War Memorials in the Kastellet

Hah!  Jael is looking up at things again!

There were statutes and memorials all over the place around the Kastellet.  Most of them, understandably, seemed to be related to wars and things like that.














According to Google Translate, this memorial says "Memorial to volunteers and those who fell for Denmark in 1848-1850 and 1864".  If I am correct, this is a memorial to those who fought in the First and Second Schleswig Wars.  There are other memorials to fighters in these wars in the Citadel as well.

This monument is called "Our Fallen" (or possibly, "Our Slain")
"in Danish and in Allied military service, 1940-1945"
"erected by the Danish people"

This is a statue that was just right in the middle of the park between the church and the quay.
Churchill looks plenty intimidating.  There were a couple of other busts a little bit away from
this one.  After church, Jael and I were going to go to walk over and see if they were FDR and
Stalin, because that is what they looked like from a distance.  When we walked back that way,
though, there was an ambulance and some emergency workers right beside them and there
was either a dead body or a really drunk body wrapped in sheets that they were working over.
So we decided to skip that part of the park.

In the middle of the Kastellet, there is a big new (very new) monument.  They started building it in April of 2011 and it was only completed in September.  It was big and empty and I am still not sure what everything represented.  It is the Monument to the Danish International Effort.  You can see it's (Danish) website, here. According to that website, "In respect for the many who have been deployed to conflict and disaster, for those who are posted now and for those who have died, the government has decided that there should be a monument to Danish International Effort since 1948."

Through the hexagon shaped window you can see a little hexagon shaped fireplace with a
flame in it and beyond that, a hexagon shaped pool.  I don't know why everything is
hexagon shaped.  The wall says (something like) "A time, and state, and people".
I also don't know the significance of that.

This, I believe, lists all of the places that Danish troops have been stationed since 1948.  When you figure that this is just the places where little Denmark has been, it kind of makes you wonder how long the U.S.'s list would be.

These walls, I think, the names of Danish military personnel who have died in service.  The wall on the left had the earliest dates, from 1956.  The wall on the right has the most recent dates, with dates as recent as 2011.

I found this picture of St. Alban's Anglican Church that I had in the wrong file folder.
This is from the land side of the church, opposite the Kastellet.
It is an awfully pretty church.

Stuff I Missed . . .

Jael took pictures and left them with me.  Unfortunately, she deleted all of the really funny pictures of her before she did that.  But, in any case, I just looked through those pictures and found out there are some of them that relevant to stuff I already put up.

So, here, and with proper photography credits to Jael are pictures of St. Alban's Anglican Church.  Somehow, Jael, who took a total of about three non-food-related pictures the entire trip, ended up with more pictures of the church than I.

This a back-view of the church (with its steeple cut off).  It is from over the moat that
surrounds the Kastilette.  You can also see the very famous Gifeon Fountain.
Also, notice the swan sitting on its nest under the edge of the bridge.

St. Alban's Anglican Church

And, finally, a picture of me, in our hotel, on my side of the room which had a closet and the exit.  I would totally have won the "get out alive" race in the case of a fire.  Jael's side of the room only had a window with no fire escape.  I really did not remember Jael taking this picture.  I think that I have blocked it from my memory.

Comazuipers Continued

Remember how I talked about comazuipers before?  Well, that is still a part of the national stream of consciousness, apparently.  This afternoon, this little ad/poll popped up on my browser:

It says: "Passed-Out Drunks: should they pay for their own treatment at the hospital?"  I think that the picture is supposed to evoke a "Ja" response.

(By the way, the small printing at the bottom says "vote now for a chance at a Mini".  I don't know if that means  those adorable little cars or something else but it did suggest that this was more ad than poll.)

Zwarte Pieten, Black Face, and America

In December, for my last class before the holidays, we had a guest speaker.  He's a Ph.D. student here at Erasmus but he did exchange studies for his Master's degree at Central Michigan University--it's a small world.

