The family gets in today, which means Christmas in Copenhagen, and then Berlin and Prague.

I'll be back in Copenhagen around New Year's...until then, Happy Holidays everyone!

Well, everyone from DIS has left.

My block (and every other place of DIS student residence) is now empty of all other American students. Everyone is either on their way to the airport, or already on a plane somewhere. It will be interesting to see what I think of Denmark in the next few weeks, minus my American fix. I will probably miss them all.

Today, I was hit by a bike.

Danish bikes are dangerous things.


Also, Jess and I decided that our block needed sprucing up, so we decided to paint one of the walls of our common room. Said painting will take place before/after the Krosteun is open, with hands and fingers.

I'm sure those who share our block will be less than amused, but hey, at least we don't eat our dogs.


Edit: I swear this looked AMAZING when we painted it. And we really weren't intoxicated, it was just really dark (you know, since my block doesn't have light bulbs because they've all been stolen)

Well, I have seen Estonia, and it is lovely. You can still see the remains of Soviet occupation, since it ended like 15 years ago. All around them, there are new, modern buildings (like Casinos and hamburger places) going up, and Old Town is still standing in the heart of Talinn. It makes for a really interesting juxtaposition of architecture.

While in Estonia, I:
smoked a Cuban cigar
ate blood sausage
ate black pudding, which is basically just a fried blood clot
drank Estonian-style Glogg
bought too many Christmas presents
wandered around the Open Air Museum, and saw more trees in one place than I have since I got to Europe
took a shot of Estonian vodka as "medicine"
saw the most awful Estonian reality television
discovered the Estonian Christmas markets
turned on and off a light switch located inside of a kitchen cupboard

All in all, it was a very successful sort of trip. Of course, it helps to have your own Estonian tour guide, taking you around and speaking the language.


Sadly, I have no pictures of Estonia...I bought the cheapest Estonian batteries I could find, and even brand new straight out of the package my camera wouldn't even turn on, it just flashes the low battery sign. So if you ever have the chance, don't buy Estonian batteries.

The paper from Hell is done! 2,955 words on the relationship between Socialist art, the German Art Nouveau movement, and Zionist iconography through the artwork of Ephraim Moses Lilien!

Try writing that paper 3 times. OUCH.


Scratch your head, wondering why everyone accepts there is a connection between Zionist and Socialist symbolism, but no one has ever written on it/researched it in English!

Try finding out all your sources are only available in ONE room of the Royal Library, where someone will sit with you and watch you read them as you write things down with a pencil and paper because electronic devices are banned from the rare books room!

Watch as you are told that you cannot make copies of artwork because it is classified as an 'art book'!

Wait for an old man to take pity on you as start to cry because you actually needed those copies!

Groan the moment you find out that getting a copying card takes over a half an hour!

Scratch your head when you are told that you cannot put less than a 100 DKK on your card at one time!

Realize you are being ripped off as you make your copies and spend only 8 DKK!

Realize you computer has crashed again and you have lost your research!

Marvel at the Danish system of book retrieval as you try to check out the same books you did the day before, now mysteriously missing!



Conclusion: the Danish Library system is AWFUL. And in case anyone ever needs a copying card, I have one with like 92 DKK on it.

Also, I've been listening to this Tobias Fröberg guy from Sweden(brother of Jose Gonzales)...its sort of folky easy-listening stuff...kind of like Damien Rice, but with actual emotion and lyrics that have something to say, as opposed to just pretending. Mom, you would like him. I can send you the link to some free tracks.


Estonia this weekend!

I promise that SOMEDAY I will try my very best to update about my traveling, but for the moment, I am in the midst of papers, computer problems, library-usage issues, and general craziness.


Until the (unlikely at this point) day that I update about Paris/Madrid/Krakow/Warzawa, all my pictures are posted on my flickr photo site, as well as an album of pictures taken in Denmark, up to date as of this past Friday. So click away...visual learning folks.


