Highlights from the Frilandsmuseet

Over the long, long Easter vacation, I ventured to the northern 'burbs of Copenhagen to the town of Kongens Lyngby to visit the Frilandsmuseet, or Open Air Museum, with my son and some of his toddler buddies. The Frilandsmuseet is part of the Nationalmuseet system and is an open air museum displaying three hundreds of years worth of Danish farms. The cool thing about the buildings is that they are actually real homes, mills, barns and outbuildings from around the country, taken apart brick by brick and rebuilt instead of replicas. They even contain period furnishings, tools and farm implements. There are of course the requisite docents in period dress and bucolic meadows full of farm animals for the children to chase.

Stepping back in time

The museum covers 86 acres and, needless to say, given the attention span and endurance of our pint sized companions, we saw only a small portion of all there was to see. A horse-drawn carriage ride helped us cover more ground and was also a great way to convince our reluctant children to stop throwing stones in the millpond.

The most terrorized chickens in all of Denmark

The museum was founded in 1897, making it one of the oldest of its kind, with some buildings dating back to 1650. Represented are dwellings from all around the country, as well as the Faroe Islands, and the former territories in northern Germany and southern Sweden.

For those of you who just went "Faroe-wha??" they are a group of islands situated halfway in between Great Britain and Iceland in the middle of essentially nowhere. With a population of only about 50,000 people, this autonomous province of the Kingdom of Denmark is another country within a country. If you're into expat reads and want to learn more about the Faroes, check out the fictional novel Far Afield.

An early Vestas prototype

Apparently Danes of yore were a hungry bunch, leading to an interesting, but unrelated, commentary on trends in Danish height. As evidenced by the picture below and reported by Good Morning America, modern Danes are quite tall, with the average male standing 6 feet and the women not far behind. I've been told I'm tall for a Korean, but in Denmark that makes me a little taller than really short. Americans used to tower over the free world, but we have slipped in recent decades and now can only lord over residents of malnourished countries like North Korea.

All in all, the museum was a beautiful place to visit on a warm spring day to learn a little more about the history of the country I'm calling home for a while.



A great time was had by all. Well, everyone except maybe these poor geese running for the cover of the bushes...



You may be fast, little one,
but we are faster...



 

Class Notes: Germany

A toddler who rejects sleep, a husband with a double ear infection and a tempermental internet connection are all horrible blogging assistants... I know it's been a while. These are my excuses. I have been meaning to write about so much - the transition into a new season, the adorable shaggy dog-sized ponies we saw at the Vestamager Naturecenter this past weekend, an amazingly beautiful stumbled-upon cemetary in the middle of Østerbro. All these things seem to go out the window when it's 10 o'clock at night and my spawn, I mean son, is still screaming bloody murder at the injustice of being put into his bed. So instead of writing about things that take real mental power, I will take this opportunity to begin a new segment of my blog - Class Notes.

I grew up on Long Island, about an hour and a half east of New York City. It is what's considered "downstate" New York, although we hardly ever refer to ourselves as that. In fact, we often forget there's a whole lot more of New York north of Westchester County. It's all lumped together as "upstate" which might as well be another state as far as we're concerned. We hardly bother to learn much about the rest of the state, don't follow what goes on very closesly or seem to understand the concerns of our fellow New Yorkers. [Author's note: I've since tried to make amends by attending college in Ithaca and marrying a guy from Buffalo.]

A similar sentiment could be applied to my understanding and attentiveness, as an American, to the rest of the world. (To be fair, there's a whole lot of America to slog through before you even attempt to broaden your worldly horizons.) A big chunk of what I know about the rest of the world comes from grade school assignments. The Ghats are mountains in India. Building a scale model of Machu Pichu out of sugar cubes takes a heck of a lot of sugar. The rest comes mainly from current events like the earthquake, tsunami and resulting nuclear crisis in Japan.

But when it comes to the actual cultures, the people, the stuff that makes a Dane a Dane or a Nicaraguan a Nicaraguan, well, they might as well all be "upstaters". So I'm trying to make amends by querying my classmates from my Danish for Foreigners class and sharing with you the amusing, fascinating, and funny anecdotes I've picked up from this goldmine of intercultural exchange.

Germany, you're up first.

Germans love their zoo animals and a number of them have become über-celebrities of sorts. The one I had heard of was Knut, the polar bear who was raised by human keepers after his mother rejected him. What I hadn't heard though was that he recently passed away - whether Knut will be stuffed and put on display in a musem in Berlin remains to be seen. Then there's Heidi, the cross-eyed opossum who has her own website, a Facebook page with a couple hundred thousand fans as well as her own YouTube channel. And perhaps the funniest, but also coolest, German animal star has to be Paul the Octopus, who correctly predicted all of Germany's matches in the 2010 FIFA World Cup, as well as the final match, by selecting food from one of two boxes marked with the flags of the competing teams. Poor Paul has also passed away but you can visit his shrine and cremated remains at Sea Life in Oberhausen.

Animal Farm

Sandra Boyton is a well-know children's author who, depending on how many times your child has demanded you read her books in a row, is either a genius, or should be shot. Or possibly both. All her books rhyme in such cutesy, catchy ways that you can literally recite them in your sleep, which I admit is sometimes helpful when you are falling alseep on the thirtieth reading in one night.

