Folk Dancing and Stundenterhue, Oh My

Well, this week was rounded off nicely with some crazy folk dancing and a trip to Tivoli, Copenhagen's little amusement park in the middle of the city. The folk dancing consisted of eight dancers who I swear must have mugged the Rice Krispies elves and stolen their hats. All were over the age of sixty (probably not a good sign for the future of Danish folk dancing) and there was a Danish emcee that nobody could really understand. After a couple short numbers, the students got down on the dance floor and tried their own hands at it. The dances were not terribly hard, but when your trying to get two hundred people or so to dance in a way the haven't done before well, you know it's not going to be pretty. All said though, only a few people wiped out completely. The second half involved more spinning around, which was not so great for yours truly.

Afterwards there was a gang of people who went downtown to a place called the L.A. Bar which turned out to be a smoky little dive bar (and no, not in the good way). Although the guidebooks say that Americans shouldn't mention the fact that Danes smoke in public but sorry - Danish bars stink!! Anyone who doesn't like the smoking ban in Minneapolis should spend a weekend going out to Danish bars and then reconsider. Anyway, it turned out that nobody was there anyway so we wandered around for a while before heading home on the Metro. One of the problems with hanging around undergrad students is that they constantly complain about how expensive things are, and seem to have already given up on going out to bars to drink.

One phenomenon in Copenhagen that we've seen is that when people graduate from high school they wear little caps called studenterhue, which look like sailor's caps with little flags of different countries around the rim. Apparently they have these in other European countries as well. Anyway we've been spotting them around town all week, and now you can see decorated vehicles driving around town carrying about twenty or so of graduates all wearing these caps, shouting and cheering. Normally I wouldn't stand for this kind of rabblerousing, but for whatever reason it is hard not to find these kids pretty endearing.

UPDATE 7-2 Daga managed to get a picture of said studenterhue-wearing hoologans riding around in a truck: