Brief interlude

What I’m about to write about doesn’t really relate to Denmark, but it has me so shaken up that I really need to share with the public. After all, misery shared is misery divided, so let’s get rolling.

On my host father’s recommendation, I watched a Danish documentary about gun ownership and use in America. Specifically, it dealt with gun ownership in families, and looked at several families who have taught their kids how to use guns at a very early age. Now, I don’t have any fundamental problem with people owning guns. There is the Second Amendment, and if people feel that owning a gun is necessary for their safety and peace of mind, I’m pretty much okay with that.  And if they own guns, I would much rather know that they were educating themselves and their family members in the safe and proper use of guns. That’s why I was really happy when I heard one of the fathers in the documentary tell his son to respect the gun he was firing, that the gun was dangerous and not something to be played with.

What I WASN’T happy about was that this child, who was no older than six or seven, had just been firing  A GODDAMN ASSAULT RIFLE. My Danish isn’t great, but I believed that the voice-over narration said that the child was using an assault rifle similar to that used in the Vietnam War. Furthermore, he was too little to hold the gun on his own! His father was standing beside him helping him hold it. And yes, that’s a good, safe way to approach it, but I’m saying that the child did not have sufficient arm strength TO HOLD THE GUN BY HIMSELF. This is COMPLETELY unnecessary, and frankly it’s pretty dangerous. You have a child who cannot HOLD the gun, and I don’t think that “giving him a feel for it” before he can do multiplication is a good way to encourage proper respect for the weapon. And I was not comforted by the camera zooming in on the child’s face as he fired the assault rifle. He was gleefully laughing, and his eyes were closed.The father then admonished the child, saying that he needed to respect the gun. Call me crazy, but maybe the father should wait until the child has a respect for the weapon BEFORE HE’S PULLING THE DAMN TRIGGER?! That seems akin to bringing a high school kid into the operating room, handing him a scalpel, and only AFTER he’s started making the incision do we say “Hey now, that’s a human life. Careful there.”

My fears were only further confirmed by the seven year-old girl who said that she liked shooting guns more than school, because “you don’t have to think.” She qualified her statement, saying that “well, sometimes you need to think about where you’re aiming”, and I quote this without mockery. I’m glad to know that she has a sense of responsibility about this. But still, she sees guns as something more…removed from conscious action. And that terrifies me. And the fact that she likes guns better than school. I guess this makes sense–the family in which she was raised was describing their trips to the shooting range as an “after-school activity” like baseball or soccer, and it doesn’t surprise me that a young child would enjoy an after-school activity more than

Earlier, I said that I’m “pretty much” okay with guns. This “pretty much” basically covers pistols and rifles. I have a very hard time listening to arguments that assault rifles and machine guns are necessary for “self-defense”. If you’re an enthusiast, fine. You can go to a shooting range and have a grand old time with your high-powered weaponry. But I watched a father of five say that he keeps a LOADED AK-47 next to his bed in order to “dissuade” anyone who broke into his house from engaging in any sort of a fight. In the most literal sense of the word, that’s overkill. Assault rifles are most pragmatically used to kill large groups of people very quickly. If your neighborhood is known for experiencing break-ins executed by groups of highly-armed, well-trained assailants that engage in urban-warfare tactics, then fine. I stand corrected. But in my defense, though I’m no criminologist, I’m fairly sure this type of crime is isolated in the US.

If this sort of documentary is shown often on Danish television, I finally understand why one of the first questions my host father asked me about my life at home is how many guns I owned.

On a happier note, I watched this documentary while eating delicious home-made cake.  And I promise, I’ll be writing my end-of-my-time-in-Denmark-for-now closing thoughts soon. I was just WAY too pissed off by this to let it go.

I’m going to miss this place

Two things happened today that made me pause and think of what a unique place I’m in.

