Hi! I’ve been having a rough month! Or like, two months. I’m working on it very hard and very earnestly but it is getting….exhausting. Also, I don’t have a proper cold but I’ve been coughing and sneezing for the past week, which I’m also annoyed about. This culminates to why I haven’t written anything in more than two weeks (sorry) and have not updated on my weeklong Munich/Berlin/Paris/Amsterdam trip (sorry) and will likely be behind on updates for the foreseeable future if things don’t pick up (sorry).
And with this as context…
By 4:15pm all I had done was sit in class for 3 hours and I didn’t want to just go home with that being my day. That sucks. But on Tuesdays (today) the permanent exhibitions are free at the Glypotek, which is an art museum here with mainly sculpture and some paintings, and I hadn’t gone yet. Turns out it’s not even a 10 minute walk from my classroom, so I hauled over.
It’s a really beautiful museum. Sometimes I feel like sculpture just seems like an afterthought at art museums (lining hallways, tucked in the corner, etc) and so really looking at sculpture as the centerpiece was an art museum experience I’d never had. Honestly, I was actually planning to just do a lazy walk-around and then read in the garden courtyard in the middle of the museum until it closed (which I’m still planning to do sometime).
And their paintings collection was surprising too. I had this Monet book as a kid, and I remember this one of his son with bright red cheeks was one of my favorites, and I wasn’t expecting to see it. It made my day a little better.
What made my day significantly better began by me getting kindly scolded by a guard in the exhibit room. I was standing a little close to a painting and he walked over to tell me I set off the silent alarm, but nbd. He turned out to be the nicest man, and we just started talking about where we were from and what I was doing in Copenhagen and all that.
(I told him I was here studying economics and he made that Face that people always make. It is my favorite face because it really drives home that people in econ still need to do better. Anyways.)
When he heard that I was here for the free Tuesday and didn’t buy a ticket to the special exhibition, he very urgently told me I needed to go down to the ticket counter, tell them his name, tell them that he sent me, and to give me a guest ticket.
:’o
:’)
And the exhibit was excellent! I didn’t take many pictures because what I enjoyed most was probably what I read in conjunction with the art. It was on funerary portraits in Palmyra and it was genuinely one of the best exhibits I’ve ever seen in terms of history, current events, archaeology, critical analysis, uh, reverence? Ancient economies? Smell? (there was a little table of things like sandalwood, cinnamon, and myrrh that would have been traded that we could smell.) It wasn’t what I expected at all from a sculpture-based exhibit.
The guard told me to come back to tell him how it went after I was done, and when I saw him again we talked about the exhibit and he seemed really happy that I liked it. He gave me a couple hugs and told me to come back any time and to track him down if I did. I thanked him too many times.
I’ll be back to read in the courtyard– and to say hi.
A Detour in Denmark 