Jacobsen's Ghost

Carl Jacobsen founded the world famous Carlsberg Brewery over 9000 years ago. I use "world famous" with a touch of irony because I had never heard of it before I came to Denmark and saw signs everywhere I looked presumptuously declaring Carlsberg to be "Probably the best beer in the world." The beer's OK, a couple grades above Keystone or Miller Lite. But I'm digressing.

You see, the Jacobsen became a big fucking deal in Denmark after starting his company and started what amounts to the Danish take on the Rockefellers. The Carlsberg foundation loans Denmark's national museum half of its permanent collection and owns billions more in assets. Many of this assets are pretty swell and accessible to the public. One of these is the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek (New Carlsberg Sculpture Collection).

Honestly, I didn't check out the museum because I get an erection at the thought of naked marble statues of Aphrodite. Rather, the museum has free admission every Sunday and I haven't done anything outside the house besides drinking for maybe a week now. It felt great finally having some purpose after laying in bed until 12 every day only to spend the rest of my time looking on the internet for new movies to watch. To be fair, it's been raining a lot lately so I haven't had much reason to go out.

I biked to the Glyptotek and got there an hour and a half before closing, which gave me more than enough time to go through the arc of fascination and boredom I expected from 10,000 old painting and sculptures. The whole place reminded me of the main visitor center in Jurassic Park. The ceilings were high, maybe 40 ft., and bordered with skylights that made the museum bright even when the sky was completely shrouded in gray.

The whole museum was actually spectacular. It was arranged like an art collection, but an art collection too big to fit in the building. Many statues found themselves in the main entrance way or in random inaccessible areas that were simply the only places left to put them. I could only appreciate a few of them because Greeks, Romans, and all Europeans after them took pride in their ability to copy their predecessors and create a body of work as diverse as a Taco Bell menu.

What I really liked about the museum was how much information was on the walls and under the works. Usually all I see is the artist, the medium, and the title, usually written in Danish. But here there were little blurbs about the historical place of many of the works. I felt like a scholar after going through only a couple of the rooms.

Replica noses that got taken off after collectors
thought they made sculptures less authentic

Tomorrow I'm going to Amsterdam so hopefully I'll have more interesting things to say about that than a marble museum.

Noir Night in Vesterbro

A couple days ago I volunteered to check tickets for the ASSITEJ International Play Festival for Young Audiences. It was an easy enough job: ripping tickets, counting them, and eating pizza meant for the performers. My job was made that much easier by the extremely low attendance. No more than 30 people showed up for either performance, which was a Brazilian play done entirely in Portuguese.

The play was being done in the Meatpacking District. It's a maze of rundown brick warehouses that look like scenes from a zombie apocalypse video game, or West Side Story, your pick. The stage was incredibly difficult to find amongst all the former slaughterhouses, and many of the audience came late and often ready to argue with any volunteers stupid enough to ask how they were doing.

I managed to stay up through an entire showing of the 2-hour play entitled "The Poem of Roses and Thorns." It was surprisingly entertaining, there was a lot of yelling, funny expressions, and the actors were exceptionally talented at balancing object of their heads. People who sat in the front row were given stage lights fashioned out of tin cans that turned on whenever the lights dropped, giving the dark scenes a cool campy vibe.

The show was OK considering I couldn't understand a word of it, but what I really enjoyed was getting a chance to explore Vesterbro after midnight. This area of Copenhagen has a reputation for being frequented by hookers and has more sex shops in a four block radius than I have cumulatively seen in my entire life. Theres a homeless shelter conspicuously placed on the busiest street in the area, a couple blocks from Copenhagen Central Train Station. Its windows are boarded up and the entrance is surrounded by a mob of old men showing varying degrees of depression and cleanliness.

I walked past the shelter and a man began walking at my side. He was eating what looked like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but I knew it couldn't have been that, it's Denmark. He asked me if I was looking for "anything," which of course meant cocaine mixed with baking powder. I laughed uncomfortably and said no, thanking him for the generous offer.

Probably because it's the area containing central station, there are many many hotels in Vesterbro. I could hep but imagine all the times people must take advantage of the close proximity the hotel share with sex shops, prostitutes, and cheep Vietnamese restaurants. It seems like the perfect place to have a date witha lady of the night. First dinner, then a romantic walk to pick up a 20-inch silicone penis, then finally to the hotel that redoubtably smells strongly of vaginal fluid and sweat.

I walked past some hardcore S&M shops that proudly showed off their ball-gag and whip selections in their front windows. I only entered one of the shops, which appear to be open all night. A bronze statue visible from the main entrance caught my eye and I had to give it the quality attention it commanded. In case you

can't tell, it's a man, penetrating a rabbit, penetrating a sheep, penetrating a pig, penetrating a cow, some more penetrating... then a dog is eating out a very pleased woman at the end. Great art. I'd expect nothing less from a Danish sex emporium.

