Playing Vikings!

So. Hi.

You might be puzzled by the title. You might also be equally puzzled by my absence from le blog. Well, I have one simple explanation that will cover both these questions.

The traditional Aurehøj Viking Trip. Oh yes. It's as awesome as it sounds.

As crazy traditions go, Aurehøj is what I'd like to call an expert in the area. There's the legendary Doctor-party (a party so naughty and infamous, that some people actually consider going to Aurehøj just for this sexy-themed party). There's the classic intro week (where the students are put through all kinds of horrors, such as the "Babe and Hunk of the Year"-competition, the gender-change day, and several rounds of beer-chugging, -relays and -bongs). And then there's the Viking Trip.

The Viking Trip always includes the following:

• Going to Roskilde's Viking Museum, which is, incidentally, and should you ever decide to go, boring as fuck, and basically just a manditory torture to put the students through to get to the next step...
• Sailing in a real viking ship from Roskilde to a random little island in Roskilde Fjord. For 200 DKK a piece, you can get to row, sail and do absolutely nothing in your very own class viking ship, with about 16 students in each boat. In our case, this involved a lot of singing, some guitar playing, and a surprising lack of old sailor's tails (except the ominous message from the captain that we weren't allowed to whistle on deck, because "You just shouldn't do that on a ship").
• Camping out on that very same random island in Roskilde Fjord. This is the fun part. The only civilized part of the island is a small campsite with three shelters, a primitive port-o-john, and a few logs put around a campfire. And then you dump your first-year students here, let them fight for the scarce spaces in the shelters, or lug their own tents to the camping sites, and basically leave them to prepare their own campfood and play their guitars around the fire.

Aaaaahhh. Apart from the fact that I was eaten alive by mosquitos (and have immeasurable amounts of mosquito bites to prove it), that we nearly didn't get any food for dinner, since my camp-stove and pot disappeared from me post-Roskilde Festival, that two of the boys finally had to elbow their way into one of the shelters at the crack of dawn, after having stayed awake for hours because they couldn't find a place to sleep, and the fact that the teachers that accompanied us seemed to not really give a fuck about us, and had clearly been forced to go with us, it was great!

No kidding. We had a lot of fun. It was like something taken out of a prejudiced anti-hippie mind's worst nightmare. A bunch of happy Aurehøj-students on a viking boat, singing random songs in varying degrees of tone-deaf-ness. A couple of boys jumping in the cold lake and swimming. Walking like a big happy family around the shoreline. Cooking sausages and bread and pasta and baked potatoes and other camp food. A guitar playing from the moment we left, to the moment the last guitar-player went to bed, and then starting again at the crack of dawn. Talking to people we had never talked to before, getting to know each other by playing strange games, and laughingly telling about several different embarrassing experiences. Everyone sitting around the campfire in the dark, singing campfire songs in crackling voices, harmonizing in varying degrees of bad. It was... really nice.

I'm already loving Aurehøj. And my class.

Thanks for a great trip, 1.M!

Earth Wind And Fire September

 

Photography by Ulrik Testmann and Asta Nørgaard.

 

Thanks for listening,

I Am Roseberry.