Thanksgiving in Denmark was great! (There are pictures on the aformentioned site)...my friends Hillevi and Gabby and I cooked the entire meal from scratch (as in, cut and baked pumpkin wedges to make the puree to make the pumpkin pie filling, and boiled cranberries in orange juice to make the cranberry sauce kind of cooking from scratch). It was intense. I had no idea I could actually cook.

Frightening.

Tonight Hillevi and I cooked a pizza with frikadellers and onions and peppers.
It was amazing.

Then we watched Arrested Development and Jess and Matt came and we made SMORES.
Which was brilliant.


Best relaxing I have done in a week.

From Budapest, we traveled by bus across Hungary to Vienna, where we spent the last few remaining days of our tour.
Immediately upon our arrival in Vienna, we went on a walking tour of the city to see the sites: The Albertina, Hofburg Imperial Palace, State Opera House, Heldenplatz, the Demel pastry shop, St. Peters Church, Mozart's home-turned-museum, the Spainish Riding School, the training grounds of the famous Lipizzan horses, and St. Stephen's Cathedral.
After a brief one hour break during which we had to not only eat dinner, but change and get ready for the Viennese Opera, we went to see The Barber of Seville. They still take the opera extremely seriously in Vienna, and dress up more than you'd think...we saw a couple of women in ball gowns while we were there. It was really quite a good opera, though perhaps not the best opera I've ever seen (and I haven't really seen THAT many), but I'm sure it would have been a good deal better if we could have seen more than half of the stage and heard everything that was being sung. DIS bought us the cheapest seats in the house, in the top seated row, in the corners of the opera house, so those of us who were right in the corner had to sort of crane our necks out and lean over the railing to see what was going on: a precarious and uncomfortable position.
After the opera was over, a bunch of us decided to hit the Viennese Casino, since we were already dressed up enough and our guide earlier had told us a way to make back all of our money. "You can't lose!" she told us.
WRONG. You can lose. We lost a lot. Given, we did walk into the wrong casino, so there were no roulette tables like our guide had talked about, just blackjack and arcades. With the exception of Peter, who made back all but one euro, we all lost everything we'd put down, including euro we had been given as "first-timers" at the casino.
Upon leaving, we ran into a group of DIS students looking for a bar, which at that point, was our goal as well. So we traveled around Vienna with them, looking for a swinging bar that was affordable and where the dress code wasn't too strict for some of the boys to get in (yes-the dress codes for bars are worse than the dress codes at the Opera and the Casino). We ended up at some new bar, that was supposedly having an opening night party - we made up almost the entire crowd there. However, they had cheap drinks and I think everyone involved had a wonderful time, until the early hours of the morning.
Hillevi and I decided that since we'd attended every lecture during the tour thus far, we deserved to miss the last one, which, according to our guide book, was supposed to be on economics, a subject neither of us cared anything at all about.
So, we slept in, took the metro to Schonbrunn, and met up with the group for lunch at Cafe Gloriette. After a rousing meal with the other folks who skipped the economics lecture, we went on to Schonbrunn's Tiergarten, or zoo. We spent a good deal of time looking for the zoo's prestigious Panda pair, Yang Yang and Long Hui, traveling through the cats, rhinos, and simulated Amazon Rainforest to find them.
I ended up leaving the park with some boys in our group, having missed the bus because of all the searching for Pandas, and ended up visiting The Albertina to see the Pablo Picasso exhibit they were showing. I spent most of the evening with them, having 'traditional' Tapas food and looking for an open bar that was also affordable, finding none, and heading home relatively earlier than we'd hoped.
The next morning we went to the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien for a guided tour. It was largely boring. I was disappointed. We then went to the cafe in the Museum of Modern Art to "analyze" the tour and share one last meal before we all went our seperate ways. It was almost touching...DIS bought us one last glass of wine.
Instead of returning to the hotel to take the bus back to Copenhagen, I caught a taxi to the Western train station to go back to Budapest for a few days and catch up with more K people.


