The biblical story of the Tower of Babel hints at a perfect, common language that humans apparently used to possess which almost allowed them to reach the heavens. Using and analysing Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s 2006 film Babel, I shall compare the two Babels and how they deal with miscommunication. I will show that the kind of perfect language that the biblical story details is impossible to exist, because of the inevitable (mis)uses of language such as lying, and I will explain how verbal, as well as nonverbal communication, their short-comings and strengths and their portrayal, make the 2006 film a great work of art.
More than a month has passed since I came back from Denmark. I’ve been thinking: “I’ll write a nice big post that sums it all up! I’ll say what I loved and hated about Denmark and its people, what new experiences that place gifted me with” and so on and so forth.
So far, I have had no motivation to write that post whatsoever. I just don’t feel like doing it. My experience from Denmark, as time passes, becomes more and more confused in my head. Details are slipping away. My skills in Danish, after months of understandable, no, welcome unuse, are leaving me like the alcohol leaves a boiling pot of rakomelo. I get more and more tired of talking about Denmark when people ask for the simple reason that I feel as if I have not many interesting things to say. I mean, what: “Yeah, it was kind of boring and mundane most of the time, Denmark and the Danes were a disappointment for the most part, but the Erasmus experience was nice, I met new people and made great friends” blah blah blah. I’m just feeling kind of indifferent towards the past few months of my life abroad. It was generally an uninspiring experience. The most inspiration came from the people I met that became my new international friends, the ones that gave me the great motivation that made me want to learn new languages — I’m hyped to say I’m studying German and Spanish and feeling great about it. But other than that…
A good thing it left me with, no question, is even more of a sense of being a good friend of myself, just doing my own thing and having fun. This kind of independence, welcome as it is, also has left me a little bit scared. Lots of times I prefer staying alone and doing whatever it is I like doing each day than meeting friends or going out. Aarhus had me sharpen my introvert side to a bleeding sheen, made me just accept who I am including probable and improbable manifestations of myself depending on the circumstances and people and all that. But right now, I feel… not exactly not sociable, no. I want to get to know new people, sure. It’s just that I’m in the phase of “but where are all the nice people at? They must not exist at all”. Which is of course a delusion of extraordinary magnitude and unfortunately a very common one among our generation.
Another thing that’s happening the past few weeks is that I don’t really feel like writing or talking about what I’m doing. I’m conscious that, right now, I prefer just living, honing my skills and spending my free time in various ways and just not talking about it at all. Who knows? Maybe it’s because I feel as if I have no-one to talk to? I mean, even my blog. Even if I write here, what’s the point? This, the point: I’m trying to figure it out. Why not just go out and live rather than sit here, essentially boasting? I started off this blog with the idea to “write things worth reading or do things worth writing”. I certainly have done so in the past: myself from four years ago would look at me and beam with satisfaction, proud of the things I have done and maybe written. But, right now, I feel as if what I write is not worth reading and what I do is not worth writing either. That is not to say that I’m not doing things worth doing. No, no! I think I’m now doing very worthwhile things but of questionable narrative worth. With experience comes maturity and now I have greater expectations from what a thing worth writing about might be. I want to write something inspiring; not for you, dear reader, but for me. I hope this day comes soon.
Today is the first day of advent. In four weeks time it’s Christmas. One week before that, I’ll be setting my foot on Greek soil for the first time after almost five months. Party’s almost over and it really feels like it’s long past its peak. Two years ago I wrote this particular heartfelt piece. Right now, I’m feeling like I can’t wait for Christmas to come and for me to be with my loved ones again. Everything’s looking as if our lives are going to change dramatically in the next few months and in ways we can’t even predict now, much less a year or two ago… so I feel the need to be with my people right now. That will necessarily mean leaving my newly-found loved ones behind over here, but my approach to such inevitable small tragedies of life can be best summarised with a “bring on the pain”. I am confident that things will take their course the only way they can…
Now I will detail such an interesting topic as the weather. The weather’s broken its month-long hiatus of just plain meh of cloudy, rainless days with sheets of rain and wind that’s blowing all of the orange leaves that had gathered in piles everywhere, turning them into forced immigrants riding towards the unknown. It’s been definitely a pretty sight. Very happy that the Danish weather finally decided to prove the wilder side of its infamy. I do not think I will see snow before I leave, though — believe it or not, Danish winters are considered ‘mild’.
