Submitted by Margaret McCaughey on the 2015 spring semester DIS (Denmark’s International Study Program) program in Copenhagen, Denmark…
This week was core course which includes a three day class trip to another part of Denmark. My Positive Psychology class took a four hour bus ride early Thursday morning to the True North Efterskole in Juelsminde. It’s a boarding school for 10th graders. They stay for only that one year before they start “gymnasium” (high school). It was very cool! We ate lunch in their cafeteria (meatballs, salad, and tzatziki) and it was amazing, way better than anything I’ve had at UD dining halls. The whole philosophy of the school centered on positive psychology. The directors, a couple from Colorado drilled “success gems” into the students like “change your brain, to change your mind, to tell your brain to change your life” and an excerpt from a poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox:
One ship sails East,
And another West,
By the self-same winds that blow,
‘Tis the set of the sails
And not the gales,
That tells the way we go.
In general, the school seemed very liberal, but they also had a lot of rules. They had to lock up their lap tops and phones at 8 pm, mandatory exercise class at 6 am, and no sex.
Saturday, we went to ARoS: Aarhus Museum of Modern Art. It was incredible, definitely the coolest museum I have ever been to. Almost all the exhibits involved multiple senses. My favorite was a room filled with a circle of speakers- you could stand in the middle and listen to an opera piece come together, because each speaker played a different harmony.
The top floor was a round rainbow walkway, which is what the museum is known for.
Before heading back, we made a stop at the Queen’s beautiful summer residence, and had a delicious lunch!
Sunday began with a trip to Den Gamle By “The Old Town” which was the world’s first open-air museum of urban history and culture when it was founded in 1909. We went into the little shops and exhibits that depicted what Danish towns looked like in Hans Christian Anderson’s time. We also went into the Commemorative Apartment from 1950 which is used today to assist people with dementia recover lost memories. It was all very cool!
Afterwards, we had a great lunch of smoked salmon, roast beef, and ham sandwiches. Then we headed to Bofaellesskabet Horsager- a cohousing community (faelleskab). It was very neat! The family we met had two small children and their own apartment. The community has a shared building with a large kitchen, dinning area, play room, and living room. It’s great for families with children because they can play together and the parents don’t have to worry about their safety. I would definitely live somewhere like that!
For our last visit of the day, we went to Roza’s family’s house. She is our study tour leader and so great. Her parents immigrated from Iraq and she was born in Syria. They made us tons of cakes and tea and had lots of stories about what they endured being immigrants. So generous of them to do all that and literally fill their house with college students.
That night, we headed to a hostel in Skanderborg. It was beautiful, basically a ranch right on the water. We had pork and potatoes for dinner and gathered around a bonfire that night for snobroed (bread baked on a stick over a fire) and marshmallows that did not nearly turn out as well as roasted marshmallows in the U.S. because of the clear lack of chemicals.