The first is that this afternoon, I sat down at the fountain on Gammel Torv (a very beautiful fountain at that) to eat a slice of pizza (potato and rosemary pizza at that!). The person sitting next to me looked over at me and said “Velbekomme”, which translates to “you’re welcome” but is usually used in reference to someone who is about to eat or has recently eaten, and in such a context it essentially means “enjoy your meal.” So this stranger was wishing well upon me, the stranger who sat down to share his spot on the steps of the fountain. I said “tak” (“thank you”) and enjoyed my pizza a little bit more because of it.

The second is that, sitting in a bar called “Eiffel Bar” this evening (it’s a bar decorated with Parisian motifs, which adds greater validity to my observation that all of Europe is in love with France and Paris in particular) with my friends Rich and Eric, we hear “Gangster’s Paradise” playing, which is about as noncongruous as it gets. Eric asked, with appropriate incredulousness, “Is it 1996 again?” Despite this oddity, we all agreed that Copenhagen was probably the best place for us to study abroad–the city is accessible and its people make us feel comfortable. Eric and I are already figuring out “an excuse” to come back. I just hope that when I do, my host family will still have the spare room for me. I don’t know what I’d do without their cooking and snarky comments.

I’m going to miss this place.

All I need is somewhere I can feel the grass beneath my feet

I am extremely happy about the post I am about to write.  This post is the second of two subjects that I planned to write about before I even touched down in Denmark, so it’s rockin’ to fulfill that dream–that’s the dream of writing about wind turbines and alternative energy.

So let’s begin!

OH MY GOD WIND TURBINES. Wind turbines are so damn cool. They’re clean, they’re a source of unlimited energy, they have a minimal environmental impact, and they’re fairly efficient, although they have problems with storing energy and, obviously, wind power is a not-entirely-reliable source of energy. I also think they’re quite beautiful, in a very modern way–the sleek white blades moving against a sky a shade of blue that somehow mixes bright with dark…it honestly moves me. And I had the great fortune to spend a weekend on the island of Samsø, a small island community that produces an energy surplus from renewable sources: solar, biomass, and above all, wind. Aside from transportation, the island is able to meet its entire energy needs from these renewable sources and still be able to sell energy back to the national grid, which is DOWNRIGHT INCREDIBLE. ALTERNATIVE ENERGY IS A PROFITABLE ECONOMY HERE. Our guide on the island, a man named Frank who deserves more mention and will receive it soon, referred to the wind turbines as “money presses” for that very reason, and said that the wind turbines single-handedly saved Samsø’s economy in the early 2000s. Now, I suppose I have to qualify the magnitude of this: Samsø is an island of roughly 4000 people, and it’s very small-town. My friend Eric referred to it as “the scenic Midwest”, and that’s a good way of describing it–lots of farmland, small villages, etc. It’s not as though this is some Danish Hong Kong being powered by the wind. But it’s still an incredibly beautiful place–emphasis is needed on the “scenic” part of Eric’s statement. It is also a small community, yet very warm for it. When we had stopped in one small town and were wandering around the neighborhood, two of my friends were stopped by two elderly Samsø residents. When my friends responded that they were American students visiting the island, the elderly people (a mother and her son, it turned out) invited them in to their house so that the Americans could have a true feel for what Samsø was like. Isn’t that incredible? Apparently the mother even apologized for not having any tea or cookies to offer my friends, as though generous hospitality was just what was expected from a home in Samsø.

We traveled around Samsø on bikes, which was definitely the best way to do it–biking gave you the best feel for the island and gave you the freedom to stop and take pictures every 50 meters, which many of us chose to do. And I’m proud to say that despite my inexperience with biking (keep in mind, my 12-year old host brother mocked my poor biking abilities), these sudden stops didn’t throw me off at all–no collisions with others, no riding into the curb and going over my handlebars…nothing but smooth sailing and INCREDIBLY sore legs for the next week or so. Seriously. We biked about 40 miles over two days. But it was completely worth it, even when we biked up this wretched kilometer-long slow incline. It left my legs burning, but it was worthwhile to get to the stop and sit on a cliff overlooking the ocean.

