Day 262 -- Emily's Function Day

A while ago Collin blogged about his function day ("Day 160-161 Funk Tur").  Yesterday was my department's turn.  Ours was not an overnight driving extravaganza like Collin's.  Ours was just one day.  For those of you that don't remember Collin's, the function day is a day (or two days) where your "function" (which means all the departments under the same director/VP) spends time together team building etc.  My function consists of two department with about 45 people total.

Our day was held at one of Novo's meeting sites called Favrholm.   This is also were Collin and I attended our introduction day for all new employees but I couldn't find that in our blog.

photo courtesy of favrholm website

Favrholm is about a 30 min drive from our house; 1 hr and 15 min via public transportation (with many changes).  Luckily my department manager offered to give me a ride which was much much nicer than last time we went there!

Unlike Collin's day of Danish hijinks, driving, and alcohol, our day actually involved work-related activities.   The morning was spent on introduction to the importance of our function and a lot of group work about improving how we do things.  Favrholm is known for their emphasis on food, so lunch was delicious, putting our pretty good work canteen to shame.   The buffet included roast lamb with baba ganoush, an assortment of salads with nuts, fruits, cheeses, some sort of fish with roasted tomatoes, the normal assembly of danish Smørrebrød toppings and bread, roasted vegetables, and an array of cheeses.   After filling ourselves we went back to more discussions/group work on innovation; and then the fun really started....if you speak Danish...and if you like a more "low-brow" type of humor, from what I could gather.

The next 75 minutes was spent listening to Connie Svendsen: flight attendant-turned-humorous-motivational-speaker.

photo courtesy of Connie's website

Now maybe if I had some more Danish skills I would have gotten something out of her presentations.  Did I mention it was only in Danish?  But I have a feeling even if I understood what she was saying, it might not have been my sort of style.  I'm pretty sure there were fart jokes in there, and there were definitely pictures of half-clothed overweight people.  and some story about Denmark's second largest baby (I understood those words) and props.  including a clown nose, an oversized pen, glasses with eyes painted on them, and much much more...all of which were used in succession.  In my opinion she could have spread them out a bit more.

So after an uncomfortable 75 minutes of not smiling when everyone around me was falling of their chairs with laughter, she finally finished and we all headed outside for some healthy exercise.  We broke into 8 teams for a mini-tournament of "Kubb" aka "kongespill" aka "Vikingespill".  According to the Danish wiki, kubb was invented in the middle ages, but not documented until 1990. and probably invented in Sweden.  It can be played by 2-12 players.  It kind of reminded me of a Danish version of cornhole, in that you have teams that stand opposite each other and throw things...a good tailgating/picnic type of game

the kubb box....hasn't anyone told them vikings didn't have horns on their helmets?

the playing field mid-game

Kubb consists of 5 pieces of wood ("kubber") lined up across from 5 other kubber.  In the middle of the field is the crowned wood ("konge" or king).  The object is to throw fat sticks about a foot long ("kastepinde") from one side of the field and knock down the kubber on the other side of the field.  Once you have knocked down all 5 kubber on the other side, you have to knock down the king.   You take turns back and forth in throwing and the first team to knock the 5 kubber and king over wins.  If you knock the king down at any point in the game before you knock all 5 kubber down, you lose automatically.  I believe there are more rules than that, but we played an abbreviated version so that was all we did.

My team won our first round but lost in the semi-finals (to the eventual champions).  I am proud to say of the 10 things we knocked down in the two matches, I was responsible for 3.  It's harder than it looks.

After the kubb tournament we had a final work-related seminar and then dinner.  This was a sit-down meal starting with roasted beet root salad with crumbled rye toast and blackberries and a tarragon emulsion.  The main was venison with hazelnuts, freeze-dried celery, a plum vinegrette, some other sauces and parsleyed potatoes.   Dessert was buttermilk sorbet with torched meringue, salt and lemon verbana marinated raspberries, and freeze-dried white chocolate.

After dinner the fun continued with beers in the lounge but I was exhausted and had an offer for a ride home so I took it.