Cultural orgy?

The National Gallery in Copenhagen was our last cultural endeavour, and on our last full day in the city it finally rained. We could spend our day in a museum without feeling guilty of missing out on sunshine!

The admission for this museum was free and we were there at opening-hour 10 a.m. Only a handful of people were gathering outside the museum in the rain, so we had the luxury of walking around in empty rooms with art, which was really pleasant!

The first floor is where we spend nearly all our time. The Danish art was there, along with the foreign art and the sculptures. The sculptures, already my favorite objects to photograph without a doubt, where lined up pretty neatly. The lighting was perfect to make nice photo's! Take a look at the following examples:














After we had seen the Danish art and the sculptures, we were moving on to the foreign art where we faced the cultural shock of our lives. I haven't been to many museums in my life, but I know cultural madness when I see it (I'll describe it in a moment). This museum has built up its collections around one big room, surrounded by smaller rooms. The big room has a chronological collection, while the smaller rooms surrounding it are 'themed'. For me, as an art n00b, this was quite confusing as I didn't know to which movement and period in art a work belonged. The museum did not give a lot of side information about the paintings beyond the basics like the title and the artist.

The madness was as follows. We were walking through the first small themed rooms of the foreign art when we got to the big room. It looked like this:



It was all the way crammed with paintings! It was a cultural orgy like I've never witnessed before. Paintings are so nice, but in this way it was too much of a good thing and it was totally impossible to enjoy the art in the way it should, in my opinion, be enjoyed. I like the way Tate Britain displayed their works. Plenty of space around it, benches near the big works, so you could sit down for awhile while enjoying them. In this room, they had one splendid Van Ruysdael painting, but I could hardly enjoy it. It was too distracting to see it being surrounded by tens of other paintings. This room actually made me a little pissed. We moved on quickly, to the smaller rooms where the paintings were hung up with more space between them.

All in all, I did enjoy myself in this place, but that one room fucked up the experience quite a bit. As a Dutch girl, I really like the Dutch paintings and it hurt me to see them being abused in this cultural orgy.
Museum experts, please tell me that this isn't normal???

Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek

On our second day in Copenhagen, Daniël and I ventured out alone, as Sylvia really had to work on her master thesis.

We went to Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, a museum for ancient Greek, Roman and Egyptian art. There were plenty of sculptures, and I love taking photo's of those! The Egyptian ones were my favorites of course. I have to admit, that after visiting the British Museum only a week before, this museum could not compete with the collection and sheer size of the British Museum.

That being said, Daniël and I enjoyed ourselves here. The building was quite nice, with plenty of detail in the ceilings and walls. One ceiling in particular was really psychedelic to me:


The museum also had its collection of mummies and because it was relatively quiet, I took a picture of me and Daniël with the mummies! How cosy.



Their section with Egyptian sculpture was relatively small, but it sported some nice ones!
Disclaimer: not all of the pictures below this text are Egyptian.






This small statue was my favorite in the museum:



And of course,
we saw the stupid little mermaid, the biggest tourist trap of the city.
We were warned that it's only a small, uninteresting statue, but I still had an expectation of some sorts. When we arrived there it really was super small! Tourists were crowding around her, wanting to take a picture with her. I was more interested as to WHY this statue becamse such a big tourist attraction. The fountain nearby was sporting a huge statue which was carried out with more skill and interesting shapes than the Mermaid, and yet there were only a few people hanging around there!

København

Last week London, now København! My friend Sylvia lives in this city right now with her boyfriend. She met her boyfriend while studying abroad in Istanbul and she missed him so much that she is writing her master thesis in Denmark now. They are living in a small apartment near the city centre and they are so kind to let Daniël (my travel companion and friend) and me stay in their house for six days.


My first impression of København was: wow!! This city looks so clean, nice and spacious! It remembered me a little bit of Canada in some ways. We took a long bus ride from the airport to Sylvia's house and I liked everything I saw. No poverty like in London can be found here; it's a world of difference. It even looks nicer than the Netherlands to be honest. We Dutch people made the mistake of building very ugly houses in the past fifty years, whereas the Danish still built their houses in the same vein as their old ones. This makes the whole city look as an organic whole. Also, there are no high buildings.