Jul is coming and hyggelighed is shooting through the roofs. People getting Christmas sweets, doing their Christmas shopping starting from early November *silent sigh* Then, the quaint little Christmas bazaar in the center of Aarhus is closed by 6pm (and it’s been 2 hours of darkness already), making the Christmas wine very eloquently called Gløgg unavailable to the thirsty crowds. What can I say? This place is boring. The only fun people seem to be having is by mindlessly consuming tons of alcohol to at least make their mind-numbingly boring Fredagsbar entertainment a tiny bit more interesting. Danish people are like a bunch of spoiled children. They’re actually more like a society of sheltered people that avoid to look at the world without some kind of capitalist-socialist rose-tinted glasses (if you’re thinking that it’s a travesty to even think that capitalism and socialism could ever walk hand-in-hand down Utopia Lane, just visit Denmark and all should become crystal clear) Its clockwork social system seems to be breeding generations of people that cannot think for themselves if their life depended on it. Maybe its a common trait between people, that… But definitely, if populations from other corners of the world share this trait with the Danes, at least the Danes are the ones that come off as the ones with the better end of the stick. They are the happiest people in the world after all…
Could Denmark be an example of what would happen to a country and a population if all its problems were magically solved? Would it all come to a grinding halt out of a sheer lack of important stuff to worry about, people being very happy leading perfectly normal, predictable and passionless lives? It does seem to me that one of the common characteristics between people of the ‘First World‘ –pardon my anachronistic geopolitical categorisation, calling rich countries ‘Western’ seems just as uninspiring– is that we all seem to invent our problems, no matter if our existing problems, big or small, are affecting our happiness or not.
That is a confusing thought. I shall leave it aside.
Where was I? Ah, yes. Too afraid of foreigners, too afraid of standing out, they are hiding deep complexes behind their feel-good, relaxed appearances, against even their own larger and frankly much more interesting Nordic relatives.
OK, enough with cultural generalisations. My relativist side is painfully screaming in protest to all the above. I would hate to do what everybody seems to be doing with Greece right now; that is branding millions of people with a single stamp. Oh, oops, hehe.
Maybe I’m just sour cause I have no Danish friends to invite me over for a hyggelig board game evening… :’e
Most of my days consist of learning Spanish, enjoying hygge alone or with my predominantly Spanish-speaking friends in various altered states (yes, natural endorphins and caffeine counts! Does caffeine withdrawal onset also count as an altered state?), obsessing with Skyward Sword like a well-behaved Pavlov’s human (the highly behaviourist principle in work here is: “we want what we can’t have”. Beware of your hardware flaws and you can probably do much better than most of us out there), writing my final assignments for Digital Media Ethics and Great Works of Art or trying to at least find a good subject for both that will balance between “I already know a lot about this, I can write this stuff down!”, “I want to learn something new, research, research!” and “I like this topic enough I will actually choose it over all the other possibilities and give it the honour of being my subject of preference for this course”. I’m listening to Grace For Drowning a lot, watching many good films the past few days and just finished Peep Show. What a great britcom it is!
Yet, I realise that once all here is said and done, I will regret not being able to use my last days here in a more creative or… Danish way. I wish I had ideas, I really do. But the spirit of Denmark has engulfed me entirely. Now excuse me: I must continue procrastinating and not doing my in Skjoldhøj Autumn cleaning, hoping that if Ι pretend it’s not there it will magically go away οr I will vacate the room before needing to do the general cleaning, having the perfect excuse… Urgh…
I regret this does not exist online in its entirety, I’m sure everyone would love it as much as I did. I still sing “Eg har klina med ein skallamann!” whenever I remember it, not caring about the risk of people misunderstanding me!
