Vi Skal til Home!

Our last day in Denmark was filled with food, scenic driving and snow.

My mom had been mentioning a farmhouse famous for its aebleskiver (sort of the Danish equivalent of a beignet). And I'd been interested in driving, so I hopped behind the wheel and put on my 360° vision to be sure not to drive over any bicyclists or pedestrians (both of whom have the right-of-way in Denmark, making roundabouts extra interesting for a U.S. driver).

We merged onto the E20 and headed south at 130 km/hr. The E20 in this part of the world looks just like I-77, like an interstate in Anywhere, USA, except with windmills and Danish churches popping up on the countryside.


View Larger Map

This map is a little deceptive because we didn't actually go to Bøgede. Instead, near Bøgede, we cut off down winding, narrow backroad through marshy farmland. It was beautiful and remote, and we even saw a pheasant. We ended up at Malerklemmen, a restored farmhouse complete with thatch. Thatch is quintessentially Danish but also rare these days because the fire risk makes for prohibitive insurance rates. Malerklemmen is an extremely popular hole-in-the wall kind of place, comparable to the Dan'l Boone Inn in Boone, NC, where you can get traditional fare in a farmhouse setting and the line to eat is out the door.

We ordered three lattes and a plate of aebleskiver. Aebleskiver are warm dough balls sprinkled with powdered sugar and served with fruit preserves. We ate them huddled at a tiny, warped table in one of Malerklemmen's many small rooms, packed with Danish families and taxidermied animal heads.

On the way back to the E20, the fascinating sky we'd been remarking on finally opened up and pelted us with snowflakes. It was a light, non-sticking snow, but between Malerklemmen and our next stop in Greve, the temperature dropped by 15-20°.

Greve is the town where Mormor lives and it's also where Morfar (mother's father) has been buried for nearly 20 years. We wrapped ourselves as tightly as possible in scarves and stuff and visited Morfar's grave. It was around 4, so daylight was disappearing fast. We didn't stick around to do much exploring in the graveyard, but it would've been a pretty walk. Danish landscape design is beautiful. The graves we did pass were decorated with fir boughs, wreaths and sculpted bushes. This scene will be filled with color again in the summertime.

Afterward, we visited Mormor's house to warm up and have a few pieces of chocolate before dinner. Mormor had asked Uncle Ole to pick up some Leysieffer chocolate on his last trip to Germany in honor of my dad and our last name. Later, Mormor came to Karlslunde, and my mother cooked salmon and little potatoes and red cabbage. Delish.

And that was that. Two weeks in Denmark. Interesting; we saw almost no cell phones on this trip. There were people pushing shopping carts in the mall, and everywhere people were eating (at the bus stop, on their bikes, everywhere with the eating), but almost nobody yakking it up on the cellies. Weird! I thought the cell phone thing was a global epidemic. But maybe people were too busy eating to talk. That chill-to-the-bone weather, along with the walking/biking you have to do to get places, makes you want to eat all the time. That's probably why, even though I consumed around 6 lb of butter during these past two weeks--plus pastry, liver paste, rejeost, cheeses, rice pudding, chocolate and beer--I came back lighter than when I left.

A 10-hour plane trip later, my dad and I hit Atlanta and sunny, 80° Florida weather after that.

Vi Skal til Odense

Pictures from our trip to Odense.

I remember working on the NC Tourism account when Bath, North Carolina, celebrated its tricentennial. Three hundred years was a very big deal.

Odense had its 1,000th birthday nearly 20 years ago. It was founded in 988 (amazing how they can whittle it down to the exact year, after 1,000 years). Two hundred years ago, Hans Christian Andersen was born here. You used to have to board a ferry to get from Copenhagen to Odense. Now you pay a bunch of money and drive across this bridge. It's called the "Great Belt" and is the second-longest suspension bridge in the world, connecting the largest Danish Island, Sealand, to the second-largest Danish island, Fyn. When it opened 10 years ago, I think it was the world's longest suspension bridge, but just afterward, a suspension bridge opened in Japan that beat out the Great Belt by about 300 meters. It's a beautiful bridge, but it doesn't feel that long when you're driving over it. After all, it's only a little over a mile in reality.

As I mentioned, H. C. Andersen was born in Odense about 200 years ago. On the anniversary of his birthday in 2005, the city put H. C. Andersen-style paper-cutting sculpture all over. They're very proud of this famous Dane. Here's a funky, very Danish-looking sculpture in his honor--the three faces of Hans Christian Andersen. When my mom was in the Odense newspaper because of her dissertation on Moliere in the Danish theatre, they took a great picture of her in front of this statue.

