En fødselsdag, to museeter, og syv timer i Malmö

Jackie's 21st birthday was delightful! Pussy Galore's Flying Circus turned out to be merely a funky café with some *interesting* wall art, but the food was good, and my grilled tuna salad was big enough to provide lunch the next day, too. As for the Absolut Ice Bar, it was totally touristy and gimmicky and completely worth it. It's not a huge place, but the entire room is in fact made out of ice, down to the benches and glasses. Picture-taking took up most of our stay, and as other people have managed to upload them, I will find a way to do so soon. I have to warn you, though, they're a bit ridiculous-- everyone was issued a giant blue poncho-parka upon entry (apparently more to keep your body heat from melting things than to keep you warm), so we all look more silly than we might otherwise. Dara and I saved our ice-glasses! Not sure what to do with them, as they can't really live outside of the freezer, but they're still fun to show off for now.

Thursday also brought a trip to the Frihedsmuseet, the Danish Resistance Museum, with a couple of girls I found through the Jewish Students group on the DIS Forum. The trip to Østerbro alone was nice-- I love seeing different neighborhoods, as it's all too easy to just hang around in my own--and the area was all along the water and quite lovely. Plus, we found a small but endearing (and blue) cafè on the walk back.

The museum itself was small but well-done, which seems to be a trend. What I think was most interesting was that in all of the time I've spent learning about World War II and Nazis and the Holocaust, I don't think I'd ever considered the experience of any Gentiles off the front lines. This comes back to the utter lack of Scandinavian history to be found in American schools, as far as I or anyone else with whom I've discussed this can tell. I know all about hiding people in attics and French Resistance and food rations in American, but other than reading Lois Lowry's Number the Stars ages ago, nothing of smuggling Jews in fishing boats to neutral Sweden or King Christian & co.'s acquiescence to occupation or Danish plots to divert trains and take down planes. So the museum contained a lot of totally new information, and the sheer amount of artifacts it contained to back all of that history up was amazing.

After an uneventful Friday, I met up with half a dozen other girls (Jackie, Dara, Jen, and new friends Ilana, Hannah, and Sara) Saturday morning to catch a train to Sweden! Yes, the country is so close to København that we can take a day trip to Malmö and still be home in time for dinner (I had an omelette). We didn't even need passports, which was kind of disappointing to those of us seeking new stamps.

Malmö was quite fun-- we kept marveling at how different it was from other European cities we'd each been to, including Danish ones. There were a few squares that made you go, 'Oh, I'm definitely in Europe,' but a lot of the city (and, for reasons I'll get into in a moment, we saw a lot of it) was surprisingly modern, with a whole different aesthetic. Before hunting down lunch, we hit up the Turning Torso, an apartment building whose structure twists 90 degrees from base to top, and the waterfront, where we had an amazing view of the Øresund Sound and the bridge from Sjælland to Sweden, which only just opened in 2000.

After a quick lunch, we backtracked slightly to Malmöhus Castle. Though it's almost 500 years old and clearly holds a lot of history, we didn't get much out of it-- almost all of the exhibits were only in Swedish. And most of them seemed to have little to do with each other, or even with the castle! Cases in point included the aquarium downstairs (accompanied by an exhibit of nocturnal creatures), some strange mirror-tunnel painted with stars, a hall of taxidermied megatrons literally entitled "Really Old Stuff" (of all the things to translate into English there...), and a two-room installation of modern art called "Law and Disorder." Bizarre, all of it, but at least it only cost 20 kr., which in Sweden meant about $3.

After that jaunt, we made it to a few quick sightseeing sights-- City Hall and St. Petri Church in the Stortorget square, the smaller square Lilla Torg, and the pedestrian shopping street Södergatan. Mid-afternoon, we split into two groups; Ilana, Dara, Jackie, and I went in search of the Malmö synagogue. I don't think there was anything of extra significance about it (other than being the only one marked on our tourist map), but it seemed exciting to find Jews in Sweden.

We got majorly lost on the way despite my otherwise superior map-reading skills, which is why we've now seen so much of the city-- although in my defense, I did get us un-lost, to the synagogue, and to a bus stop just in time to meet the others at the train states. The synagogue was lovely from the outside but closed; still, it was worth seeing and we were all glad to have found it. At that point, we pretty much made it home just in time to crash.

Today was entirely quiet and almost unscheduled-- slept in, Pilates class and workout at the nearby gym, some reading, etc. I did go to a screening of the apparently landmark Danish film "The Celebration," which left me more than a bit nauseated (hand-held camera technique) and a bit horrified with humanity.

On the upside, the screening was preceeded by my ordering a chai at Baresso entirely in Danish! The barista even responded in kind, which they never do when it's totally obvious you're not a native speaker, and we only switched to 'Engelsk' when I didn't understand her query if I wanted the drink to go or not. Definitely exciting, however minor. It's like discovering the boots-over-jeans fashion statement-- the little bits of things that click and make you feel kind of assimilated are really, really fun, no matter how trivial or unnecessary. And it's an added bonus that I'm surrounded by Americans that totally understand my reaction.

It's a short week of classes, as we leave Thursday morning for the short study tour, where I'll be learning about local government and the Danish and German minorities on either side of the Danish-German border. Hej-hej!