A number of exceedingly brilliant things were said during the course of the DIS ECH study tour (most of them by our beloved raspy-voiced member), and I'm catalogueing them here for my own personal amusement:

"the past 24 hours hav ebeen the best 24 hours of my life!" please imagine this said multiple times, every hour of every day.
"oh, she's pregnant. I was wondering, like why is that model SO fat?"
"this one time, I took my boyfriend to one of my soroitiy parties, and he wanted to wear KHAKI PANTS. I just don't understand pleated khakis!"
"brown and black...you just can't wear that. I can't stand brown and black together. I like tan and black though, that's totally different. But brown is like navy."
"and then I threw up 3 times and a little in my mouth. but it was my birthday yesterday."
"but aren't people like wheapons?"
on potato pancakes: "I was like, Oh my god! I just ate that!"
"wait, the opera's not in English? Are there subtitles?"
On the Barber of Seville, which is in Italian: "but I didn't understand anything, because I think it was in like, German or something, so I just left."
"it's my birthday! Let's sing happy birthday again! Please, just one more time?"
On how far her chair was leaned back: "It's a free country. I can lean my chair back as far as I want."
"Oh my god, they have shwarma here? Why isn't it just called shwarma? What's a kebap?"
In Statue Park, Budapest: "Let's hump the statues! Someone take a picture of me humping the statue!"
"Maybe we should be...I dunno, more respectful?"
"No, no, humping is funny. Humping is always funny!"
On leaving someone at the zoo, with the tour leaders: "We had to leave her at the zoo because she was being really loud and self-centered."

My study tour with DIS to Budapest and Vienna left on a Friday night. We took a bus to the coast, where we drove onto a boat, got ferried across the ocean, and drove through Germany, The Czech Republic, and Slovakia. Although our bus ride was only supposed to last 20 hours (which is long enough, as is), we had frequent 20-minute breaks throughout the trip. They're very serious about how long a bus driver can drive without a break in Europe. Having been crammed into a bus for over a day, we were all pretty disgusting by the time we actually made it to Budapest on Saturday night. The next morning we went on a tour of Budapest, which was supposed to be largely by foot, but due to the massive amounts of traffic for the Hungarian marathon going on, we ended up mostly driving around the city. Despite being behind schedule nearly the entire time, our guide managed to spend over an hour at Hero Square, describing each and every statue to us in detail. Unfortunately, due to the large number of people in our group, and the loud music across the street from the marathon, most of us didn't hear a single word she said, and just stared at the Hungarian statues blankly for an hour.





















From Hero Square we took a bus to the Fisherman's Bastion, where our guide did little to no talking and mostly let us wander around.
























From there we went to see Statue Park, the home of Budapest's leftover Communist statues.


























The next day, we visited The Hungarian Theatre Museum, to hear a lecture on Hungarian politics. At this point, I came down with a delightful case of food poisoning. Even so, I can't really blame Hungary. I absolutely loved Budapest, despite the dirt. It's ridicuously cheap, a little bit scenic, and it has a real sense of unique character.

While on the subject of Budapest, I'd like to take a moment to reflect of the pearls of wisdom granted to us by our German bus driver, Thomas.
When faced with people who had packed their passports in the luggage the morning we had to leave for Austria, he said:
"What, did you not realize we were leaving today? Do you not realize we cross borders?"

When Peter was afraid he'd left his passport in his hotel room, and was searching through his luggage for it, Thomas said:
"This isn't funny."
Peter: "I know. I think I lost my passport. It's really not funny. I feel really bad we had to stop the bus."
Thomas: "Yes, you should be very sorry. This isn't funny you know."

Well, hello folks! Long time, no blogging!


My internet connection is sort of really slow, but I'm going to try my very best (since I have tons of time on my hands at the moment--I have either the flu, or the longest lasting bout of food poisoning I have ever heard of!) so I will slowly be blogging about my semi-adventures. Probably in some sort of depth, I'm pretty bored sitting alone in the same room for two days now.

SO

I went to Budapest and Vienna first, on a study tour for my program, European Culture and History, sort of an aftermath of the Austro-Hungarian empire type of thing.
When my tour ended in Vienna, I returned to Budapest for a few days, went to Paris to meet up with Lauren, and traveled to Madrid, Warsaw, and Krackow before finally returning to Copenhagen Sunday night.

