Helsingor

I named my blog the undiscover’d country after a line from Hamlet, visiting Helsingor (again the ‘o’ needs a diagonal line through it) was a long time coming. The town is north of Copenhagen and across the sound is Sweden, the castle is Kronborg, made famous by Shakespeare when it served as Hamlet’s Elsinore.

The king used the castle but the location dictated the primary function, which was the collection of dues from ships passing through the sound. The castle is surrounded by canons pointed out to the water where one can imagine the artillery convinced most captains to pay the dues no matter how exorbitant as making a run for it would not have looked a promising option.

Before you even enter the castle you are surrounded with sound effects that put you in a different time. As we walked up to the cannons we heard voices and commotion that sounded as though they were preparing to fire, and as we walked towards the tree lined gravel road leading to the castle we heard the sound of a horse drawn procession approaching.

Kronborg is my favourite castle so far, it had once been victim to fire and the rebuilding has left it less decorative than some. While others have felt overwhelming with just how much there is to look at, this one kept it simple, I need that. It also had some modern museum features that brought the story of the castle to life.

Part of the appeal for us in this location was that it was seaside; we started off comparing it to home because we could see the water, and we could see Sweden, just as we can see Alaska on a clear day at home (only Sweden was really close). We have become accustomed to being near the shore because we so often are when we are at home on Haida Gwaii, but Denmark has been different, we live on an island but inland. Last post I shared how someone had said that fishing was not his culture, he meant his personal culture, Denmark has a lot of coast, there are lots of people who fish and we saw people fishing from the shore in Helsingor.

We enjoyed or time in the castle but the walk around the outside was just as good, the sun on the water, the swans in the moat, and folks out fishing. We could have been living in the days of yore, behind us the castle, in front of us the sound, and people out fishing for their dinner. 

Culture of Football

Both the boys have now made their debut for Ringsted F.C. There are many differences between playing soccer here and playing in Masset. The most obvious difference is in the numbers and I think most of the other differences follow. There are way more players, and the players are all dedicated to playing soccer, they have chosen soccer over other organized sporting options. The season never ends here, when it is winter they move inside until it is nice enough to go outside, the boys aren’t so much on a team as they are part of a club. They train twice a week for an hour and a half, the boys are chosen to play in some games and the ‘team’ is made up of club members invited to play on any given play day.

Gus has been to two Saturday tournaments where they played three games each time. Games at his age and level consist of 2 seven-minute halves so they are over pretty quick and playing 3 games is not an all day affair. Gus has represented Canada well and was quite proud of his beautiful crossed in pass last weekend that was buried in the back of the ole onion bag.

Jesse missed his first game because we didn’t sort out where exactly he was supposed to go, the athletic center is a sprawling affair and it is sometimes hard to know where to go, I think we were supposed to go to the clubhouse, I won’t bother with trying to guess how many fields there are but there are lots. Jesse finally made his debut on Tuesday this week and to my eye starred in his defensive role, also supplying an excellent ball through that ultimately led to the winning goal. Other parents seem surprised that they can play as well as they do, first because we are from Canada, a hockey nation, and second they only play organized soccer during a brief 3-month season!

On the ride to our last out of town game talk turned to where we live and then to fishing. Our ride was Gus’ coach and he told of how his mother in law had bought him a fishing rod, something he didn’t really know what to do with. As he said, “This is my culture, playing soccer, I’m not going to fish.” I wish soccer was a little bit different back home, I wish the boys could play as often as they do here, but I’m also pretty happy that fishing is such a big part of Haida Gwaii culture, even if I didn’t appreciate fishing when I was a kid. Sorry Dad, maybe if we had caught fish?

Amusement parks

I never considered amusement parks as something missing from our lives, never considered that in Denmark we would finally have the opportunity to take our kids on nausea inducing rides, never thought that I would have to face my own fear of rides, and never imagined I would watch as Gus hurtled by me on a drop so steep it went beyond vertical (97 degrees).

On the weekend we went to our third amusement park in two months, Gus and Jesse’s first three amusement parks. Our destination yesterday: BonBon-Land. I have since seen it on Times list of Top 10 Weirdest Theme Parks. The story, as it was told to me by Hans, our friend and tour guide (though it was his first time too), is that of a candy maker who decided to open a theme park to go with his line of colourfully named candy.

