Slow Goings

I always start blogs under the impression that I'll have frequent posts about exciting endeavors. That was certainly the case for my first blog, when I studied abroad in Chile during college. And chronicling my pan-continental trip home from Korea to the States was relatively uptempo, with dispatches from different countries weekly. But the records of my year in Korea, valuable though they are to me now, never quite leapt off the page.

I'm finding the same to be true for my Danish adventures.

It's a good life, to be sure, familial and warm, and nowhere near as lonesome as Korea could be. A full house of yelling kids and conversational parents is a far cry from a shoebox apartment in a pulsing metropolis of ten million (Denmark's entire population is roughly half that). I find the weeks melding together into a glow of play-wrestling and hugs, dinners, jokes and "how was your day"s. It's easy here.

With that ease comes little inclination to set down in writing my day-to-day activities. But I know even the most mundane details can be useful, if only as a comfort to my future self. So I'll strive to record, and hopefully make even remotely entertaining, bits and pieces of my Danish life.

I spent a week in Dresden and Prague a while back. The kids had a holiday from school, so Charlotte and Jonas sent them packing to their grandparents' in Herning. I caught a flight to Berlin a bus from there south to The Florence on the Elbe. Dresden, the beautiful seat of what is now the Free State of Saxony, was ravaged late in WWII by Allied boming, an event at the center of Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five." The winkingly semi-autobiographical science-fiction novel uses Vonnegut's characteristic awkwardness to create an unforgivingly honest and humiliating "war story." Vonnegut novels nudged me, reluctant and fumbling, through high school and then some; a quiet reminder that someone else was questioning society's eagerness to overlook its inhumanity. With the site of one of his most popular works so close, I was excited to see it for myself, and hopefully be imbued with some of the sentiments that struck the young writer during the course of his imprisonment in the city during the war.

It wasn't necessarily a fulfilling journey. I couldn't say I knew exactly what I hoped to get out of my visit there, some revelation or epiphany, but there were none of those. I did not consider, in a fairly glaring oversight, that, of course, almost none of the things I would see there would even have existed at the time of Vonnegut's confinement. The beautiful architecture he saw was reduced to rubble before he left. The eponymous Slaughterhouse Five, his ersatz prison, and its surrounding meat-packing complex have since been rebuilt into a convention center. Churches have been rebuilt in their former images. The river Elbe remains.

But I had an entirely enjoyable visit. I made friends with local students by using an internet "couch surfing" website, ate phenomenal Saxon food, visited wonderful museums and toured a Volkswagon factory. The city seems to have been returned to its old splendor. It was certainly splendid enough for me.

In the middle of the week, I took a two-day trip south to Prague, only two hours away. The tight alleyways and smog-thick air were an unwelcome change from Dresden's open spaces and relatively few tourists, but the food and beer were good and cheap. So was the chamber music concert I saw at the Rudolfinium Auditorium. I met five Canadians on a vacation from studies in Copenhagen, and we exchanged phone numbers.

I returned to Dresden to finish the week, then spent the night before my flight home in Berlin, where I ate currywurst and saw the Brandenburg Gate for the second time.

This past Saturday I visited the library in Copenhagen and roasted two chickens for my Swedish friend Janni, her sister, her Norwegian boyfriend Lykken and their friend Kajsa. We hit the town after dinner, with interesting results. On Sunday I visited the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art to catch the final day of their Walton Ford exhibit, a sort of bizarro-Audobon series of life-size watercolors of animals being brutal to each other or being treated brutally. It was eerily fascinating. The museum campus itself is wonderful, a winding circuit of halls and rooms on the coast 30 minutes north of Copenhagen. Sweden is easily visible from the windows. They have an excellent cafe where I had a mushroom sandwich and a glass of beer. In the evening I visited Christiania for the first time to meet one of the Canadians from Prague at a music club. It was too loud for conversation and too smokey to stand, so I didn't stay long.

This week has been uneventful. I've been lazy with my running. Jonas and I have a 15k Sunday, after which I'll stop by Janni's birthday get together. I hope to have an exciting present for her, but promising ideas are not forthcoming so far.