Busy Week

Apologies for not updating the blog this week... we've been busy!

Leysia and I are taking a course called "Denmark Today" that has Danish language instruction in the morning and Danish cultural activities in the afternoon. In addition, our language teacher is assigning one to two hours of homework each day. Between that class and taking care of the kids once we get home, I've had almost no time to update the blog.

So, lets do some catching up.

First, the kids and Ilene have been having a fun week, seeing Aarhus, going to Tivoli (a local amusment park that just had its 100th birthday... indeed, Tivoli in Copenhagen just had its 150th birthday! Take that, Disneyland, a relative newcomer at the age of 50!), and exploring the paths through the parks near our house. Max and Lilja keep Ilene so busy during the day that she needs a break by the time Leysia and I get home, so the other day after dinner, Leysia and I took the kids on a walk through the forest, past the Queen's house, through a beautiful park, stopped at an impressive World War 1 monument, and then down to the beach to look for cool rocks. Yes, all of this is within walking distance of our apartment! Of course, we were stupid enough to forget our camera (typical) and spent a good part of the walk saying "We should have brought our camera!". We have promised ourselves to do the trek again and to take lots of pictures to share with you at a later date.

Second, our language class is good and we are learning a lot. Indeed, I can now say "Jeg verstår ikke Dansk" which means "I do not understand Danish." Leysia and I are in the same class with ten other students who are all in their early 20s and who (I suspect) think its kind of funny to be in a class with two people who are so old that they actually have real jobs and two kids. The students come into the class (we start at 9 AM) all tired from too much partying, and we come into class all tired from helping Ilene start her day with the kids which involves getting the kids up, getting them fed, getting them dressed, changing Lilja's diapers at least once and sometimes twice, and particpating in whatever games Max has dreamed up for that morning. (Never mind that we also have to get ourselves ready as well!) Still, the class is fun and we have a good teacher (also younger than us) who speaks Danish really really fast. :-)

Third, our afternoons. The cultural activities that occur in the afternoon for Denmark Today have so far been a bit of a mixed bag. We had a bus trip through Aarhus that was good in pointing out some of the more interesting aspects of the city, including that the Ring Road that we use to get back and forth from our apartment to the department and our language classes was actually conceived and first built by the Vikings around the city center. The Vikings felt (I'm paraphrasing here) that transportation should occur outside of the city, allowing the rest of the city to be traversed on foot. We had an excellent lecture on Danish politics by a 31 year old man, who was first elected to the Danish parliament when he was 27. The Danish parliament has 179 members from 7 different political parties. 37% of the members of parliament are women and 18% of the members are under the age of 35. The seven different parties in order from left wing to right wing are: the Unity List, the Socialist Peoples Party, the Social Democrats, the Radical Liberals (neither liberal or radical according to the speaker), the Conservative Peoples Party (just right of middle), the Liberals (more conservative than the Conservative Peoples Party), and finally the Danish Peoples Party. I was reminded during his speech that the US has got its political colors mixed up with respect to the rest of the world, where the color red is associated with left wing / liberal views and the color blue is associated with right wing / conservative views. Ah well, we call soccer by a different (wrong?) name as well! :-)

My use of the phrase "mixed bag" above comes from the most recent activity that we attended which was supposed to be a lecture about the influence that H.C. Andersen and his fairy tales have had on Danish culture. Unfortunately, the scheduled speaker could not make it due to illness and so they had to get a last minute replacement. The man who spoke instead presented a lecture on H.C. Andersen's use of the Arabesque, a lecture he admitted he had last given to a conference of his peers (i.e. people up on Danish literary criticism)! Leysia made a brave attempt to try and understand what he was talking about; I took a nap. :-) He was so deep into his work that he had no clue that he was incomprehensible to his audience (foreign exchange students and two visiting professors learning Danish for the first time). Indeed Petra, a woman in our class from Croatia, said to Leysia afterwards "I don't even know what a fairy tale is!" So, that was too bad. Future activities include a visit to the ARoS art museum (which we will probably skip since we've already been), a visit to the university library and the Aarhus town hall, and a lecture on Greenland (a country with two members in the Danish parliament).

Fourth, Leysia and I have finally been able to put some appearances into our new department. This is good, as most Danes are finally returning to work from their vacations in July, and so things are starting to pick up here. Indeed (I like that word) Leysia is attending two meetings today related to the work that she's going to be doing here for the next year and I'm finishing off a few last things before Niels Olof, Kaj Grønbæk, and I figure out what WE are going to be doing for the next year! :-)

I've got a few more things to discuss, but I'll put them in their own separate entries.

Feel free to call us, write us, or send us care packages filled with cookies! (You get to choose!) We would love to hear from you!

Ken