The candy names are of course in Danish but the pictures on the bags at the gift shop (Paradise) help; there you can buy Dog Farts, Seagull Shits, Rotten Fish, Junkyard mix, you get the idea. They are just names though, the candy is supposed to be good. We were searching for some Dirty Diapers but couldn’t find any so we went home with a mix of gummy candies (gummy bum, gummy breasts, gummy pile of doodie), and a junkyard mix of hard candies, most of which have been spit out in the trash owing to their saltiness.

To go with the strange candy names the park surrounds you with cartoonish animals that look like they are made of paper-mache, many of who are engaged in activities befitting the candy names they are there to reflect. One of the first things we encountered upon entering the park was a giant dog clearly working to relieve himself of gas, on a particularly tame ‘roller coaster’ we had time to notice the pile of doodie under the giant dog in the middle of the ride, and a water ride took us through a rat-infested junkyard.

So a review of amusement parks is in order: Tivoli, the second oldest amusement park in the world (1843), Legoland, whose name says it all, and BonBon-Land, a tribute to a candy brand glorifying all things taboo. Which one comes in at the top of the list? If you ask Gus and Jesse they’ll tell you to go to BonBon-Land.

Cheesy math geek love poem

In a recent class we read a poem about lines, or at least partly about lines (http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/005.html). This was in a class of pre-reading stuff for the Thomas King story ‘Borders’ (http://faculty.law.ubc.ca/myoung/constitution/images/Thomas%20King%20Borders.pdf). Before reading the poem they talked about lines and we had an interesting discussion on the subject, then we read the poem. There was some overlap between the talk and the poem discussion and some different opinions as to the quality of the poem. Some thought it was cheesy, a math geek love poem, others said they like cheese as long as it isn’t too strong, a mild blue is probably pushing it.

Next up was writing about lines, wherever that took you, and it took them to a variety of places, it took me here:

Lines

We followed lines on the road to the ferry,

waited in line between two lines to board,

were directed to a line of cars on the car deck.

In the cafeteria we waited in line while the ferry

crossed lines of latitude.

We drove the long line across Northern B.C.

over the border line into Alberta.

At the airport we waited in line

so authorities could pat down Gus’s Teddy.

In the air we crossed lines, and lines, and lines,

latitude, and longitude,

rivers, coasts, property, provincial, international.

In a new place, new lines,

the bike paths to the station where railway lines arrive/depart,

the bus line to work,

lines on maps to learn where we are.

Our thoughts and memories are lines to home, to friends, to family

new lines will rejoin old lines, we retrace lines

back to friends,

back to family,

back home.

As I explained to the students I am not as homesick as that sounds, I wanted to write about the lines of travel, the lines involved in a journey. I did not intend to write lines that would be at home in a Hallmark, lines evoking a not so mild blue.

Learning Language

We are approaching the two month mark in Denmark, September 25^th will make it officially 2 months and by now our relationship with language has taken some new twists and turns. We no longer giggle at fart and slut, those are old news now, what does make us giggle is the translations provided by Google Translate. We are trying to get into the habit of reading children’s books in Danish and translating helps us pronounce and understand…. sometimes.

Kasketten har jo skygge  - the cap has the shadow

We also listen closely to conversations around us and to television to see if we can pick out any Danish we recognize. The other morning I recognized that a colleague said “It was the electrician”, there was a fire alarm related to some electrical work. Context helps make sense of things, as do words that sound like English. Leanne was pleased to hear and understand a mother tell her little girl that she was carrying the big package, again context; she was carrying the big package.

The problem is that few sentences are so simple and people don’t speak to adults the way they speak to small children, perhaps if everyone spoke as though they were talking to a toddler…. Another problem is the way the Danish language sounds (the Danes say this themselves), I have heard from a few sources about a saying that refers to how Danish speakers sound like they are talking with a potato in their mouth. It sounded strange at first until I imagined what that would sound like. It is very difficult to know when one word stops and another begins, of course if you pay close attention to yourself speaking English you can imagine that difficulty for people learning English too.

As we learn some words we play with trying to make sentences with our (very) limited vocabulary and I find myself pausing to search for words, and that’s where I find...  French? I guess that’s how our brains work, when we search for a word in a language over which we don’t have full command we find words from other languages we don’t really know.  

