Weekend, a bit later

This weekend, I went to check out the local Aarhus art museum, called Aros. This museum was very interesting, because it had a huge range of art - from very classical portraits from the 19th century, to sculptures, modern performance pieces, and installation art. One really cool thing I though the museum did well was to take advantage of having this wide range of art and juxtapose modern art with older works, like here:
These sculptures were supposed to imitate a playground. The whole room was packed full of them, and you had to follow a twisty path to get through the room.
I think the craziest piece of art was this one:
These are jars filled with preserved horse parts. It was part of an art exhibit from the 70s by a Danish artist who ritually slaughtered and preserved the horse. Somehow, it was intended as an artistic protest against the Vietnam War. It was quite gruesome.
One of my favorite exhibits was a collection of collages and other works made out of day-to-day objects that people had discarded. The objects were combined in interesting ways to make statements about our endless cycle of buying new objects and then discarding them as soon as there is the smallest thing wrong with there. I thought this box was neat.
Finally, the museum is pretty famous for this sculpture called "Big Boy":
Seriously, this thing is huge, like 20 feet tall. I think I actually have seen some works by the same artist, last winter at the Andy Warhol museum in Pittsburgh with Claire. What's amazing is how detailed these sculptures are - each pore and hair is there; they are in fact rather creepy because they are so well-done and life like.

I also went to the beach on Saturday - the weather was great the whole weekend! There aren't really many sand beaches in Denmark (most are quite rocky), so they typically build artificial sand beaches. The one is Aarhus is really nice and is located by the forest I go running in. Here is a picture of some crazy people swimming in the super cold water (I refused to go farther in than one toe):
I also went for a nice walk along the stream that runs through the center of Aarhus; people here just call it "the stream" (which is one of the shortest words in Danish - one letter. It's the a-with-a-circle-over-it. The only other one letter word is the word for island, which is just the o-with-a-slash letter). The stream one of my favorite places in Aarhus. It's a great spot for people watching because lots of people come out and enjoy the summer evenings there. You can see teenage punks, families with little kids, elderly couples, and everything in between sitting on the docks next to each other.


Tomorrow night I leave for London, where I will be reunited with my one true love, Claire O'Hanlon! YAY!