Speaking of my mom and Moliere, that's why we made the trip to Odense on this freezing cold, windy Saturday. My mom had tickets to a production of Scapin directed by Emil Hansen. My dad and I couldn't exactly understand what was being said, but watching the actors and set made for great entertainment. The floor was red sand, and the costumes were all shades of pink and gray. Great wigs and great use of motion and space on a WWII bunker-turned-stage situated in a theatre that used to be an old sugar factory.

Anywho, one of the main attractions of Odense is a nice walking/shopping district. Of course, being Saturday, many of the stores--where we might have pretended to shop for 5,000 KR peacoats or adorable 900 KR shoes to escape the face-numbing cold--were closed by 3 p.m. Instead, we found warmth (and more organ music) in several of the city's cathedrals. St. Knud's actually has the skeleton of King Knud/Canute on display under glass. That was gnarly. Danish churches almost always have an elaborate model ship or two dangling from the ceiling, probably to provide holy protection to the sailors, since so many Danes throughout history made their livelihood on the water. Danish churches don't always have stained glass, but this little circle caught my eye.

This sign caught my eye, too. This bageri (bakery) went out of their way to advertise their Kranzekage, a multi-layered celebration cake. Little did we know, we should've picked one up to eat with Champagne at midnight in honor of Mortensaften.

Mortensaften: On the drive home, we passed countless window with candles lit in them. Danes love candlelight, so I shrugged it off as a Danish Saturday night thing. Then we pulled into Crepes o Bøf, the crepes restaurant where we were going to do dinner for our last free evening of this trip, and the waitstaff informed us there was no regular menu, only a buffet for 300 KR a piece. That's $60/person not including drinks and tip. None of the three of us were nearly hungry enough to warrant a 1,000 KR dinner tab, sooooo we went home and enjoyed a delicious asparagus soup and some nice open-faced sandwiches.

Turns out it was Mortensaften, which my mother remembers vaguely. She couldn't quite put her finger why the Danes do what they do on this night: they light candles and eat duck or goose along with a special kind of roll. She called Mormor to school us on Danish customs. Apparently, St. Martin didn't want to become a bishop, so he hid in a barn amongst some geese. The geese made noise that gave him away, so on the eve of St. Martin's Day, Danes punish geese-kind by eating them. Of course, goose is a large and expensive meal, so many Danes actually eat ducks on Mortensaften. Poor fowl.

Art

Wednesday was art museum day. My mom's been wanting to check out Ordrupsgaard, which doesn't look like a difficult word but is nearly impossible to pronounce. The museum is housed in a blend of old manor house and new architecture, which you see below.


None of us knew what to expect except for Impressionist paintings and a Mondrian exhibit.


The Mondrian exhibit walks viewers through his Romantic, Impressionist, Expressionist and Cubist periods before he hit the squares and primary colors and "Neoplasticism" (breaking abstract art down to its purest form). But the prize winner was what they had left of their regular collection. We crossed into the manor house and ran straight into four Gauguins. Be still my beating heart. They also had some stunning Pisarros and an early (1865) Monet of a tree in a park with bright light that you don't see in his later work. That was hanging across from a nice later Monet Parisian bridge piece. One rare Gauguin from 1881 featured a boy sleeping in Tehamana's pose in Manao Tupapau, painted ten years later. That was a painting I don't remember ever seeing before, even after studying Gauguin for a full year, so that got a big "wowwee!"

Further into the manor house part, there's a sculpture from Jean Gauguin (Gauguin's son) of a mermaid and merman. Gauguin's wife, Mette, was Danish, by the way. It seemed to be Jean's first commissioned work. I liked it, but he was under a big shadow from his dad--you never really hear about Jean Gauguin.

They had a collection of Danish painters from the 1800s. One painter named Skovgaard did realistic travel paintings in the 1880s of places like Italy, Greece and Java that looked like photographs.

Next, we headed up the coast to Louisiana, another art museum. This trip showed us a different side of the strand and a few more places where family has lived. Denmark is a small country, but just like other parts of Europe, a short-ish drive takes you into a different landscape. The Køge Bugt area south of Copenhagen is full of cozy cottages. The part of the coast we drove was north of Copenhagen on Øresund. Øresund is the sound between Denmark and Sweden where sailors used to pay an øre to pass. This area's housing is like Charlotte's Myers Park (with substantially more statuary). Then a field would pop up with a huge manor home or castle peeking out in the distance.

