Festuge

Every August we have Festuge here in Aarhus.  It's a week of festive activities in the city--concerts and beer, mostly, with occasional sausages, circuses, and free face-painting or yoga.  I think it's meant to attract tourists and make the locals not so sad about the end of summer.  (You'll see from the pictures that Festuge pretty much always heralds the end of summer sunshine).

Anyway, it's enough of an event that we take pictures, but not enough of an event that we have ever blogged about it before.  But.  But but but.  The very best thing about Festuge has always been a little something called "Hop med Os!" (Hop with Us!)-- a small park filled to the brim with bouncy castles and overexcited children.  B and I like it so much that we always go watch the little kids there and plotted and planned when C would be big enough to go. 

This year she was!  Obviously we took more pictures of C hopping than of four previous years of Festuge all together, but that's OK since it got us to blog about this unique aspect of Danish culture and our life abroad.

Happy (extremely belated) Festuge!  God fornøjelse!

In 2012 and 2013 the city made a giant park in the middle of town.

As you can see, the park is right in front of ARoS museum, so the rainbow affords an excellent view of the festivities.

A view of the "water labyrinth" from 2014.  It's green because we're in the rainbow.

Did I mention there was beer?

View from the rainbow in 2012.  Hop med Os is just alongside the Musikhuset.

Hoppers!

Me and my favorite hopper.

OK, make that my TWO favorite hoppers!

Also the boldest slider in town.

Hey!  Let's go hop some more!

ROYGBIV and HB EM PSA

Denmark is often quite grey.  Grey sky, grey sea, grey trees.  It's pretty in a sort of stark, cold way, but sometimes you need a little something more.

That's when we like to go up in "Your Rainbow Panorama," the huge art installation on top of ARoS Kunstmuseum.  You walk around in a giant tunnel of colored glass (designed by our favorite half-Danish artist, Olafur Eliasson) and look at the views of Aarhus in every hue.  B really likes the yellow panes; he says if you look through them, it looks sunny and warm!

Well, it wasn't sunny and warm yesterday.  In fact, it snowed.  But I thought that looked pretty cool outside, and it might look even cooler from my rainbow panorama.  Here's the virtual view.

 

 

 

 

Also, in exciting news, Denmark beat Spain last night in the European Championship semifinals for men's handball!  So we're on to the finals tomorrow at 5 PM Danish time.  Handball is super fun and exciting to watch, so we recommend tuning in if you can.  In Denmark you can watch live on TV2, but maybe you can find it somewhere on the internet too.  Cheer loudly and drink beer!