I just LOVE these super-obscure guys! What a song, what an album…
Tag: danish
Highlights of Great Works of Art student presentations
What colleagues have presented so far in this course that I have loved:
Nature
Culture
Alfons Maria Mucha (yes, this is the guy that made the Four Seasons hung on the walls of To Ναυάγιο in Mytilini)
Poul Anker Bech (surreal realism)
Boy (this one’s in ARoS museum in Århus) Α Girl
From 2008 Latvian Song and Dance Festival. I expect two of the people who might be reading this to remember this sacred moment…
Downsides of Denmark
A Dane criticizes Denmark and the Danes. We gape at this apparent contradiction in terms and, when we’ve got over the shock, sit back and enjoy.
http://blogs.denmark.dk/peterandreas/
Just in time for this:
Danish Diaries #7
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?
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.
Danish Diaries #4
Days pass faster and faster… Where’s Making Time when you need it? I think I have passed the familiarity threshold; everything is making less of an impression on me now and I don’t feel like I’m in a foreign place anymore. I am quite at home at my dorm and taking the bus is starting to feel natural. I must say the speed in which I have adapted is scaring me a little. This comes with its own costs: I’m slightly less inclined to meet new people or ready to try out new things and more likely to get in a routine as I have for the past 10 days or so with my daily morning Danish classes, for which I yesterday signed up to continue into Autumn (paid from none other than the Danish government). It follows that there hasn’t been any groundbreaking stuff going on. I shall share with you some non-groundbreaking tidbits:
- Danish is a strange language. It’s not only the sound (it’s still almost impossible for me to understand anything if it’s not written in the semi-recognisable script Danes have for written word), I also find some words very funny. For example: øl means beer. Øl (pronounced like ö), if you say it this way in German, means oil. If you say it a lot of times, like (øløløløløløløl) it sounds like: A) a retarded version of lololololol and B) this.Danish also has a unique and specific way of denoting family relationships. In Danish you can’t just have grandmother or grandfather; you have to be very specific about whose mother or father it is. So you get things like mormor (mother’s mother), farfar (father’s father), any combination really. I was wondering how far it could get, like a series of zeros and ones. “My morfarmor is 104 years old” -“Oh, my farmorfarfar is still alive! They had him on a TV show the other day!”
They also do it with uncles. You have to be specific about whose parent’s brother or sister it is, too. I guess it makes things easier but it’s also funny. - I went to a sushi dinner party organised by the Japanese students in Skjoldhøjkollegiet. It was really fun, all kinds of different delicious food our hosts had spent days preparing. Everything was very delicious and there was a lot more people than I had imagined! But then came the alcohol: Danish beer, Japanese beer, several different kinds of wine, including cherry wine and fighter wine (a Spanish expression for cheap wine that fights with you the next day), liquorice, uh, liquor shots — mind you I hate liquorice, oh, one new thing to add to my list — and after the party we topped it off with 4 vodka shots at Camill’s place followed with more fighter wine and gin with fruit juice. Seriously, I should have been worse when I woke up this morning. The only thing I didn’t remember was how I had gone to bed and my hangover only lasted a few hours… f you don’t take into account that I slept in all morning and missed today’s Danish class.
Danish Diaries #3
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.
This is my class:
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):