Day 35 - February 4

It was my first day of class, though I was almost late because before I had gone shopping for my American Dinner and the line in the supermarket was surprisingly long for being Thursday lunchtime. However, I made it on time (well, not quite, but the room didn’t even open until 10 minutes after the designated time). The lecture was for my Danish Culture Course, this particular lecture on the origins of Denmark, which I learned meant 13,000 years of Danish history in the course of 2 hours. It was really interesting and I wish they offered just a plain “Danish history” course or even a Danish archaeology course – usually my focus in archaeology extends only to periods of writing and even more specifically, after the introduction of Christianity, but here I find their prehistory fascinating. They have a lot of preservation because of the bogs and a lot of interesting customs (maybe a reason I like it more, too, is that it is not ever Roman-based archaeology).

The second half was a little scattered. The professor went on several tangents, but I really liked him. The Danish Culture Course works a lot like the Core Curriculum back at BU, where each lecture is given by someone else, though here I think there’s more recurring lecturers, including this man who will also be lecturing at my Viking lecture. He had a lot of character, and Theresa described him as someone she thought should be on the history channel. Also, the Danish accent, especially the very refined academic accent, sounds almost like deeper English accents. It makes sense due to the proximity and if they were taught English it would be the original English, not American English, but it’s curious, because every once in a while, if you hear someone talking but not for very long, you might think he or she is English before realizing he/she is, in fact, Danish.