The modern art section was closed, but besides the relatively small exhibit of “Golden Age” up to 1920s art, they had a whole floor dedicated to contemporary art. The art, which I have a hard time calling that, was full of weird, graphic, and rather uncomfortable images. Maybe it was supposed to make you think, but it just gave me kind of a sick feeling. There was a video that had combined clips from black and white movies of men hitting women, there were images of talking heads with grotesque features, one with purple skin, one with green, talking with really annoying voices, there was paintings of severed arms…I don’t exactly feel more cultured, but it was an interesting experience. There were, however, some interesting things. I loved the “Golden Age” art, and there were some special exhibits that were strange but kind of fun. And a really cool room of mirrors.





Tired and museum-ed out, we went home and had cocoa. Gitte made it herself on the stove, so impressive! It was sad to say goodbye. It felt like we’d been there longer than two days. Thank you, Mom, for having been in Denmark to make my stay so much more homey.