Thursday, March 24, 2011

A Slice of...Aarhus, Denmark!


Hello! My name is Sandra and I’m honored to be writing this post on Danielle’s fabulous blog. I’m a 25 year old student from Denmark, and write about my life, food, pictures and random stuff on my blog Stillestund which means “a quiet time” in Danish.

The city that I’ll show you a slice of, is the second largest city in Denmark and my home for the last 6 years – Aarhus. I live in a small student apartment close to the city center and the university with my love Jakob, who is a musician. Even though Aarhus is the second largest city, it is in fact very small, and with its approximately 300thousand people it is very easy to get a “town-like” feeling, and you often run into people you know in the city center. The city has a long history and goes back to the time of the Vikings. It doesn’t have a lot of big old beautiful buildings, but we do have a lot of small details around the city and an old cathedral and theater that contributes to the historic feel.


I attend the University of Aarhus, and the university in general has a big impact on the city. With nearly 40 thousand young people attending it helps make the city fresh and alive. Almost all of the faculties are centered on one campus, which also include a large park where there are a lot of events during the summer, among other a legendary sailing race where the different faculties compete in homemade boats. The first picture is from the summer, where we celebrated summer solstice. In the summer we have long light nights, and it doesn’t get really dark until maybe ten or eleven.


As any larger city we also have museums, we have a great modern art museum, where the Danish/Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson right now is installing an amazing piece of art on top of the building, it is a circle of colored glass, where you can walk around and see the city in a new light, and on top of that it catches the sun and color the city as well, it looked beautiful when the snow covered the streets. I love when art alters the way we see the world! The museum also has a great view over the city and I love the architecture of the building.

Another great museum is the “Old city Museum” which is basically a small town build up, with people acting as shop owners etc. The best thing about this museum is that you can walk around there for free after it “closes” at night. I used to live right across the street from it and often took a walk through the old streets.


One of the things love doing in the city, is walking around with my camera taking pictures of street art, strange stuff or things I just discovered. One Saturday I found a great garage shop stuffed with old furniture and funny things.


And since the city is so small and very bike friendly I usually take my bike everywhere, to university, to my job and to visit friends and just to go around the city. I took this picture so that you can get an idea of how many people that bike around Aarhus, we have a lot of parking space for bikes, and special “cycle lanes” between the pavement and where the cars are, so that it is safer to get around.



I hope this gives you an idea of my city, but there is of course so much more to it than I’ve been able to show you here- thank you for reading!

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