Jazz, a Castle, and Danish foods

Saturday was the first day of the Aarhus Jazz Festival. Summer is Jazz Festival Season, and Aarhus is not immune. I went to the opening concert, which was actually big band music, with a couple Danish people I met on the website couchsurfing.com. This is a meet-up website for travelers all over the world. Basically, if you travel to a city and want somewhere to stay, or just to meet up with some locals to have a less touristy experience, you can use couchsurfing to get in touch with someone in that city. You then agree to reciprocate by showing other travelers around when/if you have the time once you're back in your hometown. The website is very non-sketchy, because it uses lots of references and checks to make sure people are legit. Anyways, I joined to see if I could find a couple more people in Aarhus to hang out with over the summer. I ended up hanging out with a guy Brian and a girl Mya, and spending the afternoon wandering around downtown Aarhus, listening to jazz, eating and drinking beer. They were lots of fun, and Brian had lived in Greenland for a couple years, so he had lots of interesting stories about that.

Greenland is very barren and very beautiful. However, their society has a lot of problems, especially the native Greenlandic peoples, because of unemployment, poverty, and alcoholism (much like the problems on many Native American reservations). Many native Greenlandic people come to Denmark in search of jobs but often have a lot of difficulties. In fact, a lot of the homeless people in Denmark (who really only exist in Copenhagen) are native Greenlandic. Just a couple weeks ago, Denmark and Greenland signed an accord that granted Greenland more responsibilities of self-government (it is technically part of the Kingdom of Denmark and was only granted home rule in 1979) over areas such as judicial affairs, policing and natural resources. Denmark, however, still has control of areas such as finance, foreign affairs, and defence. It will be interesting to see if economic/social situations improve in Greenland as a result of this increased autonomy. I happen to own a purse made out of a baby seal from Greenland. It's a pretty good story.

On Sunday, I went to Rosenholm Castle, about 20 km outside of Aarhus. This castle has been owned by one family, the Rosencrantz family, since 1559. Family members still lived in the castle full-time until 1960.
The rooms in the castle were decorated with furniture and artifacts from all the eras in which the family had lived in the castle. One really interesting artifact was a "juice tapestry". Apparently, in olden times, most rich people could not afford regular tapestries, in spite of being rich. Tapestries were only for the super-rich. Tthe regular rich instead bought juice tapestries, which were large pieces of canvas showing scenes that were painted with plant juices. However, since these were not as nice as ordinary tapestries, they were not taken care of very well. As a result, this juice tapestry is the only one in OK condition in all of Denmark today. Here is a small gatehouse outside the castle that is said to be the "first university in Jutland" because it was used to school the family's children.
There was also a museum of household objects from the early 20th century and a lot of rooms set up to look like an early 1900s Danish farm home. I especially liked the blue kitchen:

The Rosencrantz family was very influential in Danish history, and may even be the reason that Hamlet is set in Denmark. You may notice that many of the names in Hamelt are Greek, such as Laertes, Polonius, and Ophelia. Apparently, Shakespeare originally intended to set the play in Greece. The family legend says that a son of the Rosencrantz family was studying in England with another Danish friend, Guildenstern. These guys happened to bump into Shakespeare at a pub and have some drinks with him. They were so chummy, in fact, that they convinced him that Denmark was a better setting for the play and persuaded him to include them as characters.

When I got back from the castle visit on Sunday, I headed into the kitchen to make some dinner. I ran into a couple guys who live on my floor, who started asking me if I had ever had "cord bread" before. I said no, and they told me that they had decided to make it that very night because they wanted to show me how. I was sort of confused about how we were making it, since all they told me was that it required a bonfire, but I went along with it. We made up some dough and headed outside to build a fire. Once we had some good embers, they showed me how to roll the dough out into a long snake (or cord) and then wrap it around a big stick. You then hold the bread over the fire (like roasting a marshmallow) to cook it. Apparently this is a very Danish thing to do at children's birthday parties and when camping. Unfortunately, our fire was not big enough, and it started raining before our bread was fully cooked. We ended up putting most of the dough in the oven, but it was still quite fun.

Just now I was eating my favorite Danish summertime desert. Literally translated, it is called "cold bowl" but I just call it "cookie milk". It is thick milk with some egg, vanilla, and lemon in it, to which you add these small, dry (sort of vanilla wafer like) cookies. It is super delicious and one of the guys I live with has promised to teach me how to make it so I can eat it when I get back to the US. This particular guy is moving to the US in a month to get his PhD at Duke, so he has been teaching himself how to cook traditional Danish foods that you can't buy in the US. This is great for the rest of us on the floor, because we get to eat all of his attempts!