Denmark’s National Museum is located in Copenhagen. The ground floor consists of Danish and Human history. On the upper levels there are exhibits for each country. I don’t know if this is always the case, but the day we were there the upper levels were nearly completely void of visitors.

The collections were still impressive. Either no one knows of them or people get so tired from the ground level that they never make it up the stairs. One of the problems may be that while the collections are massive, there are no stories or detailed descriptions to go along with them (like there are for the ground floor exhibitions).

I headed upstairs to check out the Japanese collection. On my way I noted the impressive collection from Greenland. Surely the Nationalmuseet has the finest and largest assemblage of items from Greenland given Denmark’s history. I was amazed at the number of items they had, the condition, and the age.

Anyway, I eventually headed past Greenland and on to Japan.

The Nationalmuseet had several display cases with Ainu artifacts. Ainu are the original settlers of Japan and now nearly extinct. I was more than a bit surprised to find this much Ainu material in Denmark.

Samurai armor and helmets seem to be a centerpiece of these types of foreign exhibits on Japan.

Finally, we shall end on the mask exhibit. Having recently read The Street of a Thousand Blossoms and being a daily visitor to Ojisanjake’s blog, I found this portion of the Japan exhibit to be very interesting. I especially liked the bottom six masks which show the process from block of wood to finished mask.

Posted on August 31st, 2008 under Denmark, Japan. Tags: copenhagen, museums, pictures. Comments: None

After the Eiffel Tower we hung out at the nearby Parc du Champ de Mars while the kids played in the playground near the southern corner. A lady from New York who was there with her small kids approached us. She hadn’t spoken English to an adult in a week or more it seemed and decided to take it out on us. After 15 minutes or so of non-stop chatter on her part we were wondering if we’d ever get away. Luckily, another lady from the states showed up with her children who were much closer in age to the New York lady’s kids. The New York lady immediately ditched us to burn this other lady’s ears off and arrange play dates with their kids much to our relief.

We walked over to Rick Steves’ favorite Rue Cler to check it out. The place was dead and nothing special on a Monday. We ate lunch at Cafe du Marche which was OK.

Also based on Rick Steves’ recommendation (and those of someone else as well), we decided to head back to Luxembourg Park to check out the puppet show.

We saw a couple of puppet shows in Denmark that were really good and didn’t require any knowledge of Danish to thoroughly enjoy. Admission to see the Danish shows was free. As it turned out, the puppet show (guignols or Marionnettes du Luxembourg) in Jardin du Luxembourg was a huge disappointment. Not only did it cost almost US$10 for each of us to get in, but the puppet show is not the least bit enjoyable unless you are fluent in French. I take that back, even the French adults there didn’t seem to be having a good time. In fact, many people, in addition to ourselves, left at the intermission.

Anyway, back to our walk there from the Rue Cler…

We walked past the above Army Museum (Musee de l’Armee). In the background you can see the dome over Napoleon’s Tomb (Eglise du Dome).

We also walked past the outside of the Rodin Museum (Musee Rodin). Without even going in you can see The Thinker from the backside (pictured above). We saw a much smaller version back in Copenhagen.

The walk was pretty tiring after walking up the Eiffel Tower earlier in the day, but there were some cool sights along the way. For instance, we saw a window washer without any scaffolding; he was just on a rope.

I like the above photograph not only for the window washer but for the French architecture and clouds.

Posted on August 21st, 2008 under Paris. Tags: clouds, museums, Paris, pictures. Comments: 2

I once sat alone in a room full of Rembrandts while in the same building the Mona Lisa sat alone in a room full of tourists.

Posted on August 20th, 2008 under Paris. Tags: louvre, museums, Paris, pictures. Comments: None

After the Louvre, we walked through the Jardin des Tuilertes Park where a carnival of sorts was taking place. Compared to the Louvre, or anywhere else for that matter, this place was deserted. There were about 20 rides for the 10 or so people there. At several Euro a ride, no one was biting. We didn’t either.

We crossed a very cool bridge, called the Passerelle Solferino, to check out another first-Sunday-of-the-month, free museum, the Orsay. The queue was as bad as it was for the Louvre, but this line moved very slowly. It probably took us almost an hour to get in.

The Orsay previously was a train station and you could certainly tell from the interior. For a museum that has only been around for a little over twenty years the collection is amazing.

This sculpture, although not famous as far as I know, was my favorite. For a piece of rock, it sure can make the viewer curious as to what is being said.

The Orsay is loaded with works by Monet, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Degas, Pissarro, Sisley, and other Impressionist artists. My daughter enjoyed the audio guide while learning about Monet.

Van Gogh is my favorite Impressionist painter, but it was difficult getting very close to many of his works with the crowds.

On the top of the museum you can exit to wonderful views of the city. The green-roofed building on the left is the Opera Garnier, and the white church is Sacre Coeur which we visited on the following night. Stay tuned for more on that experience.

The restaurant and cafeteria on the upper level of the Orsay were absolute madhouses. For the restaurant you had to wait in an hour-long line. For the cafeteria you had to wait in a half-hour long line (and then eat standing up). The only good thing was that you had the above view through the mostly translucent clock. The clock may look as if it is backwards. It is from the interior. The clock is meant for those on the outside of the building.