Anyways, we were chatting before class started and he said that he really liked his time in America and, having traveled all around, thought that he wanted to get a job and live there once he graduated.  I realized, though, when he said that, that I think that is the first time someone has said something nice about America since I got here.  Granted, most of the discussions I have heard have been as part of overall discussions of empire, which generally gets people started on an unhappy note, but, in general, most folks seem to consider America to be bossy and unnecessarily inquisitive and her people to be loud, obnoxious, racist, and provincial.  This fellow said that while he had gone to America with similar preconceptions, he had been converted by meeting people and talking to them (it probably didn't hurt that he spent a lot of his time hanging out in Michigan where people are nice--not quite "Minnesota Nice", but pretty close).

Since we were talking about race relations, the Zwarte Piet tradition came up and he said that colored people in the Netherlands find the tradition very offensive.  I mentioned that I was surprised because in discussions I had seen, negative reactions were credited to American over-sensitivity and discounted.  He said that there is a large divide between the white Dutch and the colored Dutch (who, by the way are collectively called "blauwen" (blue) instead of "black" as they are in the States.  "Zwart" (black) is used sometimes but apparently has fairly negative connotations.)  He said that this year several colored students wore t-shirts that said "Black Pete is Racist" (or the equivalent in Dutch) to the official landing of Sinterklaas at Dordrecht and they got put in jail (I don't know if they were causing trouble or not but it sounded like he thought it was just because of their shirts).  So, while it couldn't have translated to America in any case, it sounds like this holiday tradition might have a limited life expectancy in the Netherlands as well.

The Maternal Pelican

Thanks to Dad, I am very sadly no longer in the dark about why the Pelican is a symbol of maternal affection.

Apparently, folks used to think that pelican mothers would rip chunks out of their bodies to feed their little offspring, making it a common symbol of the Eucharist for the Catholic Church (which makes it seem very out of place in  a Protestant church, by the way) and also, apparently, making it important in Free Masonry.  About  7 o'clock this morning, as I was getting ready to do some homework, I innocently opened up an email link from Dad and found this lovely picture to illustrate this point.

On a less cheerful note, an older tradition, going back to the Romans, was that the father pelican would, when annoyed by the flailings of his little offspring, club them to death with his head.  The mother, who apparently forgot how annoying they were after a couple of days, would bring them back to life by bleeding on them.  The Catholic education website, however, only tells about the bringing back to life part of the story.

Who knew?

The Pilgrims

One thing which I failed to do, much to my shame, was to adequately plan for checking out Pilgrim stuff when I was at Leiden.  I did try to see the Pilgrim Museum but I could not find it. (I plan on blaming that on Google Maps.)  Moreover, I ended up walking past all kinds of good stuff--like the place where they used to chop off criminals' hands--without a second thought, or stopping to take a picture.  My only consolation is that I ran out of time to do a bunch of stuff while I was there so I will probably go back at some point, anyways.  I definitely need a picture of the place where they chopped off hands.  You, however, do not have to wait until I catch up on my homework to see that and other cool historical things.  You can look at the website of the "Leiden American Pilgrims Museum" right here.  They have a fair bit of historical stuff there as well as some pretty extensive photo slide shows about Leiden.  The most pertinent is the "Pilgrims' Tour of Leiden" which is quite full (it has 68 photos) with lots of interesting information.  You can go straight to it here if you would like.

This, however, is a picture St. Pieter's Kerk, beside which many of the Pilgrims lived during their stay in Leiden.  If my various wild assumptions are correct, the row of houses that is standing where the Pilgrim houses once stood is just the other side of the church, behind that car.  That may be a door and window of one of the houses just visible between the tree branches.

A Correction about the Leiden Relief (which we will pretend was our little joke): of course William didn't flood 7 miles of Dutch folk (i.e. half of the Netherlands) to save Leiden.  He flooded Leiden out of some river or canal or something, much closer to Leiden (although still inflicting significant damage to nearby towns) which explains why they needed so much wind to make it work.