Danes Design.

So my plan for the time being has been: go to museums while it's too cold to enjoy walking around outside. One of the first that I went to was the Dank Design Center with my friend Zacaria. We both had a field study in the morning, so we met up for some lunch and then went to the museum. I thought of Rachel the whole time--everything in there was so, well, cool! And well-designed (duh).

The first part that we went to was historical: Danish design over the course of this century. They basically had a bunch of objects on display, some of which looked really banal but others were pretty cool, like this storage unit. You can rearrange the cylinders in any way you want.

Another exhibit was design in a bunch of different contexts--design for business image, for cities, for popular products, for the home, and even for prisons! They talked about the process behind producing the design in each situation, which was really interesting. The museum was a lot about process. 

Cool lamps--really simple

This chair concept was pretty awesome. It was a design for a prison chair, where inmates couldn't hide underneath them and couldn't hurt other people by throwing or breaking them. It's make from recycled material.

 The rest of the museum focused on the question of What is good design?

Here are some ideas that I thought were pretty cool:

A fold-able bike. Copenhagen really is a biking city--somewhere between 30% and 40% of the workforce bike to work. Makes me think of Grandma and Grandpa Nicklaus :) Hope the weather gets warm enough to bike soon!

This chair is just asking to be sat in. It's a really comfy seat PLUS a rocking chair. What WHAT?!

This prize-winning design is known as the Christiania bike. It started in Christiania, which is a little squatter/hippy section of town. I haven't been--the name "Pusher Street" is a little intimidating, it's a big drug place--but supposedly this design came out of there. Makes biking with groceries and such a lot easier.

The Cloud is a pretty cool wall/ceiling decoration, that (I think) you can rearrange the pieces of.

This lamp was really cool--it uses the sun's energy and focuses it to give off light.

So that's my visit to the Dansk Design Center! It was really cool, especially since design is a big thing here. All's well here in Denmark, except for the fact that February is in fact colder than January. Oh well, almost March now--and Istanbul next weekend! I'm debating on whether I need to bring my parka or not ...

Study Tour: Skanderborg and Aarhus

I know this is a little late, but I wanted to post stuff about my second day on our study tour. We started the day with a visit to a school called Sondervangskolen, which is made up of about 80-90% "ethnic minority" children, which means kids who aren't ethnically Danish. A lot of the families come from Turkey, Palestine and Somalia. We had a group of seventh graders give us tours of the school. I thought of Caroline at first, because the girl who showed us around was a lot like her, and then of Mom, because we talked with one of the teachers a lot in the library. After the morning at the school, we visited a bazar in the area of Skanderborg, where we had delicious baklava and hummus. We went to visit an area of Denmark known as "dish city," because the large immigrant population there uses satellite dishes to get news and other tv channels from their home countries. A local organization called Youth-4-Youth showed us around and told us about their work mentoring to youth in the area. We then drove to our hostel in Aarhus (a tiny room that I shared with 5 other girls) and took us out to dinner at a Greek restaurant called Cucos. I think they were trying to get us ready for Istanbul through regional cuisine.


The next day we had a lot more free time in Aarhus, and I walked the streets with a few other girls and stopped for a chai along the way. I thought I had left my camera in my luggage, but I found it in my coat pocket after we had passed the most beautiful streets! Oh well, here are some last-minute pictures I snapped:

We ended up at the Aros museum (pictured above), a really cool art museum. Here are some pictures:

This sculpture is from a photo of Abu Ghraib, This artist uses a classical style (the bodies look like Greek and Roman sculptures) but his pieces have some kind of thought-provoking aspect.

These photographers, Trine Søndergaard and Nicolai Howalt, takes multiple photos and then sort-f super-imposes them on each other. The people and animals in this picture are all from different pictures, which I think is pretty cool.

The major exhibit was the works of Jorn, whose works seems similar to that of Jackson Pollock. I really liked all the colors in his paintings, and the museum did a good job of displaying them on a plain white wall.

The title of this picture is: "Dead Drunk Danes." Interesting. The guy has a real Danish sense of humor.

 As you can see a little from the picture above, the museum was arranged around a huge spiral staircase that led you to all 6 floors.

One of the works for which the museum is famous is the large Boy Sculpture. Pretty cool--the artist got the folds in his shorts and everything.

View of Aarhus from the museum

Musings

Danish children are adorable. They wear insulated full-body suits in the winter that look so cozy! And they get pampered in huge "prams" with all kinds of frills. There's a baby store near where I live (it's about the size of a large bike shop), and the entire window (about 2 and a half houses long) is filled with prams. The other half of the store looks like car seats/carriers. These kids have it all! That was one of the first things my friends and I noticed--Danish babies and small children are adorable, almost simply because of their accessories, and the fact that they use public transportation by themselves. It's not uncommon to see groups of smaller children on my commute home Tuesday and Friday afternoons.

