Prowling my world, camera in hand

29 July 2014

Week 29: mostly Aarhus

Filed under: — Administrator @ 22:54

Following my travels to Rome and Munich the preceding week, I came home Friday night, but Sunday morning I was off again, this time on vacation in Denmark. I spent a week cycling around the country with my friend Lars, as I do every summer now. The tour is documented elsewhere; the pictures I show in this blog are mostly from the Sunday before we set out and the Monday when we came back.

29_1
I arrived in my hometown Aarhus around lunchtime. After relaxing a bit, Lars and I walked to Den Gamly By. Den Gamle By (“the old town”) is a unique open-air museum on the edge of Aarhus Botanical Gardens, where several streets from a 19th century town have been recreated, complete with streets, houses, shops etc.:
DSF7667

29_2
But we had gone there to see something else. A new section of Den Gamle By is devoted to the decade of our teenage years, the 1970s. On the one hand, it is depressing that one’s youth is now judged fit for a museum; but on the other hand it was truly fun to see and relive those years. This is a small grocery store, with the actual products (not for sale) and the prices of back then:
DSF7615

29_3
There was also a hifi shop with the stuff I drooled over in 1974 but had no way to buy, as this turntable cost almost four times my mother’s monthly net salary:
DSF7640

29_4
VCR, anno 1974. Here we are talking SERIOUS money:
DSF7643

29_5
The two shops were on the ground floor of an apartment building. On the upper floors, several apartments have been recreated in a very thorough manner. This one belonged to an elderly couple, so the furnishings were old-fashioned already 40 years ago:
DSF7616

29_6
This is a young family’s living room, not too dissimilar from what I remember:
DSF7626

29_7
Although we did not have THIS on our walls:
DSF7624

29_8
The apartment next door was a gynecologist’s practice:
DSF7619

29_9
The doctor’s waiting room–note the ashtray:
DSF7618

29_10
The examination room; and no, that’s not a real patient behind the curtain:
DSF7623

29_11
One floor up there was an apartment that had belonged to a kollektiv, or commune. It was not uncommon for young people to live like this back then, motivated not merely by a desire to pool expenses but just as much by ideals about communal living. The bed with an old wooden beer case (used to hold 50 bottles) is a classic. I too had such a night table in my bedroom:
DSF7631

29_12
A poster of Karl was standard equipment as well:
DSF7635

29_13
Typical student’s desk:
DSF7636

29_14
Toilet with Chairman Mao’s little red book:
DSF7633

29_15
The living room. Interviews with former members of this commune are shown on the monitor:
DSF7639

29_16
There is also a museum of classic Danish posters, some of which would probably fail today’s PC tests:
DSF7648

29_17
Everyone who lived in Denmark in the second half of the 20th century has seen Karoline the Cow a million times:
DSF7650

29_18
Finally, there was all the great music. This poster advertises a concert in the dorm where I lived in the late 70s and early 80s, by a very popular Danish group called Delta Blues Band. They were later joined by American guitarist Billy Cross and changed their name to Delta Cross Band, before splitting up some time in the 80s:
DSF7654

29_19
Lars looks at an interactive map of Aarhus where the most important bars and music places are indicated. Some of them still exist (often in different incarnations), other do not:
DSF7660

29_20
Having got our fix of nostalgia, we went back to Lars’s apartment. After dinner, Lars skyped with his 1-year old grandson Lauge, whom we were going to see the next day–he and Lars’s daughter live in Odense, 144 km from Aarhus, and our first stop on the tour:
DSF7669

29_21
DSF7671

29_22
DSF7672

29_23
About 24 hours later, we are with Lars’s daughter Marie, her husband Jonas and baby Lauge in their house in Odense:
_1010779

29_24
On Tuesday, we had lunch in the workshop of Jørn Svendsen, a friend of Lars and an utterly delightful and fascinating man. He is Scandinavia’s premier bronze caster, analogous to a photographic printer; the artists come to him with their works in ceramic or wax and he turns them into bronze sculptures:
_1010792

29_25
Another work of art in Svendsen’s workshop:
_1010794

29_26
It is Thursday afternoon, and we have arrived in the centre of Copenhagen. Lars took a picture of me on Langebro, a bridge linking the “mainland” of Zealand with the smaller island of Amager, which among other things contains Copenhagen Airport:
_1010902

29_27
Friday morning. The sun is rising over our tent:
_1010905

29_28
Morning dew:
_1010918

29_29
Sunday evening. We are back in Aarhus, and Marie, Jonas and Lauge have come to visit. Lars gets down to Lauge’s level:
DSF7682

29_30
Jonas trying to communicate with his son:
DSF7687

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Leave a comment

Powered by WordPress