DAY 25, TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 5TH
After staying the night in a hostel (3 in my room), we woke up and had breakfast at the hostel and then had to meet in the lobby at 9:30. After checking out of the hostel we headed to our academic visit of the day. We visited a company called Centre for Digital Youth Care to talk about their site called Cyberhus. It is an online program aimed at people aged 9-23 to post and chat anonymously and seek help. There are trained counselors that work there to chat with anyone who needs help and moderate the group chats/chat rooms. It was a really interesting visit and it was hear about their goals and ideas about online counseling. They also had a really neat office space.
After that visit ended, about 12, we headed to ARoS, an art museum in Aarhus. The name of the museum originated from the Viking’s name for the city of Aarhus. We had a few minutes in the gift shop before we met up with our tour guide for the museum. We had a really wonderful and knowledgeable tour guide who took us on about an hour long tour- some paintings that I typically wouldn’t care for too much were much more interesting once he put some context around it. The first painting we looked at was a landscape painting done in “The Golden Age” of Danish art. During this age, with the painting we looked at being a perfect example, paintings were extremely bright, sunny, and picturesque. Painters wanted to show off or “photoshop” the pictures to be extremely beautiful and sunny (as opposed to the realistic gloom of Denmark). This was done in the midst of wars, battles, and many losses for Denmark. After we went to see a painting from the “Modern Breakthrough” period of Danish art. During this time, Danish artists for the first time depicted poverty and some of the negative sides of life. This painting was from the era of industrialization when everybody was moving to the cities so the cities were becoming increasingly gross, diseased, and overcrowded. The specific painting we looked at shows a mother and two kids, most likely abandoned by the husband, looking sad, dirty, and poor. The next piece we looked at was incredible; entitled “Boy,” it was a huge sculpture of a young boy crouched down. From different angles it looked as if he was displaying different emotions. The detail on him was absolutely incredible, down to veins, wrinkles, and toenails. The way the sculpture was displayed in a fully mirrored room added to the effect.
Next we saw a collection of dried flowers and leaves that were pasted to backgrounds and framed. A bit unassuming at first but our tour guide discussed how the exhibit was to show the circle of life as well as death. Flowers represent life, but these flowers died the moment they were picked from the ground. However, what we were surprised to learn was that the flowers were all picked from sites of mass graves. The flowers were given life, most likely, from the nutrients of the soil that bodies were decaying them. Our tour guide emphasized the morbidity of that but I saw it in the more optimistic/hopeful light that from description and death can come new life.
On the will opposite this exhibit there was an exhibit of framed signed from homeless people.
Our last stop was a wall-carpet, like a tapestry but thicker, that depicted a young couple leaving his family’s poor life for a wealthier and better one. Out tour guide pointed out all of the references to Adam and Eve in it. My only complaint is that we didn’t have enough time- I was wishing the guided tour was about double the length of time. Once the tour was over we all headed to the top level where there is a rainbow panorama hallway called "Your Rainbow Panorama," that was built as a representation of Heaven. It was amazing and definitely felt a little more trippy than I thought it would inside.
More pictures of/from ARoS:
We had about an hour to have lunch so me and a few other people headed over to an Asian restaurant nearby (trying to find Chinese since today was Chinese New Year and one girl was missing her family’s celebration at home). It was pretty good food but we cut it to the last second- we were a couple minutes late meeting up with our class at 3, but we made it. We then got back in the bus for about a 25 minute ride to Skanderborg, a town (city?) slightly southwest of Aarhus. The hotel we're staying it is right between two lakes and near the woods. After checking in we went on a BEAUTFIUL walk down to the lake and the dock- it was right at sunset too so it was beautiful. A lot of people headed straight back bc it was “too cold”... but it’s probably one of the warmest days we’ve had so.... some of us kept walking around near the lake and up to a church & cemetery in town.
After the sun set we headed back to relax for an hour before we had a planned group dinner at 6:30 at the restaurant in the hotel. Dinner was a buffet with salads, meat, and bread. After dinner we were supposed to do a class bonfire but apparently there was some mix up with the hotel so we didn’t get to do it :( The hotel had a basement with a pool table and foosball table and such so some of us hung out down there for a while before heading to bed.
Comments