One of her books, Moo, Baa, La La La! opens with the following lines:

"A cow says Moo!

A sheep says Baa!

Three singing pigs say La La La!  

'No, no!' you say, 'that isn't right.

The pigs say OINK all day and night.'"

That kind of sums up how I've been feeling since I came across a Danish children's book at my son's daycare about animals and the noises they make. A fellow American expat-mom and friend of mine recently blogged about her bewildering experience concerning frogs so I know I'm not the only one out there having an animalistic linguistic crisis.

She and I both discovered that in Denmark frogs say, "kvæk-kvæk" which, to an American ear, sounds an awful lot like "quack-quack". Of course, this leads right into the next question which is, "If frogs say, 'quack' then what do ducks say?" To which the Danish response is, "rap". Huuuuhhhhh... My three weeks of Danish classes have taught me that most Danish r's are somewhat similar to French r's - throaty and harsh. The only ducks I know that would be saying "rap" in this way would be the ones dying of pneumonia or trying to cough up a feather-ball.



Solving the burning question - why?



Here's another interesting one with wider implications. Danish pigs say "øf" which comes out sounding like "uhf" or the French word for "egg" - oeuf. This got me thinking that maybe the creators of my husband's latest addiction, Angry Birds, are actually French? I've been speculating about this game since its appearance on our cell phone a few weeks ago beause it doesn't seem to have a logical point. Testy birds bombarding green pigs? But since my run-in with Old McJensen's farm, I'm suddenly finding all new depth and meaning. I can finally begin to understand how a movie might be made out of the world's most plot-less game.

 

Here's the movie's tagline: (Danish) Pigs, watch out! The Angry (French) Birds called - they want their "oeufs" back!

 

 

#12 Fur

In a rare show of solidarity and support for my mental health, the fickle Copenhagen sun finally made a full appearance today and it is a beautiful day, as windy, late winter days go. I know I should't be complaining given that it might be another three weeks before I see the sun again, but the only down side to this otherwise lovely event is that it has ruined any good photo ops for today's post. So I apologize in advance at this topic's lack of photojournalistic merit.

For the past few weeks, it's been unseasonably, bone-chillingly cold. It was during this time that I noticed another Danish phenomenon - the appearance of fur. On one particlar day, as I stood waiting for a friend inside the entrance to an upscale, downtown department store, I counted no fewer than twelve fur coats, four fur hats and some unidentifiable dead-animal-as-scarf draped around a woman's neck over about a ten minute period.

Please don't stop reading here. I promise this isn't going to be some diatribe about fur-wearing. If you're inclined to feel guilty about continuing to read or having a laugh about the subject, I suggest you make a donation to PETA before reading on. I will give some personal background though so you know where I'm coming from and can make any judgements and comments accurately.

I would describe myself as an animal lover. That said, a weak spot for bacon means vegetarianism and I will never truly see eye to eye. I generally tend to avoid eating "cute" animals (bunnies, lambs, etc) but have no problem eating tons of chicken - chickens being enormously un-cute animals in their adult state. On my own personal revulsion scale, fur-wearing ranks somewhere above operating a Michael Vick-style dog fighting ring but below not braking hard enough to avoid hitting squirrels in the middle of the road.

Danish fur-wearing doesn't actually suprise me all that much given how Danes can justify a lot of questionable clothing choices as long as they are practical. What does suprise me is that it seems to fly in the face of Danes' otherwise broad and encompassing humanistic tendencies. Here are some examples:

Are those pigs smiling?

• It is illegal to dock the ears and/or tails of cats and dogs.
• It is illegal to hit small animals, oops I mean children - even your own - in Denmark.
• Danes take a lot of pride in their high animal welfare standards in the agriculture industry, as evidenced by this brochure on pig farming.

So the fur thing came as a bit more of a suprise than I guess I expected. Sure, there are plenty of Danes who are plenty against the wearing of fur and the practice of raising animals for fur production. But here is an interesting intersection of Danish ideals found on the corporate website for Kopenhagen Fur, a cooperative of breeders and also the world's largest auction house for luxury hides and skins headquartered in nearby Glostrup.

Kopenhagen Fur acknowledges and respects ethical vegans' rights to abstain from animal products and by-products but then turns it around on its Danish head by saying, "animal rights groups are actually depriving people of their right to choose if they want to use products deriving from animals or not." I wonder though if this whole "protecting peoples' choice to choose" as a Danish value isn't a little hypocritical - I mean, I would like maintain my American choice to choose between more than two brands of pretzels or ketchup in the grocery stores yet that doesn't seem to be happening any time soon. I would also like to exercise my choice to choose a kooky, American-style name like Romeo or Apple for my next child but the Danish government doesn't seem to trust my instincts.

I think as a side project, and because my most recent graphic "statistical analysis" went over so well, I will devote some time in the near future to diagramming the various intersections and heirarchies of the Danish morals and values I am encountering. I joked today to some of my Danish language school classmates that I think I need to get a life. I think I've just confirmed that...