After the Orsay, my daughter and I were spent. We collapsed in front of this statue in front of the exterior of the Orsay to plot our next moves. Can you see how tired we are in our faces?

Posted on August 16th, 2008 under Paris. Tags: d'Orsay, museums, Paris, pictures, Sacre-Coeur. Comments: None

We happened to be in Paris on the first Sunday of the month which also happens to be the only day of the month in which several museums are free. So we headed off early to get to the Louvre before it opened. It turned out that we weren’t the only ones to do so.

There are three entrances to the Louvre. Two of them are rather hidden and the lines are shorter than the ground level entrance at the pyramid. We opted for the Metro entrance below which, while having less people queued than above, still had over a thousand people in it. The other, less used, entrance is Porte des Lions, at the south wing of the Museum near the river. I don’t know how many people were lined up there, but it would have probably been less.

The good news is that with nobody having to purchase tickets the lines moved pretty quickly. The bad news is that once you got in, even though the museum had only been open for about 15 minutes, it was already packed.

Everyone was heading for the Mona Lisa so we went in another direction and took a look at some friezes that were originally on the Parthenon in Greece. We continued on to the Venus de Milo while nearly everyone else was at the Mona Lisa.

From the backside we noticed that we weren’t the only ones in the vicinity of this famous statue as a spider had taken up residence on her shoulder. Actually, there were loads of tourists at the Venus de Milo, but not as many as there would be later in the day.

We browsed our way to the Mona Lisa.

I thought it was really bizarre that people were beside themselves to get to the Mona Lisa while completely ignoring the other works along the way. There was a wall with several Leonardo da Vinci paintings on it that no one was even looking at while hundreds of people were packing in to take a picture of the Mona Lisa. It made no sense. Is this how people really want to take pleasure in art?

It was as if the tourists wanted to be able to say (or prove with a picture) that they had seen the Mona Lisa, but they really had no intention of enjoying their experience at the Louvre. We tried to avoid the crowds as much as possible, but it wasn’t easy.

The above is a statue of one of the first baseball players. It looks like he may have been on steroids.

To avoid the claustrophobia I felt in the Louvre, I looked out nearly every window I could find. In doing so, I found that much of the “art” of the Louvre is not housed on the inside, surrounded by pushy tourists elbowing their neighbors out of the way for a picture to show their friends back home, but through the windows. Some of the windows offer unique vantage points to interior places in the Louvre and others have dramatic exterior views.

The one above (and it looks much better once you enlarge it by clicking on it) includes the Eiffel Tower to the right.

Posted on August 15th, 2008 under Paris. Tags: eiffel tower, louvre, museums, Paris, pictures. Comments: None

Purchasing tickets for Denmark’s train system is one of the more unusual things about Denmark. There are so many different ticket options and prices to go from Point A to Point B that it leaves your head spinning. You never know if a given trip on the train will be cheap or expensive. Copenhagen Business School was paying for our trip to Louisiana so I didn’t have to worry, but before I found out they were paying I did a little research.

We could buy an all-day pass for 115 DKK each (about US$25). We could purchase one-way zone passes for 80 DKK each way. Or we could purchase tickets along with an entrance to the museum for 160 DKK round trip. I’m sure there were a dozen other options using other passes or klip variations or . . . The bottom line is that you never know how much a trip will cost, if you may get lucky and get a special that is going on that day, or if you go to a different ticket agent they may know of another less expensive way to get to your destination. It’s a crap shoot.

I prefer the Japanese system in which you always know the price and the price is much cheaper than in Denmark. For instance, to travel the distance we traveled to Louisiana from Copenhagen we’d pay no more than about US$5 in Japan. Here the price, again depending on the ticket agent of the day, ranges from about $12 to about $20.

Louisiana Modern Art Museum (Moderne Kunst in Danish) is in a beautiful setting in the town of Humlebaek (also spelled Humelbaek). I’m not a big fan of modern art; in fact, much of it does absolutely nothing for me. However, the settings for some of the pieces here really do make the works far more interesting than they would be on their own.

My kids pushed a button near the above work. Nothing happened. Then, about 10 seconds later, the bell started slamming the metal man in the head over and over again causing a huge noise that seemed totally out of place in this quiet museum. My kids freaked out. They thought security would be all over them. I’m not sure how this is art, but it did make things interesting.

You never know which of the museum’s Andy Warhol collections will be out on display. They have three. One is the “Marilyn” collection (which we’ve seen examples of in a museum at BYU). Another is “Flowers” (which we have seen examples of at the Smithsonian in DC). The third is what we saw at Louisiana, “Mao.”

I thought this last one was going to have a different title than it did. This work is called “Eyes.”

When my kids could take no more (actually they had a great time on the very long slide here and there is a workshop with lots of stuff for kids to do) we headed to the adjacent beach. More on that in tomorrow’s entry . . .

Posted on August 8th, 2008 under Denmark. Tags: beach, copenhagen, living in copenhagen, museums, pictures. Comments: None