Short Travel Break, Post 2: Louisiana, May Day, Swing, and a Special Hat

Good evening, all.

So, here comes another blog post your way. I have a lot of very short subjects to discuss today, so hold onto something because away we go!

First, I went to Louisiana on Friday. Yep, Louisiana ... Museum of Art. It is in a city called Humlbæk just north of here, and it's a modern art museum. I went with my host parents on Friday. It was quite a place: there was already any room to park around the museum (despite there being 100-200 parking spaces), and this place is in a town that's smaller than Grinnell. There were actually a surprising number of really well-known artists' works, including one Monet and a couple Picasso. A few exhibits were really interesting, such as a few mobiles made from painted straw; others were definitely "Is that art?" moments, such as a solid blue painting called "Monoblue" set across from a solid pink painting called "Monopink." There was also a collection of 10,000+ plaster casts (the artists said that no two were alike), and two immense bronze spiders. I was glad I went, even if I am not usually one for modern art.

Saturday was quite a day, though not exactly as I had planned. In the early afternoon, I left for Copenhagen to go to the big May Day celebration. However, upon getting off the train at Østerport, I had a horrifying realization: I had left my black wool hat on the train! I turned around as fast as I could, but could only watch as the doors closed and the train sped off to the airport with my hat on it. I was crushed... it was a great hat... I went to the ticket counter and said that I had left something on a train, and they told me to call the main office. I did that, but it was in Danish, so the only thing I could do is leave a message (or, at least, I thought I left a message). Then I went to the ticket counter in Nørreport, hoping to find someone else to tell about my hat. They said that there's nothing they can do, and that I should call this different number after 3:00. So, without my hat, I decided to go kill time at the May Day thing that I had planned on attending.

The best way that I can describe the May Day thing is a mix of Block Party, 10/10, the Iowa State Fair, and the Harkin Steak Fry saturated in Communism (Now if your head is not spinning after that, then I have failed). Anyway, so it is a big communist/socialist political day, and there's Communist and Social Democratic party people distributing leaflets and waving red flags and all that. There was a lot of hammer and sickle emblems all over everything, too, and socialist/communist politicians were giving speeches. However, there were also tons of merchants selling all sorts of things, including scarves, jewelry, hats, hot dogs, kebab, thai food, and a bunch of other stuff, so that part was very fair-like. Then there was alcohol. And by that I mean there was alcohol ... and lots of alcohol. There must have been 100+ clusters of Danes sitting around on the grass (the event was held in a big park near the football stadium), each cluster with at least one 30 rack of beer. And the average age was incredibly low, I would say maybe around 30 at the highest. Most of the groups looked like late high school students or early university students, each with their own rack of Carlsberg beer or Sommersby hard cider (keep in mind: the drinking age is 16 here). It was loud and noisy and law-violating (saw plenty of jaywalking, public intoxication, and indecent exposure), certainly not consistent with any of my previous encounters with Danes, except maybe at the FCK football game. Oh yes, and there were concerts going on at the same time as all this.

However, I didn't exactly do much while I was there: I didn't feel like drinking, I wasn't hungry, I didn't want to buy any overpriced accessories, I didn't have anyone to talk to, and I didn't understand any of the speeches; the event was more of a case study of Danish society rather than an actual event that I attended. And I was also missing my hat terribly...

After my camera battery died, I left to go call the number about my hat. They said that I needed to file a lost and found report, and that the sooner I did that, the more likely it would be that I could get my hat back. So, I went back home (an hour long trip, as you already know), and then filed the report. I then killed some time, trying to not think about my lost hat, then, after calling the train station again and having them say that they did not find my hat upon cleaning the trains, I decided to go train hopping to see if I could find my hat.

So, I went to the station and hopped on the train to Vedbæk. No hat. Then I got off and killed some time walking around the empty Vedbæk school before getting on the train to Skodsborg. Again, no hat. In Skodsborg, I walked around a forest killing some time, then got on the train to Klampenborg. Again, no hat. In Klampenborg, I walked around the station and tried to look at it as a logic puzzle; the people at the station said that they have no idea where the trains go once they reach their final destination because they get renumbered upon a successful run. However, I realized that I had left my hat on the :02 indirect train between Nivå and Kastrup. If the train comes at 20 minute intervals and it takes about an hour to get from one to the other, then it would make sense that there are six trains running on that circuit. However, the circuit was about to close soon, so I realized that I could only check two more trains and would have to leave one unchecked. So, I got on the train to Hellerup and went to my previous seat and behold! there was my hat. I grabbed it and proceeded merrily to Hellerup, where I caught a train back to Rungsted. This was an extremely lucky occurrence: any drunk idiot could have picked it up (or thrown it away or vomited in it or goodness knows what else), or the train conductor could have picked it up and thrown it away... but they didn't, and my train hopping paid off. I consider myself very very lucky.

My last interesting thing of the weekend was another session of swing dancing. I think that I wrote about this last week, so I won't talk about it to much here. I danced with a goodly number of people; however, I've come to notice that the dancing scene is a little less casual here than at the Grinnell Swing Society. Here, most people seem to come with their significant other and do not spend much time dancing with anyone else unless they are both particularly experienced in swing dancing. This was certainly not always the case, but I felt like it was an incredible challenge for me to find any available follows for much of the dance. Today, I danced with a Pole, a German, and a few incredibly experienced Danes, and they have told me what many experienced follows have told me: relax and loosen up, only then will I really start to get into the music.

Anyway, that's a wrap for today. Sleep beckons. That's the news, and I'm outta here.