Louisiana is just as much of a must-see for the exhibits as it is for its architecture and the fact that it's positioned on a cliff over the sound. We started in the cafe, overlooking the sound and the Calder mobiles, with open faced sandwiches and hot tea. Here's another explicit sandwich pic:


There seems to be a smaller and smaller permanent collection here. The Giacometti sculpture and this Debuffet are part of what's always here, so we could take pictures.






The best part of this Louisiana trip was a visiting exhibit of Richard Avedon portraiture. Very well installed. Started with work from his Harper's Bazaar period in the 50s with models like Carmen and Suzy Parker in Paris. They had his Charlie Chaplin, his Marilyn Monroe, some Warhol, tons of authors, a 1970s American politicians collection, a 1980s trip to Colorado/Montana/Texas, and ending with his fall-of-the-wall pictures in Berlin.


Here's our general feeling about a day of art and our weeks in Denmark. Thumbs up! Or, er, one BIG thumb up.

Copenhagen Again

After Carlsberg, my dad and I trekked back into downtown. We grabbed some open-faced sandwiches to keep us going. The sandwich shop was so small that we had to sit outside. The little kid in the background of this photo was alone outside while his grandmother went in to get coffee. That's still a normal thing in Denmark, though there was that CNN story a few years back about a Danish mother in New York City in major trouble for leaving her child outside a store. This child had a surprising range of facial expressions for someone so small, and he seemed to be carrying on a complicated conversation with his grandmother (of course any conversation in Danish is complicated to me). Funny. The expression he had on his face when I was taking pictures of food was even funnier.

We checked out a few home stores including Illiums Bolighus and Bodum, where my dad finally found his replacement French press carafe and I drooled over new mug designs. We also stopped in the Church of Our Lady, which is a major contrast to Jesuskirken. Austere interior with cream-colored walls. We took a quick pass around the tall, white marble statues of the Disciples that line the interior, and I'm realizing now that one of them held a square--another masonic symbol. Working on National Treasure II over here :) This was Copenhagen as we crossed the road to the train station.

Memory Lane and Beer

Had a good beach jog. I mentioned to my parents that I ran south to a park. My mom said the park is called the "Enchanted Woods" and as children, they were scared to go there because of what might be lurking. Thank goodness nothing happened; I completely forgot to take out gnome insurance before leaving Charlotte.

Back to memory lane, here's one of the row homes my great-great grandfather built in Valby.


And here's the flower shop where they bought flowers for their wedding. Still kicking after 43 years. Flowers are a huge business in Denmark. You never show up anywhere without them.


This whole area was farmland when my mormor and morfar were born in the early 1900s. Here's one of the family homes about two streets up from Jesuskirken. I have foggy memories of being inside this house when more of my mother's aunts and uncles were alive, but the family sold it 20-odd years ago now. Before the yellow house, there was a family farmhouse on this land that burned to the ground.


Another part of this neighborhood is the Carlsberg Brewery.


The tour used to be 2 hours long and awesome. They recently changed it to a self-guided walk through the history of beer in Denmark. That means that "touring" the brewery is nowhere near as cool as it used to be. You don't see the working brewery because they confine you to a little museum area. That's a shame, but there are still draft horses, the world's largest bottle collection (pictured below), a retrospective on Danish beermaking and a tasting room at the end, where I tried one of the Carl's Specials and the newly released Tuborg Julebryg (Christmas beer).


I have a compulsive museum-placard-reading issue, so it took a while to get through the beer retrospective exhibit. A lot of reading. The main message: Denmark loves beer. You never know how much beer-related information to trust at a beer museum, but qualitative research confirms that Danes drink a lot of beer. The exhibit says there was even a "Great Nordic Inebriation" period in the 1600s when beer took the place of water. There were reports of beer shortages when children were "wasting away" on tea. When the Carlsberg Brewery began to thrive, workers enjoyed a patriarchal business model that provided healthcare, behavior guidelines and a 4-gallon-a-day beer ration to each employee. Four gallons a day.

