Sunday, December 16, 2007

Christmas & Leaving Denmark

We have taken a lot of trains from Århus this fall. The enter- tainment in the station waiting room revolves around a large model train set maintained by the train company. When you put coins in, the train runs and the revenue goes to charity. It is fun to watch small kids of 3-5 look at it with very wide eyes. The mother of one little girl of three or so was out of coins, so I treated them, and was rewarded with a great, shy smile. In the Christmas season, the train has elves climbing on it, which you can barely see in the photo.

When we were in Roskilde the other day, I was struck by the wintry, rather spartan beauty of the countryside around the campus. The back part where resides the communications school juts out into the countryside. I was struck by these bushes and berries.

They took me back to my boyhood in Idaho where I invented a tradition for myself of going down to the river near our farm and looking for berries, holly and evergreens to make a Christmas wreath out of. It was always fun wandering around the mostly empty river bed, walking or sometimes ice-skating on the frozen pools of water. That river was sort of an all purpose entertainment. My nephews and I walked all over it when we were small, swam in it and floated down it on auto inner tubes in the summer when we got bigger, and ice skated and explored the river bed in the winters. It seems like a story out of a book about some classic boyhood in the countryside now, but it was just life as normal at the time.

We are in a hotel at the Copenhagen Airport, waiting to catch a plane tomorrow. With large bags full of six months of stuff, we thought it best to take it in stages.

Leaving Denmark to go back to the US is bittersweet. We have really enjoyed it here and have made some great friends, particularly among my colleagues in media studies at Arhus University. Among supposedly reserved Scandinavians, we have made at least as many friends and good collegial relations as I remember making among a comparable time among very outgoing Brazilians.

Plus it has been really interesting to learn about Denmark. I am used to doing fieldwork, reading up, interviewing and observation, to learn about places like Brazil, Mexico or even South Texas. It was interesting to do that in Denmark. In fact, last week, after I presented the initial results and thoughts on my research on Danish TV programming and audiences that I mentioned here a couple of posts ago, one of my hosts at Roskilde University was a bit amused that I was here doing fieldwork, studying them-- since it mostly goes the other way around with Danes, as in the US, where We go out to study Them. (Observing this was Thomas Tufte, who also did his dissertation research on Brazilian TV and whom I have known for a long time. So it was particularly interesting for him.)

Us and them gets more complicated all the time, particularly between the US and Denmark. If you come from my part of the US, Idaho and Utah, and your family has been there for a couple of generations, the likelihood of your having Danish ancestry is well over half, from what I have been told. (I have one Danish great grandfather.) Ironically, Denmark is one of the few places I have ever worked where people took me from my appearance for someone local. Denmark is a big piece of the US national and my own personal hybridity. So we have met the natives and they are us.

But exciting times await in Texas. Our daughter Julia just graduated with an MA in library/ information science at UT and just got a librarian job in Cedar Park, just north of Austin. Here is a picture of her in full graduation fig. And our son Rolf is getting married to Kristy Money of Provo, UT in Salt Lake December 28. So the pace of things is about to speed up, with Christmas and a wedding in short order.

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