Eläimiä eläimille, a deliciously disgusting Finnish short. No trace of it exists online. I hope one day it does so it is available for all to see.
And the one that struck me the most, The Green Wave, on the forged elections of Iran in 2009 and the uprising that followed (click on the link just for the website design excellence, if regrettably you are not interested in the film itself).
Green is the color of hope. Green is the color of Islam. And green was the symbol of recognition among the supporters of presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who became the symbolic figure of the Green Revolution in Iran last year. The presidential elections on June 12th, 2009 were supposed to bring about a change, but contrary to all expectations the ultra-conservative populist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was confirmed in office. As clear as was the result, as loud and justified were the accusations of vote-rigging. The on-going Where is my vote? protest demonstrations were again and again worn down and broken up with brutal attacks by government militia. Images taken from private persons with their cell phones or cameras bear witness to this excessive violence: people were beaten, stabbed, shot dead, arrested, kidnapped, some of them disappearing without trace. What remains is the countless number of dead or injured people and victims of torture, and another deep wound in the hearts of the Iranians.
THE GREEN WAVE is a touching documentary-collage illustrating the dramatic events and telling about the feelings of the people behind this revolution. Facebook reports, Twitter messages and videos posted in the internet were included in the film composition, and hundreds of real blog entries served as reference for the experiences and thoughts of two young students, whose story is running through the film as the main thread. The film describes their initial hope and curiosity, their desperate fear, and the courage to yet continue to fight. These fictional ‘storylines’ have been animated as a motion comic – sort of a moving comic – framing the deeply affecting pictures of the revolution and the interviews with prominent human rights campaigners and exiled Iranians. Ali Samadi Ahadi’s documentary is a very contemporary chronicle of the Green Revolution and a memorial for all of those who believed in more freedom and lost their lives for that.
After watching The Green Wave in Øst for Paradis, the local cinephile theatre, there was a live Skype discussion with members of Amnesty International (one of them was in Iran in 2009) and Ramy Raoof, an activist from Egypt that leaked info out through Twitter during the “Arab Spring” (and still does). He tried to make clear the point that Facebook and Twitter, often used as the taglines of the Arab Spring by Western media, were not pivotal in organising the revolution; even after Mubarak had cut off the Internet and SMS, people of course used other means along side digital means. Ramy stressed that, even if Twitter and Facebook had not existed, the revolution would still have taken place…
…and added that, in Egypt today, the “temporary military government” after Mubarak has taken too many liberties and is not looking to be all that temporary at all…
This film shook me as few have. Imagine living in a country where you could be tortured or killed just because you were out in the streets demanding your vote to count, where the government would stop at nothing to muff you or your blog. Where merely me posting this could be deemed a crime punishable by… well, any means necessary. Maybe it’s far too easy to imagine other countries having such horrible regimes. Anyone who has read or watched Persepolis will be familiar with Iran’s difficult recent past and to see that things have certainly not improved is at least troubling. It also made me think about our own situation in Greece and how far things could go before spiraling into a similar scenario… When Alex Grigoropoulos was shot in December 2008, Greece was in flames for a couple of days. What would happen if (young) people got shot every day? Would people still go out to protest? Or would our generation freeze in terror, remembering that real protest against governments caught with their pants down could very well mean very real death, or worse? I have to admit that I don’t know how I would act if faced with these options. Looking at all of history’s failed revolutions, I do not want to shed blood for a pre-determinedly lost cause. Hell, even if the cause was not lost, I don’t want to die! Would a successful revolution won with the blood of hopefuls be worth it? Is anything won with blood worth it?
It’s the equinox, the middle of the seasonal change. This time of year, day gives way to night three minutes every day at my latitude, at its annual max. Every night from today til the Winter Solstice will still be longer than the previous one, but getting longer at a slower rate. The slowing will turn into a grinding halt on the Solstice itself, also known as Christmas, when the day will start gaining ground again. And long and cold nights they will be, here in the north. Let’s hope they’ll be hyggelig as well.
So it’s the first day of Autumn, if you’re one that prefers his astronomical seasons to the arbitrary calendrial ones. If you’re like me. A lot of leaves have already put on their jackets for the coming cold (it’s already ~12C every day here). They’re very pretty in their last days of life, their colours saturated with deep, earthly reds. As the days pass, more and more leaves will find their beautiful deaths on the wet streets. It feels wrong drying them, preserving them, when their rightful place in the circle of life is death and non-preservation, becoming food for bacteria and fungi.
This environment is quite perfect for going to lessons and having to preoccupy yourself with creative ideas. Perfect environment for sitting at home when you’re not out walking in the rain listening to music or Spanish lessons, doing your assignment for Media Management and Journalism 3.0 in the Digital Age, on Search Engine Optimization and Croud-Sourcing… What’s better than being at a Great Works of Art class, it pouring outside and you analysing Monteverdi and Vivaldi inside, in the cozy warmth of knowledge, academia and the body heat of art-thirsty colleagues?
University classes have started (first lessons last week for Media Management & Journalism 3.0, I still haven’t had a class of Digital Media Ethics or Great Works of Art, although I had to listen to Monteverdi’s Vespro della Beate Vergine as preparation for the first class — listen to it if you like big band Baroque!) I’m meeting more and more people (and I thought the ~100 people of Destination DK was a lot; how about ~1500? That’s how many exchange students are here for the semester!), and, to be honest, the novelty is starting to wear off.
Just yesterday, it was “the biggest Friday bar of the year” (every department has its own Friday Bar which opens in the afternoons of, get that, Fridays, to accommodate thirsty and tired students from all of the week’s stress. Generally, just another excuse to chug beer and party.) So, yes, yesterday was the biggest Friday bar of the year. Close to the university park lake there was a stage on which there were teams playing Beer Bowling, with a large crowd surrounding the stage and loud club music blaring on the speakers. I found a lot of other exchange students around there but I wasn’t feeling like socialising under those conditions, it was too crowded and brainless and I could honestly see no fun in it. I mean, I’d like to play Beer Bowling with friends, but as a spectator sport?
Looks like fun. If you're Danish.
I’m trying to decide… What kind of fun do I like? On the one hand I really like quiet, personal, hyggelig situations with or without friends, watching a movie, discussing over good, just-cooked food — oh it feels so great cooking, I wonder why I wasn’t doing it all these years?! Thanks Ana and Cedric for helping with get in the hang of it! — playing a board game, subtle fun I don’t get very often these days except with very certain people. On the other hand, I can enjoy big parties and loud music, I like dancing (the alcohol percentage in my blood is inversely proportionate to my musical eclecticness, big surprise!) and I like meeting people, but yesterday I just wasn’t feeling up to it at all. Yes, there were even some girls that I wouldn’t mind talking to in there, some that I had met before and others that I wish I would, but just couldn’t. You know, I find it hard to just talk to strangers but even harder to talk to people I’ve exchanged a few words with already. I don’t know whether it’s shyness, indifference, dismissiveness or one of these masked as one of the other two…
Anyway, I decided I wasn’t having any fun and just walked from the university park back home, mp3 player alternating between the audiobook I’m currently obsessed with and Primsleur Essential Spanish… Actually I do this quite a lot these days, walking from Skoldhøjkollegiet to Århus and back. It takes around an hour, it’s good exercise, I listen to audiobooks and my favourite music, it fills me with positive vibes and it’s free, unlike taking the bus! This is the optimal walking (and I also presume biking) route, my stride took only 59 minutes yesterday. τ^^ Rain will most definitely be a problem now that winter is coming, but eh, I’ll worry about that when winter is here.