Who doesn't love a little bundle of joy? The winter suits remind me of Randy, Ralphie's brother in a Christmas story, except I haven't seen any children fall and not get up because of these suits. They look pretty comfortable. Still, I laugh and think of that movie every time I see one.

But the weird thing about Danish kids is that parents will leave the pram outside a shop or something ... WITH THE BABY STILL IN IT. I don't understand it, people say it's a Danish trust thing and that they are just more trusting of the general public. Something with the welfare state--Danes are very trusting people. People don't usually lock their bikes up outside of buildings and such. Don't worry, I am being careful and locking all my doors and stuff, I'm not getting lulled into the Danish sense of security, but I find it really interesting that even bikes that are locked still get stolen on my campus, whereas it doesn't seem to be a problem here...

It might be me just getting my hopes up, but I think it's starting to get warmer here! The ice on the driveway of the school has melted! Spring is approaching (hopefully)! I didn't even need to wear gloves today. I'm ready for some warmer weather. Reading my friend Catherine's blog about Spain is making me jealous--60 and sunny! And my friend Zach was complaining about the 'tough' Mediterranean winter in Tel Aviv. No, sir. It's the real deal up here in the North country.

On another note, public transportation is not all it's cracked up to be. After about a 30 minute delay this morning, I miss getting around in my (or my dad's) little black Sebring. I miss a lot of other small things, but I have some photos with me and some packages to look forward to that help. Alex sent me a nice little package the other week, with some photos of friends and some chocolate, so I feel like I have a little bit of home with me. And I'm looking forward to my next package, which is rumored to contain a certain chocolate-covered treat. Can't wait!

Hope you all are doing well! Working on getting some video uploaded to the blog, I think I've figured it out! Now I just have to work on my steady hands while shooting ...

Short Study Tour to Western Denmark: Day 1

Got back from my short study tour to Western Denmark yesterday evening! It was really interesting. My program is focusing on Migration and Identity, and this study tour focused on how Denmark is handling the influx of Muslim immigrants.

Our first stop was the Vollsmose Cultural Center, located on the island of Funen (the island between Zealand, where Copenhagen is, and the Jutland, the part of Denmark connected with continental Europe). Our guide, Peter, talked with us about what they do at the Cultural center. A lot of what they do is work with ethnic youth in the area. They help with studies and homework, they assist in finding people jobs (the people there were of mixed opinion if it was harder to get a job if you weren't an ethnic Dane), and they work with youth interested in music and the arts. They have various theater and music groups, and we got to meet with a sort-of "rap coach," who works with youth in the studio to create music. He played some really good rap for us--created by two 13 year-olds! It's better than the stuff on the radio! Kids rap in Danish, English, Arabic...whatever language they want. Some of the biggest immigrant populations are Turkish, Palestinian, and Somalian.

After the cultural center we visited the nearby Brandts Musem, which had the photo exhibit "A Kick Out of Africa" with kids all over Africa playing soccer. Our next event was a lecture by a Professor Necef from Syddansk (South Danish) University, and he talked about racism in Denmark. It was really interesting to hear another point of view, really different from what we're learning in class. Our hostel that we stayed in that evening was beautiful! We stayed in cabins on a lake in a town called Skanderborg. We had a bonfire in the evening and everything!

Going on a Dig

One of the cool things about Copenhagen is that history is always so close. It's in the buildings still standing from the 1600s despite fire and bombardment, in the way the city has changed throughout the years, and in the way Copenhagen looks at their future. As part of an excavation for a new metro station, a team found what they think may have been the original stone wall of the village that the town, and now city, of Copenhagen grew from!

They also found a Viking handle, which may mean that the town was older than they thought and dates back to the Viking age! The current story now is that Bishop Absalon "founded" the town, but in reality he just fortified an already extant town. We learned about this in my class Copenhagen: History and Contemporary Urban Issues, which is all about how the city has changed through the centuries and how it got to be the way it is. The teacher is really great, and he says we should be able to "read" any European medieval city through what we learn in this class. Right now he has us doing an exercise where we go around to 15 different historical areas in the city and answer questions and make observations on these sights. It's pretty cool, and he provides us with an "autoguide" so we know what we're looking at, but it's so COLD to be walking around! The wind makes it especially uncomfortable. I've decided that I will not complain at all this summer when it gets hot; I will just think back to my cold afternoons wandering around the medieval part of Copenhagen.

These assignments have been keeping me busy--that and enjoying time at the hojeskole! Foosball is a favorite evening activity :) And everyone always rushes dessert, which comes out around 9 pm.

The train has been great, it's good to get some work done! Once or twice they've made important-sounding announcements in Danish, in which my friends and I just smile to each other and ask someone around us who speaks English what the message is. It's very clean and comfy--good thing, because I spend a lot of time on it!

That's all for now, I miss all of you and hope all is well!