Due to the insane number of photos I took (almost 300 to be precise), I have started a flicker account, where I'll slowly be adding the pictures over the next few days.

Duty-free alcohol + a boat + large waves = a bad idea but only on the second night, when everyone got seasick. GOOD FUN!

But really, Oslo was pretty fantastic, for the 7 hours we were actually on land and all. The cruise ship wasn't bad either, asides from our rooms being under all of the cars, and thus, reachable only by elevator and below sea level. People were having flashes of Titanic all weekend.

Here you can see that our room was in the very bottom, IN THE CORNER. If there had been an accident, we would have been the first ones dead.

I am currently swamped with papers and packing, but I will make an effort to put up more pictures from Oslo and tell actual stories at some point before I leave for Budapest, even if it has to be at 2 in the morning.

So I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm sort of terrible about updating this. Sorry bout that.

My camera wasn't working this weekend, so I am forced to stooping to steal everyone else's photos. When I have done that, I will update about my Oslo cruise experience. Until then, here is a picture of the University of Copenhagen's Student House bartending "DREAM TEAM' I am photographing for a photojournalism assignment:





and a couple of pictures from our short study tour that I never posted because I got lazy:

Well, I have been all the way to Western Denmark and back. The short study tours were a little bit crazy, ours in particular. I hear word that other tours were only in two towns during their three day study tour; we went to EIGHT. Needless to say, we spent a good deal of time on the bus being shuffled from one 45 minute long stop to another, but I'd have to say that our little Philosophy group had a better time than a lot of other tours. There weren't quite as many people on our tour as others, so we got a chance to get to know each other better, and though there were definately some little cliques, we spent most of our time with lots of different people.
The first ridicuously long day began around quarter to 7 am at the train station:













We immediately left for the Kierkegaard Path in Tisvidleleje, a town about an hour from Copenhagen. There was only 45 minutes scheduled for the stop, but the long hike took a bit longer than 30 minutes at 9 in the morning, so by the time we even got to the ridiculous rock we were supposed to see we were all tired and rushed. This is the rock. It marks a coast that Kierkegaard once mentioned in a journal entry. While the town was completley picturesque, the rock was maybe a little bit lame.
















From the rock, we went to the supposed site of Helene's Spring and Grave. I say supposed because it turns out that even if there was ever a Helene to begin with, she is definately not buried anywhere near there. After seeing the large rock marking the once famous grave, we walked to the beach, where we were forced to take the traditional DIS tour shot of Gammeldansk, the worst snaps thing you have ever tasted. It was strong. I don't think anyone really enjoyed it...its one of those liquors that has a very long lasting burn after you drink it. I hear the Danish tend to put it in things when they drink it...I can understand why.


























From Tisvildeleje, we went to Soro, to see the Gymnasium there. A gymnasium in Denmark is like the Junior/Senior years of high school, if you can translate the completely different educational systems at all. After Soro, we journeyed to the Pedersborg Church, where Kierkegaard's brother was once the bishop. Then we headed for Kalundborg, a very small town that happens to have a hostel. They also have one bar in the entire town, which we all went to. I think it would be safe to say that everyone had a great time, despite the locals laughing at us all evening.

The next morning at 7, we left for Syddansk Universitet, in Odense. It was large, and we didn't have any directions or even the names of people to contact. It was a little bit crazy. We attended two lectures, one on the Mohammed cartoons (from the Danish perspective - very enlightening), and one on television and culture. After lunch, we left for Vejen, to visit the small sculpture museum there. Most of the works there are by Niels Hansen Jacobsen, but there are some by Ejnar Nielsen and Anna Munch too.














I will try to update with some more pictures, and some more activities from our trip soon.

I forgot to post these pictures:

This is my existential Danish crush, Soren Kierkegaard.

