Two weeks ago my Danish classes restarted, this time in a more serious environment. I have two lessons every week, Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. At the end of September I’m going to sit for my first test in Danish. If I succeed, I’ll jump from complete-beginner Module 1 to almost-beginner Module 2. All I need to do to pass is speak about either a topic of my preference (I STILL DON’T KNOW WHAT I SHOULD CHOOSE TO BABBLE ON ABOUT! Greece? Food? Denmark? My hobbies? Aasfgfdlfkg?) or one of three books I’ll have to read beforehand. Oh, I had forgot the sensation of language exam stress! Missed you old chap.
I was in the mood to record some Danish for you tonight, maybe try to work on my pronounciation a little. I used a text I wrote almost a month ago for my Destination DK classes. My Danish is not much better today, but I can spot some mistakes I made back in August when I wrote this. I left them in for historicality.
Jeg hedder Dimitris Hall. Jeg kommer fra Grækenland, fra byen Nea Smyrni i Aten. Jeg er 22 år gammel. Jeg studerede kulturel teknologi og kommunikation til fem år på Ægæisk Universitetet, på øen af Lesvos. Min mor er græske og min far er australsk. De er sklit 20 år. Jeg har ingen søskende. Jeg bor i Århus to uger på Skoldhøjkollegiet og vil bor her i et halvt år. Jeg har mødet mange udvekslingsstuderende. Danmark er grøn med mange træer, skov og cykler. Desværre, jeg har ikke cykel nu, og jeg har ikke mange pengen. Men jeg finde Danmark og Århus hyggelig og jeg er glad at være her. Grækenland er ikke samme måde med Danmark. Grækenland er varm og ikke grøn, de har ikke mange penge der. Men Danmark og Grækenland har mange øer og jeg kan lidt øer og havet.
Translation:
My name is Dimitris Hall. I come from Greece, from the town of Nea Smyrni in Athens. I am 22 years old. I study Cultural Technology and Communication for five years at Aegean University, on the island of Lesvos. My mother is Greek and my father is Australian. They’re divorced 20 years. I have no siblings. I’ve lived in Aarhus for two weeks at Skjoldhøjkollegiet and will be living here for half a year. I have met many exchange students. Denmark is green with many trees, forests and bicycles. Unfortunately, I don’t have a bicycle now, and I haven’t got much money. But I find Denmark and Aarhus nice (cozy!) and I’m happy to be here. Greece is not the same as Denmark. Greece is warm and not green, they haven’t got much money there. But Denmark and Greece have many islands and I like islands and the sea.
The past few days haven’t been all that much to write home about. The main reason for this is my almost complete lack of money. I knew before coming here that costs of living would be extreme, I thought I was prepared (was I ever…) but I didn’t expect that even going to the supermarket or downtown could be so frightening to my wallet and the full range of its contents. That together with a few unlucky money-sucking occasions have meant that I’ve been forced to put a few limits to my wanderlust and learn to enjoy the finer pleasures of looking at the four walls of my room and my laptop’s screen. Fortunately it’s not as bad as it sounds; I’ve got company in my kronerlessness, as well as grass and trees around Skoldhøjkollegiet.
For you to understand exactly how easy it is for money to disappear in ways unexpected, allows me to disclose a recent episode of my dorm life. Every week two of the twelve rooms in Spobjergvej 58 have to do the cleaning up. One is responsible for the kitchen and the other for the other common areas (the common room, the staircases and corridors etc). An inspection takes place every Tuesday to determine if everything’s clean as it should. If not, little notes are left for the respectiverooms to notify them of what they have to do by the following day. If they still fail to clean they are charged completely unreasonable amounts of money for the cleaners that do the job for them.