BCESIS vs. Lectio

I know many teachers will be wondering how the Danish school system (or any other system for that matter) can function without BCESIS. The system I have struggled to familiarize myself with this year is Lectio, and while I use it far more than I used BCESIS, I have fewer pains in my hand from repetitive clicking syndrome.

I miss having my own classroom, a place to put stuff, but in the absence of such a place on-line places become increasingly important, and if they are well designed places they are place enough, and perhaps even an improvement.

Lectio and I had a rocky start to our relationship, primarily I suspect owing to the fact that I don’t understand Danish. Google translate and the help of friendly colleagues have got me to the point where Lectio and I are on good terms (unlike the school website it doesn’t just translate so there is much copying and pasting), and I know I will miss it dearly when we say goodbye.

For a few years now I have been attempting to start a class wiki (or something like one) that allows for and encourages communication in an on-line environment, the downfall has always been time, the amount of work I would have to put into it to make it work, not to mention that my time is wasted if the students aren’t putting in their own time too. Lectio does everything that I wanted in a class wiki and because it is the accepted way things work around here the students are accustomed to using it, or in the case of the new students, are forced to get accustomed to it.

I am new to the system, and it is still in Danish so I suspect there are layers that I don’t even know about, but so far I use it to check my schedule, assign homework, post assignments, e-mail students, post documents for class use, take attendance, receive assignments, search the library, and post grades.

Paper seems so last century. Come to think of it, so does BCESIS.

Wind Power?

The most striking feature of the Danish landscape as I recall it upon arrival in Copenhagen (I was quite tired at the time) was the wind park located offshore. The wind turbines made an impression partly because there was no missing them but also because of the proposed wind energy project on Haida Gwaii.

I never felt strongly one way or the other, I like to think that I keep my mouth shut when I am uncertain or uninformed, I came to no conclusion about the Naikun wind proposal but it did get me thinking about energy on island and wondering why wind power wasn’t a good option to supply island power.

Travelling around Denmark it hasn’t taken long to realize that the offshore wind park is not the only wind energy around, wind turbines dot the landscape everywhere we have been. This past weekend Gus and I traveled to a soccer tournament with his coach and I was able to ask some locals about the turbines, they admitted they didn’t know much, they had heard nothing about noise pollution but had heard something about effects of being too near (I didn’t quite catch it). A woman sharing the ride told about her parents who had bought into a turbine project and in return received electric incentive, she thought that wind power in Denmark provided about 10% of the electricity used, but when I did some research Wikipedia statistics suggested that wind power accounted for 30% of the domestic electricity usage.

So if wind power can supply 30% of the electricity for a nation of 5.6 million….

I speak from a place of ignorance regarding wind power, what do I know? I know that diesel is expensive, dirty, and not the way of the future. Could wind provide energy to an island the size of Haida Gwaii? The residents of Samso Island(diagonal line through o) would likely say yes.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/07/080707fa_fact_kolbert?currentPage=all

Reflecting on Difference

The first assignment I gave to the 2^nd year students that was not simply assessment for my own knowledge was a poem entitled ‘I am a Dane’, the idea was for them to write their version of Redbird’s ‘I am a Canadian’; I shared my poem in an earlier post. I have been marking these poems recently, an endeavour that takes longer than any marking I have ever done before because it necessitates the use of Google to educate myself about the things they have written about, in some cases Google translate must be used when they have included words that they haven’t translated (for poetic reasons of course). In reading the poems a common theme emerging is that of difference. What makes a Dane, a Dane? A Canadian, a Canadian? There is a tendency to focus on difference but there are those who also point out that these differences aren’t really so different and that modern society ought to embrace diversity and that a Dane is not one thing, nor is a Canadian, and so what does it all mean?

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Still it seems like there is no resisting the allure to discuss and analyze difference even when it is small, I think it has something to do with interpreting and understanding, we need to think about and compare with what we know. Jesse and I had a good conversation about little differences on our bike ride to soccer the other day; it was focused on a favourite topic, food. Incidentally nearly all my students included food in their ‘I am a Dane’ poems. Danish food is not so unfamiliar, they make a mean open-faced sandwich and pork is well loved, nothing is strange or wholly unfamiliar, but it is not the same.