One of the main reasons I decided to walk after hours in such a seedy neighborhood was because I wanted to find some real-life hookers in the wild. Not, looking to be a John for the first time, rather, I wanted to finally be exposed to a line of work I had never seen before outside of movies. My first sighting was a woman who looked to be in her fourties and wore black stockings with a suggestive skirt and flattering heels. While her outfit made her look merely like another Danish woman who was comfortable with her body, she walked around indecisively and paused in the middle of the sidewalk at random intervals to look around. I passed her and she began speaking Danish to a man who was walking behind me. Sounds like a hooker to me, but I still called her a "maybe."

Everybody's Stupid

The Peace Corps, churches, and my study abroad program all make clear that in addition to being volunteers, missionaries, and students, we are all ambassadors. Throughout the first few months here, I took my post very seriously. Fearing making a mistake and defacing my nation's image, I often remained completely silent in public, or at least very quiet. My absolute worst fear was coming off as one of the loud, fat Americans that is the most representative image in the eyes of many Europeans. 

What I've discovered now is that, as an American, it is impossible to prove people's stereotypes wrong. As it turns out, the bigoted image of the American is perpetuated by the bigoted reality of the European. Before I go too far down this path, I must explain that I've made friends with Europeans, but they all believe me to be an exception, one out of many in a country of ignorant, wheezing, trigger-happy Americans.

Many times I have met people and found it impossible to have an interaction that wasn't dominated by the person's disgust at my American-ness. I met one Lithuanian girl at a student bar. I asked her where she was from and she said, "Lithuania, but you probably couldn't find it on a map." In certain circumstances, this sass could be interpreted as a cute flirt from a sexually liberated girl begging to fuck. However, her cold frown told another story, and I responded like any dumb American should. "Probably not."

It was the truth, insofar as finding something on a map means searching on a blank map for a small country in the Balkans. Obviously, given enough time and a well-labeled political map printed after World War II, I could easily find it. But to expect the country to be ingrained in my geographical memory forever, that's just too much. That would be like asking a European to find Guatemala on a map, or Mali, a country some Europeans I've met never even heard of. 

You see, as much as people criticize the US for acting like world police (which I too oppose, for the record), they act like we should be masters of the universe and know all about every single country and each one of their fascinating, insignificant, histories.

In a brunch organized for my sociolinguistics class, I was met with similar criticism after making a benign remark about... applesauce. My teacher, a tall bearded septuagenarian, announced that he was going to bring out applesauce he had made from a tree that lived not twenty feet from where we sat. Half-joking, I said, "You can do that?!" I looked at applesauce the same way one looks at ketchup, something common and good, but never made in the kitchen.

An extremely tall and equally nerdy Dane who worked in the IT division of the university laughed at my remark as a fat lesbian Dane informed me in her deep accented English, "You ah not making a very goot image of America." The nerd related a bland impression that kept the flat, know-it-all tone he always had. "I thought all the food came from the store," said the privileged, ignorant, American.

I didn't bother defending myself. This was the kind of situation I have grown callous to while abroad. People who think Americans are dumb or blunt or loud will find it in every American. Where from a fellow Danes a remark would be considered sarcastic or, at worst, misguided, from an American it is the manifestation of a broken culture.

I cannot blame people for their assumptions about my country from me or vise-versa. I did the same thing from the beginning of my stay. I had a Danish roommate. He was an ass hole who played a lot of video games, so my image of his country mixed indelibly with my image of him. This pattern continued with everyone I met who wasn't born in the US. The Spanish girl becomes the Spanish people. The Italian I sat next to in class is the sheepish representative sample of a country. 

If you don't think in these terms though, the whole idea of having the multi-cultural study abroad experience is complicated. When you can't judge a culture from a few of its members, then at what point, if ever, can you say anything about the culture? What I've slowly been learning is that you never learn enough, unless you're actually staying in the country of interest. Five Italians does not make a country, not even a good random sampling, especially if they're all students. 

MS Pointless

Instead of working on the longest research papers I have ever been assigned in my entire life, I've been using MS Paint to kill the time. Because my wrist hurts from spending so much time drawing lines using my tiny track pad, I don't think I'll be able to spend much more time on the computer. I don't want my wasted time to go completely wasted, so I'll upload a couple ones I liked for posterity and your viewing pleasure.

This took forever with the curve tool!

Booking flights is tough. Booking flights that are cheap is even more tough. Now, trying to book those same cheep flights from Denmark... oh brother...

I'm planning my first trip through Europe. After talking to some people from England and Belgium, I've realized that when you live in Europe you really don't feel the same sort of obligation to travel everywhere in the union. To them a trip to France has the same sort of romance as a trip to Virginia. They have the time and they have the drive of not a kid in a candy store but a kid in a candy store he has lived in for the past twenty years. Now, eliminating the fact that you can't be a kid after living twenty years in any setting, I'm sure you can see my point.

