Everything is an opportunity for language-learning. It's Wednesday morning, and I'm putting the laundry in, happy to have figured out that "hvidvask" means "white wash" before bleaching all of our clothes.
There's a hard rapping at the door, which is next to the laundry room. Rowan walks past the door and then past me. "There's a man at the door, Dad." Thanks, Rowan.
There is indeed. A uniformed man who barks something at me which - surprise! - I don't understand. "Sorry, I don't speak Danish." I am compelled to repeatedly apologize about this, what with having come to their country without a lick of Danish language to my name. This is not entirely true, but the opportunities to use "The child is eating an apple," and "He is the man," seem to be few and far between. Thankfully, "Hej!" in Danish is the same as "Hi!" in English, so if we keep our mouths shut after that, we blend right in.
So my man immediately switches to English, which is what the Danes do. All of them speak English, or at least a whole lot of them. As Martin, our neighbor, tells me, "We're a country of five million people. We don't really believe anyone is going to learn Danish."
"I am the chimney sweep," says my uniformed guest. Ok, I think. That sounds about right. I explain that I am not the home owner here, launching into an explanation of the whole home exchange concept, none of which interests my man here. He just wants to sweep the chimney. It's an annual arrangement, evidently, and the whole thing takes fewer than 10 minutes before the chimney sweep hands me the bill for the home owner and bids me good day.
And it is a good day, if you like cold. And rain. I gave Berit a hard time for buying a winter coat at the flea market in Copenhagen, but guess who's laughing now. Go ahead. Guess.
It's clearly an indoor day, so we make for Aarhus - the Copenhagen of West Denmark. It's the big city in these parts, a college town with lots to offer including the ARoS museum which is the largest modern art museum in Northern Europe. Or at least Scandanavia. Something like that.
And it's excellent. The building itself is very interesting, with its Guggenheim stairs and all. I read that the exhibits are laid out in thematic homage to Dante's Divine Comedy. You enter in the middle and either ascend to Heaven or descend to Hell.
In Heaven, you find ARoS's iconic "My Rainbow Panorama," a 360 degree hallway made entirely of colored glass that sits atop the museum and affords a rainbow panorama of Aarhus as you walk around the ring and through all the colors of the rainbow.
The lower floors are Hell. The art there is disturbing in a variety of ways that I am unable to actually call up in my memory, having walked rather quickly through the area. I'm not a fan of disturbing artowrk, and as I speed walk past those who are, I feel the stares of more highly-developed art patrons as they look at me askance, thinking that I don't get it. And they're right. I don't.
A favorite exhibit of ours is an installation in which you enter a large room so full of pink smoke that you cannot see 10 feet in front of your face. The five of us spent some time in there. It would be a great place for a game of hide and seek. Actually, Griffin wanted me to hide his backpack so that he could try to find it. I wouldn't do that, but hid my hat instead. Even that was picked up and placed on the bench outside the room before he could find it.
We headed to the outdoor pedestrian mall after the museum, where Griffin and I got 50 kroner schwarma and a Coke. This schwarma was much better than at the place we found in Copenhagen. In fact, we may partake in this schwarma whence again in Aarhus. Pam and the girls had some foccaccia sandwiches at a cafe next door.
We split up for a bit on the mall, with the girls doing some shopping (Berit bought some shoes and Rowan, some sneakers) and Griffin and I wandering about with our hands in our pockets. I whistled Beatles songs while he beat-boxed and for a moment we considered putting our hat out. The girls found us at a foosball table outside one of the shops, and we all played a few games.
Thursday - Legoland, Billund
Billlund, the home of LEGO, is about a half hour from here. It's where they actually make LEGO, the name of which comes from "leg godt," meaning "play well." There are several Legoland locations around the world, but my thinking was, if ever you were going to go to Legoland, this would be the place to do it.
As it turns out, the theme park itself was small and moderately interesting. I'm guessing now that theme parks, in general, are perhaps what we do really well in America. Not in Denmark (Here it's rye bread. See previous.). We stood in lines with throngs of Danish school children, and we rode a few rides. The best part of the whole place was Miniland, an area devoted to miniature versions of places around the world. It was unfortunate that we found this last, since I would have probably just sat in Miniland the whole day, watching the miniature LEGO boats, buses and trains, move about these miniature worlds. What I really liked were the way the people were set into these scenes with each other, and I enjoyed taking some photos like these.
In the evening, Pam and I consulted Martin and Pia about biking to the beach. The kids wanted to stay home and chill, so the two of us took off together on a downhill route that got us to the Vejle Fjord / East coast of Jutland in about half an hour. It was a beautiful ride through farm land and past ridiculously cute coastal houses some with sheep.
And despite the temperatures, when we finally found ourselves alone on a wild, sandy, shell-strewn beach, there was no stopping me from submerging myself in these Scandanavian waters.
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