yesterday was quite interesting— many diverse experiences all in one day.
it began with a somewhat failed attempt to check out the famous royal copenhagen porcelain factory. my design professor asked that we go to see how the craftspeople of this very well-established landmark in danish design produce their work. apparently each blue-fluted plate goes through 30 pairs of hands to refine each and every detail. all of their work, from plates to tea sets to decorative objects, is incredibly detailed (and expensive!). i had a good time taking a look at their stuff, but the “factory outlet” that we visited was no longer a factory or a museum…interesting but not exactly the assignment. maybe sometime i will make it to their current factory further outside the city.
after that i met my “muslims in the west” classmates for a visit to the DIT mosque. DIT, which translates to the danish islam faith society, is made up of about 2000 people from all over the world. services are conducted in arabic and danish. the leaders of dit are the ones who internationalized the cartoon crisis of 2005-2006— they took the danish newspaper jylland-posten’s cartoons of the prophet mohammad to lebanon and egypt, which resulted in the danish embassies there being lit on fire… their spokesperson, a really articulate and intelligent man born and raised in denmark but of afghan descent, gave us a brief presentation about the society and about islam in general and offered to answer any questions we might have. he then took us into the mosque, which was converted from a formed wine cellar. there are no purpose-built mosques in denmark. it felt rather inappropriate for us to be there because they were in mid-prayer, crouched on the ground. we entered the room silently but had not done the ritual washing and clearly were not participating ourselves. there were no women in the room and we later found out that women do their five daily prayers in a different room than the men. after the mid-afternoon prayer they conducted a special funerary prayer. there was a coffin just sitting unattended in the back of the room, by where we were standing, which alarmed some of us. that was the closest i have ever been to a dead person. anyways, they moved it to the front of the room and we witnessed this man’s final blessing. it was a pretty strange and surreal experience, observing an ancient and holy ritual without really knowing what was going on. the spokesman/tour guide said we reminded him of deer in the headlights.
after an afternoon of homework in the DIS library— avoiding the slushy snow that keeps falling outside— i met up with some friends of a friend, three danish girls (actually one of them is icelandic) who are a bit older than me. i always worry that these meetings are going to be awkward considering we are all strangers, but they were so friendly and of course, spoke perfect english. one of them will be studying abroad at portland state university in the fall so she asked what she should know about portland and the northwest. it really reinforced the notion that this world is so small!
i missed my afternoon class today because i had a brief but scary bout of chest pain at lunch time. i think it is the combination of coffee every morning, ramen (with tons of sodium) every day for lunch, and this week’s odd schedule (i haven’t been home before 9:30 pm for three days straight, which must be a record for me!). in any case, i’m going to try to eat healthier and drink less coffee and hopefully this little issue will clear itself up…
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