Storytellers - (not so) Danish literature and film

During our first two weeks in Denmark, we had two lessens of Danish lit and film.
Again, I was really looking forward to these lessons, because I’m very interested in literature. In Flemish, we have a saying: ‘Op je honger blijven zitten.’, which means that you are not satisfied because you had higher expectations than what happened in real life.

I thought it would be more theoretical, that we would be given some texts which we then had to analyze. Sadly enough, we were given a few words about Denmark’s culture and got the assignment of making a short presentation about our country.

We talked for a short time about Karen Blixen and then saw a movie about her life. I think it’s a pity that we haven’t learned more about her books, maybe read some sections of it and then discussed it. Okay, we now know about her life, but not about her style of writing.

The week after, we all presented our country and our city to each other.
I didn’t want to get my hopes up, but I still expected that we would learn more about Karen Blixen. Nope, I was wrong again. This time, we watched a movie about H.C. Anderson. Again, we didn’t discuss any of his fairy tales, even though everyone knows them. We watched half a movie about his life. I didn’t really learn something interesting about Denmark or Danish literature and film.
In fact, during these three months, I learned more about the countries of the other Erasmus students than about my host country. I think that’s sad.