This is me and Kara touching the statue of him, as a dozen English tourists watch just outside of the picture:












This is from our trip to Venstrade's (the Liberal party which is actually a conservative party) headquarters. The students pictured represent the whole portion of Polish students in the DIS program.

















As I'm taking one class at the University of Copenhagen's Department of Theology, I was invited to their International Student Orientation DAY. This included a room full of kegs and sandwiches, and lots of european students. This is the room with the kegs - it dates back to the medieval ages, and those are real crystal chandeliers hanging there. Notable moment: the head of the university welcomes each country by name, except for America. Our Danish guide was extremely embarrassed, and apologized to us for the oversight until he left a hour later.








That night, we ended up at this little known place called Mojo's Blues Bar. They had this amazing open mic thing going on, and the first band up was incredible. We ended up sitting with the second band up that night until we left to catch the last train back to our respective homes. They were a great group of Danes who were incredibly surprised that anyone from Chicago or New York City would ever want to go spend time in Denmark, even though they admitted that they didn't think they'd ever want to live anywhere else. This photo is the result of no light and no batteries.

This is outside of Christenborg Palace: This old palace holds the royal horses, Parliament meets at the palace next door.

Well, I have officially made it through my first three weeks of classes. Tomorrow I have a walking tour around Copenhagen (theme: Kierkegaard was once here), and a meeting at the Red-Green Alliance Party Headquarters (Denmark's resident crazy-Communist party). Somewhere in that time, I need to rewrite a paper and pack for my weekend tour of Western Denmark.
This is the plus side of DIS classes: everything is a fieldtrip or a study tour. I'm not really sure what we're doing for our study tour...it's supposedly the philosophy tour, but according to the schedule they gave us, we are going to lectures on the Mohammed cartoons and American television programming...I'm really not sure what the connection is. Being the philosophy tour, it is a generally great group of kids, and we all seem to be excited about tramping around Denmark to see places Kierkegaard once visited. I personally have high hopes for out little adventure. Our tour leader is my Kierkegaard prof, and he is more than a little exuberant about the whole thing. He basically planned the tour around what he would like to do (and I'm assuming what he thinks we would like to see).

Some more pictures of Copenhagen:




















Denmark does not have gangs, they have groups of punks. Large groups of these children are seldom seen, but when the temperature reaches more than 60 degrees farenheight, everyone comes out to the city.

The most expensive night ever:
1) Left too late to get to Copenhagen's bars before they began to enforce cover charges
2) Missed happy hour and had to pay full price for said beers, etc after paying cover charges
3) Missed the last train to Albetslund, and had to take the night bus: did not bring the correct pass, and had to buy a one-way pass to a 4-zone area
4) Got off at the wrong unmarked bus stop
5) After 30 minutes of aimless walking and the realization that we were lost, drunk, tired (since it was the second night in a row that we were attempting to function on less than 4 hours of sleep), and cold, had to call a taxi
6) Made it back home well after 3 in the morning.


I definately paid more just getting back home (a process which technically, should have been free) than I did paying for beer probably the whole time I have been in Denmark.

Night bus? Never again.

Today my Danish Politics and Society class went to visit the headquarters of Denmark's largest political party, Venstrade. They currently hold the most political power in Denmark (which is ruled by a negative majority thing, so they don't actually have most of the vote, they just have less opposition than a majority of votes against them), and the seat of the Prime Minister (who happens to be the longest governing minister to come from Venstrade). The trip was relatively boring and uneventful. I say uneventful, not boring, and by uneventful, I simply mean not worth writing about.
However, my Danish Politics and Society professor IS worth a few lines of blog: the man is basically the love child that Sean Connery and Denmark would produce, if the two could sire offspring. Same vocal timbre, same posture and hand motions...the man has got the Connery thing DOWN. It's bizzare. He even looks like an older Sean Connery, from his clothes to his hair. It is decidedly unnatural. I am completely in love with the man. He's almost ridiculously funny. While at his former rival's headquarters (he used to be the speaker for the Social Democrats), he constantly made polite but funny/off color remarks about Denmark's "Liberal" party. I put Liberal in quotes because here the liberal party is actually the conserative party, and just right of the center of the seven Danish political parties. Another miscellaneous story about this professor: he continually makes the mistake of calling America's "melting pot" the "melting pox." I think he's done that too many times for me to really think it is always an accident.