It was my turn to clean the common areas last week and of course I didn’t want to make my already atrocious financial situation that much horrible. So I took extra care to vacuum every carpet and linoleum surface and mop anything that could be mopped. Alas, Tuesday’s check unequivocally concluded that my vacuuming had been unsatisfactory. To top it all off, before I knew it, the common room floor surfaces were covered with grass and mud again — it was a rainy day and my flatmates were not paying much attention, why should they, it wasn’t them that had to clean up, was it? I begrudgingly did my part and slept easy, believing I had escaped the villainous clutches and voracious wallets of the cleaning ladies staff (they’re very serious about gender equality here, it’s even reflected in their language. Not that I disapprove, of course). Next day I was greeted with a beautiful 154 kr. (~20€) for “cleaning performed due to insufficient cleaning”. If they had chosen to be a little bit thorougher, costs of unwanted cleanliness could have easily reached 400kr for the likes of “vacuuming the furniture”, “keeping escape routes free” and “washing the lamps and tables”. At least they were kind enough to add “the hall of residence will collect the amount for the cleaning on the next month’s rent of the relevant resident”. Oh, it’s OK, I don’t have to pay it right away, only with my next month’s rent! >:ε What strikes me as the oddest is that none of my flatmates seems to know with any amount of detail what the cleaning entails or just care about it for that matter. The three weeks I’ve been here it’s not the residents that have done the cleaning but the company. It shouldn’t surprise me now that I think about it; my flatmates do strike me as the kind of people that would rather pay than clean up themselves, out of sheer boredom most likely.
My new Andalusian friend Ana and I have made a habit of going for walks and cooking dinner together every evening — Spanish, Greek and new experimental recipes. We are in a compatible economical situation (one that does not permit lots of going out) so we can make the best of our limited means. That includes buying beer with the highest price-for-alcohol ratio (but still the cheapest) and watching documentaries on Youtube. Joy: I’ve found yet another friend with which I can agree about how the entirety of our world is a social construction! Our discussions are sometimes limited by language barriers at a higher level, but hey, she’s already trying to teach me Spanish and doing a good job of it too, so ¿quién sabe? I totally used Google Translate for that, by the way.
Apart from cleaning, being with Ana, watching In Treatment and How I Met Your Mother (almost done with season 6, finally!) most of my past days I’ve been trying to make my laptop work with Skype. That would be an easy task normally. Thing is, I’ve been trying to run Linux for a few weeks now and I promised myself that this time I WOULDN’T give up and return to Windows after the 50th time I would be forced to do something the hard way, if at all. Well, this time, I’m not so sure. PulseAudio is driving me absolutely crazy. I’ve been scouring the web for days trying to get my microphone to work but it’s all been little more, or should I say less than a headache. And it’s not just Skype and all the friends and family I’d love to actually talk to instead of merely hearing. What I was also looking forward to was posting videos of me trying to speak Danish! Now I can’t do even that.
Sorry Linux, I love you just as I love free stuff and sticking to my ideology and beliefs –not to mention doing my part of anti-conformity– but sometimes you just can’t resist that […ooh, as if I’d share with you my forbidden pleasures… ~^,]
By the way. If I love something more than receiving postcards, letters and packages, it’s receiving them with no prior notice. For everyone that might want to surprise me and make a grown man cry tears of joy, here’s my address here in Denmark:
These days have been everything about being out and meeting new people, most notably a few Spanish and Mexican girls that have turned my opinion on Spain, the Spanish language and the Spanish people by 180 degrees. Hi-fives to Ana, Dulce, Ileana and Henar!
Studenterhus Århus continues to organise lots of stuff every day to keep us entertained, like taking us to ARoS ([state of the — pardon me for the pun] art museum, loved everything, from the super po-mo stuff that didn’t make sense to the super po-mo stuff that made lots of sense to the early 20th century Danish painters that I’d normally find quite ordinary) or having a speed meeting (I can tell you, I have never been so thrilled AND tired of getting to know people at the same time, most of I’ll never see again because they weren’t actually from our Destination DK group but from some other summer university program of AU that was about to end). I’m starting to really like the people of Studenterhus and the place itself which is not too bad at all for a beer or coffee.