Originally, Danes drank top-fermented stuff. I'm not a huge expert, but top-fermenting yeast seems to be popular with craft brewers in the States; it adds a complex, fruity dimension to beer. Yet, Europeans were going nuts for bottom-fermented beer. When the Danes couldn't create a bottom-fermenting yeast formula that worked, they took a trip to Munich. My Morfar once told my dad a story about this trip: Morfar said that during the tour of the Munich brewery, Jacobsen carried an open-ended cane, which he stuck into the yeast when no one was looking. He carried the sample back to Denmark (the museum said he used a hatbox; they could both be right), and after that, the Carlsberg brewery was able to master the bottom-fermenting, "Bavarian style" beer.

By the way, I always thought the brewery was named after the last name of the founder, but Jacobsen named it after his son, Carl, and added the word "Berg," which means hill, after the place where his first brewery was situated.


The exhibit also describes how taxation issues in the early 1900s helped solidify Bavarian-style beer's status in Danish society. A big tax was added to beer, and it looked like beer would tank, but then a much, much bigger tax was added to spirits. The Danes liked to chase their aquavit (strong, caraway seed spirits) with light, top-fermented beer, but after taxes increased the cost of spirits twelve-fold, Danes ditched liquor and turned to the stronger Bavarian-style beer to cure what ailed them.

I liked the below part of the exhibit for two reasons: 1. it depicts an interesting marketing campaign from WWII applauding the nutritive features of beer. This was an effort to get some of the nation's barley ration allotted to beermaking.


2. This part of the exhibit connected to the Danish Resistance Museum with the mention of a beer crate used to hide explosives that blew up the "Forum" (gotta ask my mom what the Forum is, or was). The exhibit surmises that because a beer crate was used in the Forum attack, a reprisal attack was staged a year and a half later. They blew up part of the Tuborg brewery, and Carlsberg brewed several months worth of beer for Tuborg to their specifications to keep them going.

Another big part of this brewery, literally: the elephants.


Here you can see the swastika again.


And here I am with one for scale:


On our way to catch Bus #6 into central downtown, we passed this housing--it's workforce housing! Looks like these units may have been gentrified. Much of Valby is actually high-density urban housing. Of interest to someone who works for Socialserve.com.

Jesuskirken

Tuesday was memory lane day. We started in Valby, my mom's hood. Carlsberg brewery is here, and so is the church where my parents got married, Jesuskirken.

Jesuskirken was built by the founder of Carlsberg, J.C. Jacobsen, which makes it the church that beer built. It's probably the most ornate Lutheran church in all of Copenhagen--Bavarian-style Danish beer has done well for itself. Every column, pew, window, archway has been carved or sculpted in a different design. There's a bunch of marble and mosaic and a Neoclassical Thorvaldsen sculpture, as well as the first French Romantic pipe organ in Denmark (I can hear you oohing and ahhing from here). It's beautiful; definitely the kind of church people dream about getting married in.

We took some time to examine the designs on the end of each pew, and this is the first place we discovered a swastika. Then we realized it was everywhere.

My mom disappeared for a minute and returned with a gentleman who told us that Jacobsen took the swastika as his own symbol in the 1880s. The swastika is ancient, usually a symbol of peace, and was even used by vikings. 1880 was of course pre-Hitler, so Jacobsen couldn't have known the lasting effect it would have when he plastered them all over his church and brewery.

I didn't get a picture of the swastika, but here's another familiar symbol at the end of one of the pews:


This is a classic Masonic symbol, and actually, so is the swastika and the Star of David, which is all over, too. I have a feeling there may have been a lot of Masonic symbols we missed in here! The Masonic Order doesn't seem to be part of the church's lore, though.

My parents in front of Jesuskirken 43 years later:


This devil is off to the right as you walk up the church. Behind him in this picture is one of the many buildings in this neighborhood where some of my family used to live. Throw it up for Valby!


Next will be Valby and the Carlsberg brewery, but it's 3:45, so I have to hit the beach for a jog before it gets too dark.

Holte

Monday afternoon, my mom had a meeting with a Danish actor who was in her dissertation. My dad and I tagged along to explore the northern Copenhagen suburb of Holte. There are some sweet boutiques up there, so I tried on a pair of skinny jeans to get that out of my system. Decision made--I'll sit tight until that trend passes.

Suzanne and I find the "fart" signs around Denmark especially amusing, so Sister #2, this picture's for you. This sign isn't actually talking about bodily functions; it says that when it's warm, boat tours start here, on whatever this cold, dark, deep body of water is. Little rivers lace all around Copenhagen.

Afterward, we stopped a little further south at Langby to window shop for lighting fixtures and Scandinavian furniture. I'd have brought you guys back some awesome chairs and lamps and stuff if I had an extra zillion Kroner in my pocket.