After Venstrade Party headquarters, I met up with some students in my Jews in Europe class to visit the Danish Jew Museum. It took us about an hour and a half of tramping around downtown Copenhagen to find the museum, which turned out to have only one door which can only be accessed by going into a branch of the Royal Gardens. Unfortunately, as we discovered all too late, it is in fact a mere 15 minute walk from where we started. Oh, if we had only known!
The museum itself was interesting. As one boy said, "the walls are making me nauseous." Indeed, all the walls of the tiny, tiny museum are slanted towards a section named, 'THE PROMISED LAND.' I personally found this to be a little over the top, as they suggested that we are moving towards a golden age of enlightenment (especially concerning the Jews). Just what this golden enlightenment will really contain was never really specified. I am skeptical. I also felt that the whole wall thing was a bit over the top, and slanting all of the floors in a the 20 ft area towards this mythical creation kind of pushed the experience over the edge for me. I will not enjoy writing the required 3,000* word essay on those 20 square feet.

*READ: exactly 3,000 words. Large variations in word count not tolerated.

I update too often.


I have officially committed a huge cultural faux pas: Not only have I been hanging out with some Danish boys I'd met while getting lost in Copenhagen - which is disgraceful enough as I'm generally the only girl there, and a foriegner at that, but I failed to delve deep enough into the Danish culture and customs concerning beer. Evidently there's a seldom discussed, but relatively enforced custom of sorts over here: if a Dane buys someone a beer, and that person accepts, it means that they will be going home together. I'd never heard of this. So there I am, in a bar on a Saturday night, with some lovely Danes. Beer can be expensive (if you're lucky one beer will be about 5 american dollars), so when one of them offered to buy me a beer, and simply shrugged off my attempt at a no in Danish, I didn't really think much of it. A couple hours later, he goes into the bathroom, and one of his friends buys me a beer. There was a flurry of mad-fast-hushed Danish when he got back to our table. Not speaking Danish, I simply sat there, confused, watching them carry out some sort of increasingly tense conversation. I look over, see that the bartender is laughing at me, and ask him whay they're arguing about (at this point they're all ignoring me completely). He explains to me that they're discussing who is going to take me home. To make a long story short, I fear that this particular group of Danes and I are no longer friends. It is clearly very bad taste to accept two propositions in a single night, I will probably need to make new Danish friends. It was all incredibly embarrassing.

But here are some completely unrelated pictures, of my adventure trying to get to what I thought was an office-supply type store, but turned out to be an S&M shop:














I ended up by one of Copenhagen's beautiful gardens:













This is part of Copenhagen's ongoing "Images of the Middle East" series, a collection of very random and diverse pictures around the city (and I think an actual gallery somewhere too) designed to combat the less than subtle racial discrimination against immigrants of middle eastern origin in Denmark.





That particular picture is on the side of a church that is over a century old:









I just find that strange, ironic even.

Last night DIS had a huge party at this bar near our main school building, Den Glade Gris, which roughly translates to something like, 'The Happy Pig'. I think just about everyone in DIS showed up, and we completely packed all three levels of the bar. On the first floor, where there were a couple of locals playing pool, they had fairly decent music playing. However, up on the top floors with all the DIS students, they played only boy bands for over three hours. It was painful.
In this picture, you can see everyone trying to dance under the half disco ball. It was beyond crazy there.