When we weren’t biking, we were being taught about alternative energy at the Samsø energiakademi by a man named Frank, who described himself as a “frustrated nuclear physicist”, and my God did he look the part. He wore this garishly colored polo shirt, and those who know me and my appreciation for colorful clothing should be shuddering at the thought of something that would make me declare it outlaw. The polo was striped in two different patterns: the front of his shirt was striped in reddish-pink and blue, while the back was striped in green and orange. I spent the better part of the day quietly asking myself what would move a man to commit such an act against himself, and I was surprised when we received an answer, and a damn clever one at that. Frank finally acknowledged his shirt (after it had been shrieking at us all day) and said “You might wonder why I wear such a shirt. It is my defense. As long as I wear it, I give myself a guarantee that I will never be filmed and added in to a documentary.” It was his silent protection for his camera-shyness. I instantly gained newfound respect for this man, because not only is it clever, but it is self-sacrificingly so. This is the type of wisdom that this man possessed–the insight to solve a problem so quietly and so decisively. Frank also spoke at length about how Samsø came to be Samsø, and that too demonstrated his wisdom. He said that the most important part was to make everyone feel like they had a role in shaping the island, that they were invested in and responsible for the project and its outcome. This meant slowing the process down, but the end result was that a much more dedicated community supported the project, and there were more resources (both abstract and concrete, like willpower and large supplies of straw for burning) brought to the table. Everyone on Samsø, Frank said, is proud of what they have done for themselves, for Denmark, and for the environment.

And lest we feel out of place, we did our best to participate in the community/environmental friendliness of the place because, well, everyone on the trip was a hippie (yeah that means YOU TOO, Eric!). So we bought our own food and cooked dinner together, collectively dividing the labor between roughly thirty-two people, and the results were a LOT better than my previous foray into student-led cooking. We had three types of salad, chicken prepared in two ways, an appropriate amount of pasta (although ironically, I volunteered to buy the proper amount of pasta. Why the hell did I do that? Don’t I EVER learn? Thank God someone else was with me to check my impulses), and garlic bread with this incredible goat cheese dip.

And then, when we returned to our hostel, we found that the hostel had a little playground, including this AWESOME semi-inflated…THING. There’s no real way for me to describe it other than a huge sheet of thick rubber stretched over the grass and slightly inflated. When roughly fifteen of us got on the mat, the air was pushed in to the center so that we could all bounce around on it. This resulted in a lot of stupid ideas, including running from one end to the other to ride the wave of inflated plastic/knock each other over, playing duck-duck-goose, and just bouncing around like a bunch of loonies. Subsequently, there were several, several collisions. But one of the professors on the trip with us (who was bouncing around with just as much vigor as the rest of us) pointed out that having fun in this way used no CO2 emissions and was run off of renewable energy (BOUNCING!), and thus it was wholly sustainable. This comment easily added tenfold fun to the entire affair.

The hostel was also situated in the middle of a field so large that you could lose yourself in the sky. My friends and I would go out and stand in the field before going to bed each night, and one of us pointed out that if you looked long enough into the sky, it looked like there were cobwebs between the stars. It was incredible.

The hostel also had ponies. That’s right. Sustainable energy, long bike rides in perfect biking weather (warm enough to be outside, not too warm to make you really sweaty when you were bike riding), the moving asthetics of wind turbines, great food and great community, communitarian committment to a greater good, sustainable fun, and ponies.

Awesome.

P.S. The post title comes once again from Belle and Sebastian’s “Asleep on a Sunbeam.” Second time using that song in this blog. That tells you, dear reader, that you should look into it, because you can bet that it’s a pretty great song.

P.P.S. And speaking of Belle and Sebastian, when we were doing introductions with Frank, he asked us to say something that meant a lot to us. A lot of people talked about building relationships with others, helping others, making their community better, etc. I fell in to the first category, but I said that it was best summed up by Belle and Sebastian’s “I’m a Cuckoo”, the lyrics of importance being “I’m glad that you are waiting with me/Tell me all about your day.” This resulted in many people talking about Belle and Sebastian with me, which made me really, really happy. And one person said I looked like someone who would listen to Tegan & Sara. HUGE compliment in my book.