Day 37 - One Day I Went to Aarhus

Aarhus Central Train Station

Well, the past week has seen me visit some interesting places :) This naturally means a long blog post, so get ready for it:

As the end of my last blog post indicated, I was on my way to Aarhus, Denmark. The inspiration for this trip had everything to do with a poem that I studied at school in my final year by Seamus Heaney. The poem's title is "Tollund Man", and the poem begins thus: "Some day I will go to Aarhus/To see his peat-brown head".

You can find the full poem at the following address: http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/poems/heaney/the_tollund_man.php

I must make it perfectly clear, though: I dislike this poem intenseley. Possibly, in part, due to how saturated we were by it at school.. But I think that it is largely due to the fact that it just isn't a nice poem.

The idea of going to Aarhus, however, was just too awesome to pass up.



One of the canals in Aarhus

The city itself has about 300,000 inhabitants, making it the second-largest city in Denmark (after Copenhagen). It is located on the mouth of a small river (indeed, Aarhus means "river mouth" in old Danish), and has a few nice canals in it. The currency of Denmark is the Danish Kroner, which is worth about 7.5 euros as of the time of writing this article (for current market rates, visit http://www.xe.com/.. And then go outside and do something interesting). Aarhus doesn't sell stickers with the city's name printed thereon.



Busy town, Silkeborg

To the east of Aarhus, about an hour's train ride, is the town of Silkeborg. If you, like me, are a trusting person, then you will believe Heaney when he says that the Tollund Man is in Aarhus. However, you would be misled, as the Tollund Man is not in Aarhus but in Silkeborg. Maybe Silkeborg's three-syllabled name was unsuitable for Heaney's requirements of poetic meter, whereas Aarhus fits better. In any case, we won't waste any more time on conjecture around the motivation for Seamus Heaney's deception.



Silkeborg Museum

So, in Silkeborg is the Silkeborg Museum. It is a nice little museum, with some nice artifacts from thousands of years ago, extending through the middle ages to the recent past. Among the oldest of Silkeborg Museum's items is the Tollund Man himself, who dates from the 4th century BC.

So I went and saw him. The exhibition is nicely set up, and his head is very well preserved, right down to the stubble on his face. Unfortunately in the 1950's (when he was discovered) preservation techniques were such that only the head, fingers and feet could be adequately protected from deterioration. The body is, therefore, a reconstruction, but a very convincing one. The benefit of the fingers being conserved is that the Tollund Man's thumbprint is the oldest fingerprint on record.



The man himself

 So yeah. Tollund Man.

Otherwise, my activities in Aarhus also included playing guitar and eating pizza. Both were enjoyable experiences. On my first night in Aarhus I sat down and played guitar with another lady at the hostel, who turned out to be Bodil Ashkenazy, whose father-in-law is the famous Vladimir Ashkenazy. She is a musician herself, and has a lovely voice. We exchanged CD's, which was great :)



Beer and Busking - great Sunday arvo

As for busking, I had a great time playing in the pedestrian mall for a few hours on Sunday afternoon. Everyone was very generous and, as always, thank you so much to those who bought a CD :)

Part of my audience were two Lithuanian guys who had come to Aarhus to study. They gave me beer, I gave them CD's, and we sat and chatted for a little while. Wonderful afternoon.

The next blog post constitutes my trip to, and brief stay in, Vienna, Austria :)