Today we just strolled around the city. Our first stop was the bicycle dude, where Daniël and I rented bikes for five days. I'm very happy about this, there's nothing more pleasant of getting around in a city on your own. It's not that I dislike public transport so much (although the Tube in London was quite horrendous at times), but I prefer to not be tied to buses, trains, and tubes. You are more able to move freely on a bike, and I like that.

We went to the Botanical Gardens, Rosenburg Castle and the gardens around the castle, the city centre, Nyhavn and Daniël and I even went running together. I had to bring my running gear because I'm awfully behind on my training schedule. The Dam tot Dam loop is drawing nearer and nearer and I'm nowhere near ready to run the 10 miles. It was a little to hot to go running, but we managed to not get lost and ran for about one hour. A shower is almost never more pleasant than after heavy sport activity and this was no exception. We made a nice pasta pesto salad and just now rented a movie.

Tomorrow I want to visit a museum and visit the Palace.

Here are some pictures to give you a general impression of what I saw today.













The last picture was taken in the city centre, where you could find the 'living statues'. This man was the best one I have ever seen! He was walking his bicycle, apperantly on a very windy day. This guy payed attention to the tinyest detail of 'looking windy'. His scarf, the fake smoke blowing from his pipe, his coat...awesome!

FortaRock 2009

For a new festival FortaRock was pretty decent.

Pro:
- clean toilets (wow?)
- performances were following eachother in high tempo, as there were two stages.
- a lot of merchandise (I finally managed to find and buy Neurosis - Times of Grace!!)
- good bands

Con:
- expensive tokens
- not the fault of the organisation, but once more I was baffled at how people just dump their rubbish everywhere. Many garbage bins were provided, but people are too lazy to walk a few metres and dump their shit in them.
- sound at the open stage was low. Yet again it was not the fault of the organisation as they weren't allowed to turn it up, but it ruined many a performance. Only solution was to get real close to the stage.
- the food I had (the vietnam food) was the worst rice I ever tasted in my life and super expensive too.

Warbringer: saw it only for a few minutes and as I was still getting in the mood for metal it didn't awake much feelings in me.

Heidevolk: always fun, but never totally awesome. Nice songs, but it sounds all the same to me. They managed to give the festival some atmosphere though, the band is very enthusiastic!

All Shall Perish: not my cup of tea. I browsed the merchandise, met my friends, admired the clean toilets....

Delain: Uhm yeah. This sucked. I had to see this because it was my duty to write a review for www.zwaremetalen.com but else I would have run away. I used to be a big fan of symphonic metal, listening to Nightwish, Therion and Within Temptation but this is rubbish. I have to review the occasional female fronted metal cd for zware metalen and I have heard much better stuff than this. Also, the lead singer Charlotte doesn't have a great voice for this kind of music. Her vibrato sounds very 'made', I don't know how to describe it but it sounds awful.

Dillinger Escape Plan: seen them two times already, and didn't get it two times. A lot of people like this band, and I can see why. For me though, it's just a bunch of noise. Believe me, I dig noise, but only when I see the structure in it. In the case of this band, I tried and failed. Energy and aggression were rife, so I think many people really enjoyed it.

Candlemass: my jaw almost dropped watching this band. Not because the music is genius, but because of their lead singer. That is one mother fucking scary dude that I would NEVER want to run into in some dark alley at night. From his hair, to his face, to his slick moves on the stage, everything about this dude was CREEPY! He could sing though. I can still vividly see how he looked, how like a snake, he slithered all over the stage. Fascinating it surely was, but also disturbing!

Death Angel: for many the highlight of their day, for me dinner break! Time to eat the worst nasi in my life (from the Vietnamees stand). 3,5 tokens (= 2,90 * 3,5 = 10,15 euro OMG???) you got some rice with, if you scrutinized your food, vegetables and some loempia's. Gahh..worst rip off of the day. In the meantime, Death Angel was unleashing their violence and I enjoyed myself by watching it from a safe distance.

