Land of Perpetual Dusk

Hello again!

The blog has been resurrected for some travels that I will be undertaking this summer and probably next year, in America and abroad. Read on, tell your friends (and mine) and as always, I love comments, so leave 'em.

Right now I'm in Copenhagen (København) Denmark (Danmark), studying with a fellowship called Humanity in Action, which is basically where we meet a lot of journalists, politicians, NGO workers, etc, and talk about minorities, immigrants, and human rights issues in Europe, and a bit about the Holocaust too, because it is seen as Europes biggest, baddest human rights disaster. We also have everything paid for, I'm living in an apartment with another guy, for example, and we have a host family in addition who feed us and take us out to dinner and are very nice in general, and we get a bit of money too... HiA takes care of us very well. So yeah, there is a bit of exorcism of white guilt through the mechanisms of white guilt involved.

Anyway, there are other HiA programs in Berlin, Amsterdam, Warsaw, and Paris, and all of the fellows, from those and a few other countries, plus the Americans, started together about 2 weeks ago at a place called Krogerup Højskole, on the island of Zealand, just north of København, where there are littlel cottages along the coast and at night, the sea looks like this:




















The lights and land across the water are Sweden. Now Krogerup Højskole, which, by the way is completely unpronouncable, like most Danish, is what is called a Danish 'Folk School'. These are sort of a cross between community centers, continuing education centers, and boarding schools, and were invented in the Romantic 19th Century by some guy whose name is unpronouncable and who wanted to educate the rural peasantry. We stayed there because its a good place to house 104 people for a long weekend and have lots of lectures about human rights, and its very quiet and sprawling. The outside of our big mansion house / learning center looked like this, from a tree...
















And this, from the ground...















Inside, we had panels a lot. Like this one, which includes the Dutch and German Ministers of Integration, a French journalist and an American former prosecuter at the International Criminal Tribunal in the former Yugoslavia... all of whom are HiA board members, I believe.

















We stood and asked rather intelligent questions. Heres my current roommate, Mark, taking the floor...
















Outside, the conversations were lively. I call this 'Discourse Beneath the Oak':
















Discourse Part II
















Part III















Discourse is all we did, except play soccer...




















And visit a lovely seaside art museum called Louisiana....















Where we saw large striped modern sculptures (Ditte modelling)
















(Ditte blending in... also, it is obligatory for every Dan to own a black and white horizontally striped shirt)















And the coast of Sweden again. Pictured in this photo, I might add are Dmitro the Hilarious Ukrainian (front and center), who showed up in the first day of lectures in a full suit, but seeing that he stuck out, switched to a sleeveless vest-shirt with the word 'Longstory,' written in graffiti, inexplicably, all over it (unfortunately, I got no picture), and in the back ground, the pale guy with the black hair is called Garret, who describes himself as 'deeply immersed in the German goth culture,' a culture which I hope to become part of when I see him in two weeks in Berlin.





















I'm so very sorry that this is so brief, but now I am in Copenhagen, and I will try to blog soon from here, but my internet access is really limited. I'll try to return emails as best I can, and look forward to some good pictures.

Everyone take care,
Robbie