Both of us are fairly regular library users and one of the first things Ann does when she arrives in a new city is to acquire a library card. Sonderborg was no exception and the staff here were really friendly and helpful so we both had access the second day we were in town.

So far we have used the library to borrow books, DVDs and CDs, get internet (when our own failed) and then I have gone to two public talks. I haven’t really does this before but since I’m trying to stay on top of what’s going on in Sonderborg for this blog I’ve kept an eye on the library’s calendar and there are loads of really interesting topics.

First I went to a talk by Nikolaj Witte who presented “China and the search for immortality” about the religions and customs of China. A very inspiring talk and with Nikolaj’s background in philosophy we got a nice introduction to understanding the very different mentality and culture of China. This talk was part of the municipality’s week long celebrations of the Chinese New Year and I think that was why the event was free.

The second talk I went to was with Anders Høeg Nissen, one of the presenter of a weekly radio show about technology, robots and lasers. I’ve been a casual listener of the radio show since high school back in the late 90s so it was fun to put a face to the voice. Anders talked about trends in technology in general and some gadgets specifically. Most of the topics I had heard about in the show or read about elsewhere but still, it was good to take a step back and consider what these advances in technology mean for us in the bigger picture.

Often topics are covered in themes so there will be series of talks about Iceland or this winter there are a lot of talks about WW1. All the talks I have read about has been by Danes and in Danish so you have to be able to comprehend spoken Danish to get something out of these talks. The prices are from free to 50/80DKK per talk, sometimes with discounts for students.

While we were living in London libraries were closing all around us. In our borough 6 out of 12 libraries got shut down during 2011. If you want to keep our library around you need to use it 🙂