Parents, Grandparents, Aunts, Uncles, Cousins, More Cousins, Brothers, Sisters, Fiancés and More Cousins

Pictures from the birthday luncheon for Mormor. It lasted from noon til seven at night on Saturday. Many of us haven't seen each other in over a decade. The pictures speak for themselves, so I'll just add names.


Here goes. Standing (l-r): Kirsten & Mike, Annett & Uncle Svend, my mom & dad, Aunt Marianne & Uncle Ole, Caroline & Peter, Bente & Franz; Chairs: Jim & Suzanne, Cousin Kirsten, Mormor, Anni, Pia & Chris (and I'm tucked right in there by Pia); Floor kids: Marcus, Camilla, Christina, Austin, Celine, Claudia, Mia, Gus, Christopher.


Top row: Cousin Peter's kids, Christina and Christopher holding Gus (my sister Kirsten's son) and Mia (daughter of Peter's sister, Cousin Pia); Bottom row: Cousin Kirsten and Mormor


My mom (she's the youngest) and her middle brother, Uncle Ole


Uncle Svend (my mom's oldest brother) makes a toast


Mia checks out the birthday cake

Sunday was more visiting. Was really great to catch up. Wish I lived closer to my cousins!


Cousin Peter, Christina and Christopher

We started with breakfast courtesy of my mom and dad. Afterward, some of took Uncle Svend's family's dog, Waks (I'm sure I'm misspelling that) for a walk on the beach. Claudia, Camilla, Marcus and Waks turned back early, but Peter, Caroline, Christina, Christopher and I continued to a harbor where they clean and filet the fish on the dock and sell it right away. Peter remembers a lot of experiences on this beach from growing up and sailing with my uncles.

Later, my mom, dad and I drove to a harbor to see if we could see some of Cousin Celine's sailing competition on Køge Bugt. There were some interesting boats there. Celine's competition just looked like white triangles (sails) on the horizon. We did see an enormous rabbit and a lot of cool boats. The catamaran is a popular boat type here. This one has cabins in each of the hulls. Uncle Svend lived on a tri-hulled catamaran for a while when I was little.



We also saw this sign indicating that you must apparently wear a porkpie hat to ride on the bicycle path. The guy in the background is not in compliance.

Roskilde

Friday, we all took different roads to the town of Roskilde, which should be about 30 minutes away. This was the original capital of Denmark and has a rich viking past. There's a neat museum here because in the 1950s, five viking ships were discovered under a pile of rocks blocking Roskilde Fjord. Twenty-five years later, the ships had finally been painstakingly reconstructed inside the museum.

Each ship was a different style and used for different purposes--trade, viking transport, war--and after they'd passed their prime, they were filled with rocks and scuttled to blockade the fjord and slow enemies. Outside the museum is a village of buildings that my pop said were where they reconstruct viking ships for exhibition using traditional tools. The main path has ships dry-docked on either side. The path is lined with small trees, each with a plaque describing how its wood was used in viking ships and which trees typcially hold elves. It's amazing how many different kinds of ships there are. This one looked like a dragonboat to me, except it holds 60 passengers, not just 22.

Inside, besides the five ships, you can watch a movie about the five ships, read about where the replicas are sailing these days, shop for viking wares like skins and swords and coloring books, and see how the vikings may have organized a battle around Roskilde Fjord. It's interesting how much their war tactics and culture must have inspired the Lord of the Rings trilogy. They had fire beacons for when war broke out, the naming conventions are similar, they have elves (living in Alder trees, apparently) and they talk about "middle earth," too. Funky!

All the same, it's difficult to view them as scary, mighty warriors when they may have looked like this:




Or this:



Ack! Never mind. That's very scary.

We shed our fur-lined cloaks and trucked up the hill to the Roskilde Cathedral. The Danes have been burying kings and queens here for centuries, but it's weird--most are not even in sarcophoghi. They just have ornate, above-ground coffins. My father challenged me to find Harald Bluetooth's grave, and I did. It turned out he was buried in one of the church pillars. Economical use of space. There are also parts of the floor in this cathedral where you can't walk without stepping on a grave.

Christian IV, whose castle we visited a few days ago, Rosenborg, has his own big chapel emblazoned with the C4 logo. He and his wife as well as his heir apparent and several others have lain here since the 1600s. The whole experience was a mixture of religion, art, sepulchral delights and choppy music from the pipe organ (someone was taking lessons).




Suzanne and two little devils :)