In recent days we have had tinned mussel based chowder in an attempt to re-create a good Haida Gwaii chowder, and Jesse never thought he would miss salmon so much. We talked about how we wish we could pick berries (we see plum trees that seem wild but they are big and we are ladderless when we bike about the town), about how we wish we could go fishing (or at least eat the fish others have given to us), and we would love to bar-b-q some back strap, or have a nice venison roast with chanterelles (I hear there is good mushroom picking already on Haida Gwaii). Even minor differences make us think of home and our stomachs frequently direct our thoughts.

We eat well here, it’s not like we are suffering. The bakeries are all too tempting, the cheese is cheap and delicious, and the candy… I have a soft spot for gummy candy and licorice and the soft spot is going to grow if I’m not careful, there’s like a whole isle of the stuff in the grocery store, and in the next isle the beer, the wine, the booze. You can drink it walking down the street too, and if there are any underagers reading this, you can buy it at 16, but you can’t get a license or go into the bar until you are 18. Still with the legal age of purchase at 16, and the starting age of my students being 16, drinking is a part of school culture like I have never experienced before, at least not until university. Today on my walk to morning class I passed a stack of empty kegs from Friday’s after school party. Some differences feel bigger than others.

New Experiences

A motivating factor when undertaking an exchange is the desire to have new experiences, see new things, meet new people, face new challenges. We have done many such things, we have seen castles, navigated new places, gone on roller coasters, learned history, tried to learn the language, and recently Jesse and Gus had their haircut…. by a hairdresser.

I’m glad we waited until they were ten and (almost) eight, and in a foreign land before taking this big step; somehow something routine enough was a great adventure. They arrived early to look at photos, were nervous as they stepped into the chair, giddy when they were sprayed with ‘stuff’, excited as the buzzy thing did its work, and impressed with their good looks when the job was done. We strolled through the streets casually glancing in every reflective surface until we got to the store where they could buy product to maintain their new looks.

Mom and Dad will never cut their hair again.

Small Cars

As I make my way through the parking lot to school, or at the station, or through the streets, it would be hard not to notice the difference in personal vehicles. I have written before about the number of bicycles, this morning I left the house a bit later than usual because I did not have a first block class and got caught in bicycle rush hour as students made their way to the local Gymnasium (closest equivalent to high school), but the difference in cars is quite obvious too.

Yes the makes are different (though there are plenty of Toyotas), Citroen, Peugeot, Skoda, but they are also considerably smaller. One does not see pick-up trucks; they seem not to exist. On the weekend I pointed this out to Jesse, imagine the middle of the road downtown Masset and what sorts of vehicles do you see? Oh yeah, there’ll all huge. Obviously a difference in lifestyle has much to do with the different vehicles, we simply have different needs, but at times I have felt like I was walking through a parking lot filled with miniature cars, even the minivans are squished down to a miniature scale.

Of course the only vehicles I have been in over the past month are public transit vehicles, trains and buses. I ride the bus to work, about 35 minutes ride and have settled into the routine, I enjoy reading a magazine on the way there and back. My old routine of reading at the kitchen table in the morning while listening to the CBC is gone for now. So too is that quiet time when I am awake and everyone else is sleeping, school starts earlier for the boys this year, and if I don’t have class first block they leave before I do. So the routine has become a bike ride to the station (which on tired mornings feels like the tour de France but is really a short ride), followed by a bus ride of magazine reading to inform what things I might ramble about in class. This morning I have added a bit about public transportation at the front of the lesson (which contains a doozy of a powerpoint on The Canadian Rockies, we are researching topics taken from Redbird’s “I am a Canadian”). This morning I read (in Harpers and quoted from Loelia Lindsay, former duchess of Westminster) “Anybody seen in a bus over the age of thirty has been a failure in life.” I looked around to see how many other failures were on the bus, but everyone looked normal. Later in the same article the bus was referred to as the ‘loser cruiser’ and I remembered a time when I worked early mornings in Toronto and took the ‘vomit comet’ down Yonge street.

A quick conversation at the beginning of class revealed that no students thought poorly of those who took public transportation, or no-one was willing to say so, on the contrary many thought it was a smart choice both economically and environmentally, and then I thought of the small cars, and of my truck. My truck is under a tarp in Alberta – zero emissions, for now.