Satyricon made my day, TOTALLY!

Their performance was worth all the waiting for me! I know a lot of people started to dislike the band when they shed their tr00 black metal roots (although some people also might question if they were ever tr00 black metal), but I am digging their new style. Their latest album The Age of Nero is on my iPhone for a long time already and has been helping me through bad moods on public transport, during work and on the bike. Their new sound is more polished, but it's still 'nasty' (in a good way). It makes me want to bang my head really hard! I normally don't do that when I listen to them so this gig, seeing them for the first time, was THE opportunity to finally kill my neck. And so I did, with pleasure.

They opened with Commando, which my friend Christiaan captured with his new camera. It can film in HD quality and it shows!



They also played: Black Crow on a Tombstone, The Wolfpack, Mother North, Forhekset, Now Diabolical, and even Fuel For Hatred!

Their performance was way too short for my liking, but my neck was quite dead at the end of it.

After Satyricon it was Meshuggah's turn to blow us away with their craziness. I managed to kill my neck even further as this set was also totally insane. Of course they played Future Breed Machine, but also three songs from their latest album ObZen. Christiaan captured the first part of Bleed.



We were both very tired after this gig and after seeing the first few minutes of Moonspell decided to embark on our big journey homewards. You gotta see 'big journey' in Dutch light, because a two hour journey to get home is considered a long time in this country. And it is a long time when you just want to take a shower and get to bed! Christiaan has had the pleasure of getting beer spilt over his clothes twice so he was eager to get rid of the constant stench of old beer that was surrounding him. You might think he was a drunkard, but no. They served Bavaria at the festival, so we only had 1 beer, then realised it tasted like piss and only drank soda's for the rest of the day. I don't understand why they didn't serve Grolsch!

Black Metal

Okay, black metal as it was in the old days may be dead (and I surely wasn't a fan back in the day, because I was a little nine year old girl and probably fan of the Spice Girls), but today I can still enjoy the noise that the first and second wave of black metal brought forth.
The whole black metal scene can also be ridiculed, and it should be, because nothing is scarier than people who take themselves to serious!
Look at how cute Frost looked back in 1999!


Burzum has been released from prison and I'm wondering what he's up to. Is he going to release new music? According to his website he will, and he'll also write a book! I just hope he is done with burning down churches and killing people. He does look like a rather happy fellow these days, seeing him smile merrily like on this picture. Not as tr00 looking as in his old days!


For the sheer fun of it, lets take a look at some more ridiculous pictures. It's 1 a.m. in the night, I'm wide awake, too distracted to be able to read a book and in the mood for black metal funstuff!

Kings of idiocracy are of course, Immortal!


They made looking like idiots their main objective in life! I remember rolling on the floor with laughter because of this YouTube vid. PERFECT ridicule!



And with that, I am going to try and get some sleep.
Later this day the FortaRock Festival in Nijmegen is taking place.
I'm going there to see Satyricon, Meshuggah, Candlemass, Heidevolk, Delain, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Death Angel...and I'm probably forgetting some others!
I'm skipping the last band The Devil's Blood for sure though. They were playing before Wolves In The Throne Room earlier in february this year, and God, THEY SUCKED.

The British Museum

This was one of my best experiences in London: The British Museum.



Free, like most of the big museums in London, and HUGE! You could get lost for days in that place. We spent quite a few hours strolling around and for me it was photography heaven. Tate Britain, my favorite museum in London, didn't allow cameras to be taken inside (which I can understand, because a lot of people are morons who use flash to take photo's in museums, which is frikkin' annoying). I took roughly 336 photo's in The British Musuem, and will post the highlights here. I'm not the right person to write about museums, since I don't know jackshit about them. I just love looking at everything and I love taking photo's so I might as well just post those. Knowledgde about cultures will come later in life, when I have read more about it. Considering that I never visited museums when I was younger, going to five museums in five days was already a big happening for me!

Pics from the British Museum in no particular order: