Celebrating Danish and Chinese Culture

One of the advantages of the way our exchange program works is that CBS students come to Purdue in the fall, then return to CBS in the spring, while we're here. That means that I already know a few Danes. One of our Danish friends who studied at Purdue invited us over for dinner on Friday and made incredible vegetarian versions of traditional Danish dishes. We had Danish style lasagna which has a wine sauce rather than tomato sauce, a mushroom paté (normally it would be liver), and beet patties with remoulade (traditionally made with pork). The dinner and company were both excellent.

After Friday night's celebration of Danish culture, I spent Saturday celebrating Chinese New Year with Ziyu. There was a large celebration held at the Copenhagen City Hall. There were performances all afternoon as well as booths about aspects of Chinese culture like tea and calligraphy. The performances represented many different cultural groups and traditions in China. Ziyu helped explain the different performances and translated for me because the emcees only spoke in Chinese and Danish. At the end of the performances on stage, we went outside where there were lion and dragon dances followed by fireworks at 5pm here, which is midnight in China. When we got home, Ziyu cooked Chinese food for dinner.

In one of the performances, a calligrapher wrote while the woman on the right sang.

The lion dance.

Dragon dance.

Fireworks at "midnight."