Hello! Welcome back to my blog. I have not disappeared, I am still right here in Aarhus. It’s hard to know if one should apologise for not updating a blog like this in a timely fashion for a number of reasons. The primary of these being that this is my blog, and to be honest, it’s as much for me as it is for anyone else, so who am I apologising to? Myself? Maybe. Speaking of that, why are you here? Like on my website, reading this? Who are you? This might be a cheeky overstep but I think you should comment below and tell me (I don’t see the email it asks for when you comment (update: I do) so feel free to put a fake one in, but maybe it tells you if I reply? Not sure, do as you please and report back). Are you my mom? Hi mom! A classmate? A former co-worker? Who is reading I wonder? Is this a sufficiently strange way to start a blog post after two months of sheer radio-silence? I think so. I like to mix things up.
I suppose I should start by filling you in on what the hell has been going on in my life since my last post but that one was looking back on a trip from earlier, so maybe I won’t fill you in all the way. I’ve done a lot, but it doesn’t feel like that. Or at least it hasn’t for the last month or so. Let’s start over the holidays. My partner came to visit from Canada for a week, and we had an utterly amazing time, I walked her around a bit of Copenhagen when she flew in before we bused to Aarhus. I got to show her a very dead, somewhat gloomy-looking Nyhavn (the part of Copenhagen you have seen in pictures everywhere), and we walked all the way across to Torvehallerne (food market) and got a delicious lunch! I paused my quasi-vegetarianism experimenting for the week for my partner’s sake and because she suggested we cook some sort of bird in my flat for Christmas, which we did! But, we’re not there yet.
After lunch in Copenhagen, we got on a bus to Aarhus and arrived after dark to a mostly dead city. We attempted to grab something to eat downtown and failed and fell back on some leftover curry in my flat. My partner was entirely exhausted from the timing of a flight which left the Americas in the afternoon and arrived in Europe in mid-morning, so we talked and had a sweet romantic time before drifting into glorious unconscious bliss.
We awoke on Christmas Eve, and after a Danish breakfast consisting of various breads, I ran out to retrieve my bike from the bus station and tried to haul-ass back up the hill that is Aarhus. We then explored some of the city, although much of it was closed. I think I’ll write a little tour of Aarhus from my perspective later, so I won’t get into that here. We ate more food at home and relaxed and talked.
On the 25th we journeyed to Marselisborg (the deer park) and had a magical experience. Deer are super weird, and it is amazing to be able to hang out with them for a while. Then we walked along the shore and the forested path for several hours, breathlessly taking in this sliver of the North Sea, a body which my partner had been away from for some time, and was delighted to be returned to. We did not partake in the fearless Danish nude dip into December waters, but we ate our packed lunch in solidarity before the rising tide indicated the need to keep moving. As the sun began to go down on Christmas day, we caught a bus back into town, and then back up to my flat to eat the small bird we had to unexpectedly partially butcher and prep the night before. Going from very deliberate vegetarianism for some months, straight to hacking the neck off of a carcass was a somewhat emotional experience as we contemplated the life of the creature slaughtered for our more-ritual-than-most consumption and the extraordinary destructive environmental impact of these practices. It was an evening of confronting and consuming our cognitive dissonance; an emotionally and intellectually stimulating process culminating in a very delicious, if controversial dinner. We drank Danish honey wine (mead/mjød), and we enjoyed each other’s long-missed company.
The ensuing two days were spent mostly on gallery and museum exploration as well as a short, cold, but joyous trip to Tivoli Friheden. The following day we explored Den Gamle By walking Aarhus through the ages, and we went out for an amazing Aarhusian dinner in the supremely cool Frederiksbjerg. The final day in Aarhus was spent walking around the main shopping streets and the Latin Quarter where we had tea at a lovely new coffee shop and admired the cobblestone under our feet. We then travelled back to Copenhagen to spend the night before her flight in the morning and goodbyes.
As she flew back across the ocean, I walked alone up to Nørrebro and spent a sentimental day walking around, listening to music, appreciating street art, record stores, cafes, and Assistens Cemetery.
And then January happened, and now here we are. Alive and well in February. It rains often, it’s significantly warmer than home, but Denmark always feels much colder (a Lithuanian friend also confirmed this, -10°C/-20 is fine at home but here -1 feels like a wet, icy hell). Yet, it’s a wonderful wet, icy hell, filled with history and warmth and fantastic people and I can only avoid the word hygge for so long.
So there we are, I am still alive, still in Aarhus, still very much enjoying my life and falling behind on my blog and scrambling to get all of my school work done. That was Christmas, and without setting any kind of expectations in which I should be held in any way accountable for, I’ll write some more about what I’ve been up to prior to that, and also in the time since. This blog takes a bit of a back seat as it is not quite as high a priority as my school work or songwriting, both of which take up the majority of my working time here, but I’m hopefully going to try and write these a little more. I deeply appreciate the freeform blogging medium, and it is a splendid contrast to the essays I have been drowning in.
Thanks for checking in.
With love from Aarhus,
Kostyn
P.S. Should I be signing theses at the bottom or what? What is a blog? I have no idea.
Edited by DJ Maki (my partner).
Edit an hour or so later: I do in fact see the emails commenters provide. Sorry for the misinformation.
Edit 2 (2017/02/03): Failed to properly credit DJ for her invaluable read through.
Leave a Reply