break me down and watch me burn (use your love as gasoline) [ sambucky ]

in the air (cover the stench of pain)

Aarhus is a beautiful city, Sam decides rather quickly. It's cozy in a way metropolises never are, but busy and modern enough that it doesn't feel like a ghost town or like it's pretending to be something it's not. It's full of students, people coming from outside the city to work, elderly just living their best lives, and a whole lot of different kinds of artists. Even the basic architecture has a beauty to it, and when it's not - basic, that is - punk, vintage, industrial, and modern architecture and decor mix seamlessly.

At the harbor, on a concrete wall of a shipping company's storage building, is a huge piece of graffiti street art, and across from it is a fountain made specifically for people to have fun with and play around in. The busiest shopping street runs across a canal, the bridge looking like something out of a gothic, French movie, and past an old, rustic church roughly the size of a small house. Not even a block from the main railway station is a massive, public food court, filled to the brim with every flavor of food you could possibly want from a multitude of different cultures.

It's got him rather awestruck, really. Aarhus is such a tiny town by American standards, and, compared to the size of Copenhagen, Aarhus doesn't seem like much. But, though Copenhagen is beautiful in its own right, Aarhus oozes the kind of personality that has Sam's chest fluttering with joy.

There's streets and roads entirely made of cobblestone that are too narrow to really be called either, houses old enough that they can't be more than fifty by fifty yards and in any way good for one's health lined in slightly askew rows on each side, a block from a newly built apartment complex, a neatly kept park, and a net of paved roads. Actually, the cobblestone damn-near-alleyway-narrow-road and paved road meet each other naturally without any change in traffic. It, frankly, boggles Sam's mind, because cars should not be allowed to go down any road that narrow, but the populace of Aarhus does it. And they do it well, despite every side-mirror looking like it's gonna be torn off by the next pole. It's damn pretty, is what it is.

Aarhus' pearl - the thing that drags people in and is the focus of their attention - is the culture museum, ARoS. It's a massive, perfectly square building a stone's throw from the city hall that doesn't look like much on its own. The long windows are placed in an asymmetrical pattern and look sort of like a bunch of white doors laying on the side, and the staircase up to the entrance is more like a neat cobblestone ramp than an actual staircase. It's made of bright orange-red bricks, a hill wrapping around the lower third of it like a big green blanket. The parking lot is dug underneath the building itself and into the hill.

However, that's not all the building's got going on. What really captures people's attention is the gigantic rainbow wheel on top of the roof. A rainbow wheel, made of a metal floor and ceiling and colored glass wall, that you can walk through and look out across the rest of the city from.

This is where Sam is; standing atop a big, square museum made of bricks, looking out over the city of Aarhus through a magenta pane of glass. He's rather taken with it, really, because his expectations for how strongly the glass tints the view were honestly quite low. From Sam's experience, it isn't often tinted or colored glass has a powerful effect on the world beyond it - hell, good sunglasses are stupidly difficult to find - but whatever this particular color wheel is made of, it's good.

There's something indescribably powerful about the impression and atmosphere an entire city tinted in neon pink gives off. Sam can't accurately put words to it even if he tried. As he said, it's indescribable - however, that's not gonna stop him. If trauma isn't gonna stop him from willingly taking on the responsibility of catching Captain fucking America when he throws himself off a flying aircraft carrier controlled by Nazis, then his lack of vocabulary and poetic practice isn't going to now, either.