Good advice on research

"The only reason a reference book won't be on the shelf is if someone is using it at that moment. And if so, the person is still in the reading room, so you can kill them and take the book." I love my Nordic mythology professor.

Know what I don't love? The fact that at the beginning of last night's potluck dessert, the one boy I picked out as the most obnoxious human being I've met in this country is the one who asks for my number by the end of the night. I'd forgotten how unpleasant this whole game can be. Is it crueller to say no from the get-go or wait until later? I didn't really have to decide at the moment, since I didn't remember Jørgen's phone number anyway. Now I get to rehearse my "Nooooo still hung up on someone else good luck elsewhere" speech in case Mr. Loud Marketing Major looks me up in the directory.

Further education

Lest it seem that I spent my entire trip in cowpastures, I should note that Thursday was my first proper night on the town in Denmark (or almost at all, really.) Ålborg is a university town, so it has a walking street with bar after restaraunt after bar after discotheque after bar. The tour leaders took us out at 8 to buy us all a round and Line, true Dane that she is, managed to find a beer I didn't mind.

The adventure started when four DIS kids were leaving with two Danes they had met in the bar and asked if I wanted to come. I tagged along with them, and Henrik and Daniel (his mother was Irish) led us down the street to a second bar with a jazz quartet where Daniel was the bartender. He proceeded to buy all manner of alcohol - our theory was later that he had a thing for Emily or Dan or both. After a while the band announced that anyone who wanted to play in with them was welcome to, so we made Willow join them on the drum set. Willow, a vegetarian theater major from Oberlin with orange leg warmers and a nose ring (could we get any more Oberlin?) was telling me that since I'd never done any of this before she'd walk me home if I had too much to drink and wanted to leave, but I did surprisingly well. It seems that multiple drinks don't make me much fuzzier than one if spaced out enough.

After that we went to a discotheque, where Daniel said some magic words to the bouncer, got us in free, and then produced yet another round. We danced for hours and had a good time laughing at the Danish boys' very enthusiastic dancing. Still more educational was the stripper, whom we certainly weren't expecting. After it became clear who she was and what she was doing a circle of men formed around the front of the room, slack-jawed, while the (shorter) women had to stand on the stairs in the back to see over their heads, wondering how she ever got her pants off over those shoes. At two in the morning we'd had enough and walked the 45 minutes back to the hostel. It was a terrific night.

Danmark, du har mit hjerte

During our first week here we were warned not to fall into the common patterns of reacting to a foreign country, one of which was to abandon one's own nationality and want to become as Danish as possible. I'm struggling with that one right now.

This weekend I was on a school trip around Denmark, which was my first real sight of the countryside. Copenhagen is a beautiful city and I love it, but if you really want me to latch on to a place show me the farmland. Something about it gets to me no matter where it is. Driving past the farmsteads like gold and white islands in their fields of dark plowed earth, sitting on a rock by the harbor in Ålborg watching the sun set, standing by the sea at night with the wind whipping the waves up onto the rocks, it all would have inspired a love of whatever country it was in. But the fact that it was all in Denmark was like the difference between a parent seeing a picture a random 5-year-old drew and seeing a picture their own child drew. The farmhouse in the middle of the green fields under the sun would be beautiful enough on its own, but it gets at me even more with a solar panel on the thatched roof. The cows in the fields make me smile even more with the wind turbines wheeling in the background. The fact that it's all in this sweetly egalitarian place makes it shine.

It made me want to sing patriotic songs, but I don't know any Danish ones. The closest I could come was this, which is the closest Quakers come to patriotic songs. I can't ever be anything but an American, so I won't try to change it, but it made me wish I had been born here instead.

Daughters of feminists

The last 24 hours have been full of luxury: I bought some yarn, found a thrift store, and got the registration number I needed to get a library card. I now have all the books I can read, purple fuzzy yarn, two wool skirts, and a copy of Marie Claire (to practice my French, but more fun than a textbook.) I hadn't realized how poorly I function without access to thrift stores.

In the library I witnessed a rather pathetic sight: a Danish guy was giving a blues performance with his guitar in the main lobby. I assume he had written the lyrics himself, because they were pretty stupid. I felt bad for him, since he was writing in a language that obviously wasn't his own, but you just can't sing the blues in Danish. What would it be about, anyway? "My heart's aching but at least we have free healthcare"? "My woman left me because the kids are in state-funded daycare so she doesn't need my income, and Lutheranism isn't that strong here anymore"? "It rains a lot here"?

My pre-library card reading was Michael Crichton's A Case of Need, which I think was intended to raise issues, but not the ones it raised for me. Without any other factors, you can tell it was written around 1970 because it's clearly after the civil rights movement but the women's movement. Crichton makes a point of having one of the characters be a black lawyer, just like he makes a big point of having female doctors or something in his later books (but a maximum of one main female character per book.) Here, the secretaries are all female and are referred to as girls. The doctors are all men. Their wives are all housewives who apologise for not keeping the kids out of their husbands' hair enough.

The thing that made me think was that a couple of years ago I wouldn't have noticed this at all. He's not making some point about "This is the natural order, and all women should be in the background supporting their husbands." He just doesn't notice or challenge it. It seems so stupid that for 18 years I held most of the assumptions about gender that people started questioning decades before I was born. It makes me want to raise my kids in a vaccuum so they're not raised surrounded by images of people in the traditional roles while they're still too young to question it all. I don't want them to have to go through the miniature revolutions in their heads when US society had this revolution long ago.

Of course, this doesn't work because a) doing this would mean forbidding them most of the world's books, art, etc. because a truly feminist culture has never existed, and b)the scraps of Disney movies that make it into the house would be prized because they're forbidden and rare. It's like that rather clever song:

Daughters of feminists think they'll get married
To some wealthy guy who'll support them forever
Daughters of feminists don't bother voting at all.
Daughters of feminists beg to wear lipstick
Each day from the age of three.

But mom, I don't want to wear a kirtle

Today Jørgen and I went to Tivoli, the Victorian-era amusement park. It's small by American standards but much nicer, with rose gardens and a lake and some of the city's best restaraunts. On Sundays girls dressed as princesses get in free, so the place was teeming with small blonde girls in floofy pink dresses and plastic tiaras. If I'd had a daughter, I totally would have sent her in historically accurate dress. She probably would have hated me. Good thing I don't have a daughter.

Another thing that's really different here is freedom of speech/expression. The definition of hate speech must be a lot lower here, because people have gotten into legal trouble for saying things that wouldn't be as big a deal here. And you're not allowed to get tattoos on your face, neck, or hands. But other things aren't as big a deal - in Tivoli there was a big sign outside an arcade with a painting of a bare-breasted woman on it, which would probably get torn down by outraged parents if it appeared in Disneyland. And I don't know any Danish swearwords yet, but the newspapers print some English ones that would never fly in the US.

Idle hands

After all the warnings from the program that this is not a semester to goof off and that the workload is atrocious, I've decided they left out the caveat "...if you're a giant slacker to begin with." My lack of a social life or a job here means that for the first time I can remember, I have too much spare time. I'm not partying in bars like most people, but I'm not swamped with work either. I'm not even reading because the DIS library has no fiction.

This dilemma may be alleviated by my discovery of the only thing that's cheaper here than in the US: fabric. I figure not having a sewing machine will actually be an advantage, because I can buy a yard or two of something cheap, and then making a skirt or something by hand will eat up time.

Also yarn. There are three yarn stores I've found so far, and at the moment I can't think of any more sensual bliss than standing in the embroidery floss section of a yarn store. The color, the feel . . . I can't stay too long or I start wanting to buy some and embroider things.