But I'm from the US, so the whole kid in a candy store allegory holds true for me. As such, I need to experience every bit of Europe I can afford during my short stay here. I met I guy from New Jersey here who wanted to travel like I did. We decided to plan a trip that crossed through four countries over sixteen days. It sounded a bit ambitious, maybe a little irreverent too. But many international students have booked trips over the same period that go through ten cities, maybe more. For us, three days in Barcelona is quality time.

This is the story of us booking flights. Between credit card declines and website crashes, it took us around an hour to book each flight. I liked to break the monotony of the affair and voice by frustration with the websites' tendency to reject my payments and delete my contact information. Jack assured me my experience was normal and, in fact, better than most people's. I couldn't let him steal my spite so I directed my anger towards him whenever he tried to console me.

We finished booking our flights at three in the morning. I didn't know it until we hung out after, but dawn in Springm in Denmark, takes place at four. It's a horrible sensations, seeing the white light of the sun reflect off the cold modern windows around Amager. I used to think of dawn as a reminder that you were alive. Here, I feel like the sun is your parents scolding you for not doing homework. It hurts my eyes and gives me a headache. Even if I haven't had a drop of alcohol the night before, the second I spot the cruel Scandinavian Sun I feel like a vampire at the sight of a Catholic's crucifix. I cover my head in blankets and pretend it will go away, but after a few hours it's a battle long forgone.

Have you ever heard of A Spanish Apartment? It's a French movie set in Barcelona about a French erasmus student studying in Barcelona, the city I just mentioned. It's great. It totally captures the philisophical essence of studying in another country. Of course, it's nothing like what I've experienced here, where I cling to alienation like it's an old friend I only get to see on holidays. It makes Spain look like a real happening place, so I'm excited to see it.

Did you know that Europoeans call "study abroad" "erasmus?" Did you know that there's a difference? Did you know that difference is that they get money from the government? Did you know that Danes get paid $1000 USD every month to go to university? Each month? Did you know that the minimum wage in Denmark is almost $20 an hour? Did you know that they are charged 40% income taxes? Did you know that Danes, after taxes, are paid almost twice as much as I've ever been paid? Did you know the sun rises here at 4am?

Red Solidarity

This Sunday was the first of May first. While that not be explicitly interesting to the reader, he might be interested to know that Denmark and Europe at large celebrate socialism in all its glory on this date. The day is called The First of May funnily enough. It's like Earth day except with the Labor Party playing the role of Earth, and instead of people giving speeches attempting to get people to turn off the lights and taker shorter showers, people give speeches telling people to complain to their government about a lack of affordable housing and other stuff like that (I don't know Danish; I just know "arbejder" means"house").

Despite the obvious political overtones, the vast majority of those in attendance were young Danes just looking for an excuse to get drunk. There were many tents filled with people who were handing out a wide variety of propaganda. One of my favorite was a Danish organization that supported Kim Jong Il's regime in North Korea. I wanted to find out what their rationale was; perhaps it would revolve around a Western super-power conspiracy theory, since Europeans seem skeptical about many points in history I take for granted (I'm referring to the rumors of 9/11 being an inside job or that the moon landing was a video shot in Kennedy's living room). Because they couldn't speak English and there were not English translations of the literature they were handing out, I was left to develop my own theories about Kim Jong Il's true merit. Maybe he wasn't such a bad guy after all. Maybe North Korea is actually heaven, and the reason why they need aid is to... I'll be honest, I couldn't come up with anything. But I did support them by purchasing a pack of cigarettes that managed to escape the border patrol and end up in Denmark.

Jack's Chinese, so it was only appropriate that he
posed with the NK contraband

In addition to people pushing pamphlets and pissing in bushes, there were many tents that had performers. The whole park (Fælledparken) had a music festival vibe, although in between every performance there were long-winded speeches given by people I assumed were running for some sort of office. The main stage was dominated for the majority of the day by a raspy-voiced woman in a vest who yelled horsely into the microphone to produce a screeching guttural sound that resembled feedback.


Jack, the Asian posted above, knew a girl from school who was performing in one of the tents. She played sitar in Emma Acs' back-up band. I was surprised by the professionalism of the group, and actually didn't want to leave after the first song. It helped too that the girl sitarist was a beautiful Persian adaptation of Kate Hudson's character in Almost Famous. I took a pretty shitty video of their cover of Joy Division's Transmission, but the majority of the concert was original material.

 

They sound as good as they look. Seriously, the sitarist makes the band.

It was a sunny day when I arrived at the park, but after a couple hours the sky turned gray and the wind began biting the exposed skin of my legs. I always pick the worst days to wear shorts. Jack and I took the train back and I risked not buying a pass. It started raining on the way back and a Metro controller stepped on the train a couple miles away from our stop. I saved myself an $150 fine by escaping the train, but had to bike through wind and water to arrive shivering at my apartment.