Monday was the first day of my Danish class and we have classes every day starting at 8:45. Living 30-40 minutes away by bike from the university campus in Århus where the lessons take place doesn’t help things, but I enjoy biking there and home. If only it wasn’t so time-consuming! Sophia is an excellent teacher, exceptionally cheery and informal, laughs out loud a lot, loves to talk to us about her life and Denmark in general. I’m very happy to be having lessons with her! Danish… Hvad hedder du? Hvor kommer du fra?Jeg har ikke en kærester. Jeg har et seng, to border og tre stoler på min værelse. Jeg cykler mange i Århus. Well, it does taking A LOT of getting used to and believe me, it sounds absolutely NOTHING like it reads. After four days of lessons already and ten days in Denmark, I think I might have started catching words on the street or in shops that are not common with or in any other way remind German. I still think I have a long and winding road ahead of me before I can even start catching spoken Danish; unless of course it was spoken to me veeery slowly and clearly, in which case I doubt whether it would continue to claim the right to be called Danish anymore.
The atmosphere is great in the lessons and I’m having a lot of fun each day. Of course there’s another 7 or 8 classes just like us, most filled with complete Danish beginners!
I’ll sign off for today with some videos showing Skolhøjkollegiet, my dorms (I’m in no 58, room 3 by the way):
Yesterday, after another long walk in Aarhus, it was time for the first official Erasmus get-together! Studenthus Aarhus organised a Welcome Dinner for all the new-comers and their empty stomachs. There I met my first Erasmus people! I have no idea if they’re going to be my friends for the rest of the semester — it’s only 5 out of 100 Destination DK participators (the early goers such as me for the language and culture program) and over ~600 exchange students in total for this semester– but who knows, right?
Today with said friends we headed a bit outside of Aarhus to the annual Viking fight and horse-riding show. It was part of a greater Viking festival with tens and tens of tents with all kinds of craftsmen making everything and anything related to Vikings, from mead to shields with runes, from traditional Viking food to ornaments. Everything was produced on the spot. The fight and horse show were sure impressive, with all the combatants yelling and their swords and spears clanging. No picture will do this experience justice of course, maybe in time some videos are going to find their way on Youtube.
But I’ll admit it. What I was most fascinated by was not the vikings, not their cooking or their runes but the location of this happening. The viking festival took place on a grassy hilly clearing next to a beach. But surrounding this clearing was a beautiful forest with trees so tall, leaf canopies so thick they were practically hiding the sky, creating the musky, cozy atmosphere of the deep forest. It was complete with running water and light washing in on the streams from the few openings among the leaves… We reached the festival through that forest starting at Moesgaard Museum. It’s very easy to reach from the center of Aarhus (we just hopped on bus 6 from Nøregade), so I can definitely see myself returning preferrably together with my bike!
The other big thing of today was that I went to the hospital. When I woke up in the morning I could feel, together with my dry and brambly throat, my left ear just clogged with fluid and hurting as hell. “OK”, I thought, “this is not another of those my-throat-hurts-for-a-few-days-it’s-gonna-take-care-of-itself. Reluctantly, I decided to get checked up after returning from the Viking festival (as Dulce said: ‘why miss it, if you’re not about to die…’ and I hold the sentiment close to my heart) Turns out I’ve got a “mouth infection” and that only penicillin can put an end to the bacterial menace once and for all. If I had a CPR number (I’ll get it when I get my Danish residence permit, that is next month) I’d be eligible for completely free examinations and medication, in contrast with today when I had to pay for my penicillin in the end because I didn’t have a CPR number and thus belonged to the ‘tourist” category…
But these Nordic people… They make even their hospitals good to look at.
I have to sign off now, get some sleep and let the antibiotics do their thing. Tomorrow we’ve got brunch at 10:00 at Studenthus Aarhus and eat well we must cause it’s Museum Day! Gotta get my rest, no? I’ll up new pictures as soon as possible.