Today, I went down to Christiana with some guys I met at our little DIS bar night. Christiana is the hippy Commune just off Copenhagen on a small island. Originally illegal squatters, the Danish goverment decided to just let them stay there, as its a huge draw for tourists. Christiana basically sets its own rules, with minimum enforcement of Danish policies within its walls. It is currently the only spot in Denmark where marjuana is legal. They also have their own process for accepting new citizens: you have to apply to the city, go on a minimum 10 year waiting list, and then be voted into the city by everyone already in it. There are a number of small cafes and bars, where all proceeds and profits go directly to the commune. It is sort of dingy and run down, since they take care of the space entirely on their own, and they have a general 'no picture' policy, so as to avoid any conflict with the Danish police over drugs or other laws, but here is a picture of the main gate: you can see my friend Ryan taking a picture of the opposite side which says, "You are now entering the EU"

There is a lot of great artwork all over the walls of Christiana (being somewhat a community of artists and all). This is just outside the main gate:
We walked all the way from Norreport Station to Christiana (a decidedly long walk folks). When we were about halfway to Christiana, we ran into a random DIS kid on his way to lunch. Since we all randomly enough knew him, he decided to tag along to Christiana with us. We took some pictures along the way:
This is part of a museum on ancient Greece that we accidently ended up walking through, and this is in front of the Parliament buildings:

Lest you somehow get the idea that the weather here is actually nice, I would like to submit the following picture as evidence for what it nearly always looks like around here:
Note the charming grayness.

The following is part of a Danish folk festival that is currently going on around Copenhagen (but I am not sure why they are line dancing, or how they ended up with cowboy hats):
That is definately what I woke up to this morning in Albertslund. CLASSIC.

The weather was absolutely amazing today, so I took some pictures:



This is one of my favorite advertisements, despite it being for Harry Potter (and we all know how much I enjoy that)


and this is one of the main squares in Copenhagen, near the shopping district:

This is near where I go to school





This is not. This is just what I see when I get very, very lost and end up walking almost 20 blocks out of my way





There are about a million street performers in Copenhagen's shopping district. These particular performers have been on this corner every time I've walked down this particular street. I attend the University of Copenhagen's department of Theology just down the street from them.


These are some other street performers. They play some crazy Yiddish music.

I have been finding that I am making many more Danish friends than friends in the DIS program. This seems ironic, as the orientation sessions suggested that the Danes were very hard to meet (they are not) and we had to go out of our way to meet people other than DIS students. I have definately not found that to be the case, nor have I really felt the "euphoric honeymoon" feeling that they have been talking about during orientation.

I finally managed to get in touch with customer service for my cell phone, and it may now be usable. However, whether or not I am able to sucessfully make a call from it remains to be seen.

There is actually sunshine today, and blue skies. And I went out of my way to walk 10 blocks to find a cheap umbrella. Figures.

It rains here constantly. As in, I am talking sheets of rain here. If it is not raining, there is probably a light drizzle. I saw blue sky once, right when I got here, and in the 20 minute ride to Albertslund from the airport, that small patch of blue sky was gone. I hate rain. I wish someone had told me that no, it only snows for a month here. The rest of the time it just rains.

Everyone who lives here looks like a model. I think it is shameful that any one group of people have this kind of gene pool. This is why they are so fashionable - they are the only people skinny and tall enough to actually wear any of it.

I am happy to say that I have officially survived my first 24 hours in Denmark.

I spent over 14 hours in airports and on planes. After running into a couple of other DIS students, I almost missed my plane to Heathrow. Once on said plane, I found that I was seated next to an 8-year-old boy traveling to London by himself, and it was his first time flying. Besides having to listen to the constant beeping of his gameboy, I was woken continuously on the hour when flight attendants came to check on him. This continued until around two, when he finally fell asleep on the floor, curled up around my leg. I believe this to be too heavy a price for a single, solitary hour of sleep.
Heathrow was disasterous. We had somehow mangaged to get there a half an hour earlier than expected, but due to the insane security back-ups to transfer flights within Heathrow, I quite literally ended up walking off the first flight to walk directly onto the bus that took me to the second. If that first flight hadn't made it there early, I am quite sure that I would have been standing in security missing my flight to Copenhagen.
As it was, we ended up leaving a little bit late, and consequently, got in to Copenhagen late as well. I spent over an hour watching luggage circle, due to the luggage from three different flights from Heathrow being directed to the same conveyor belt. While this did limit confusion as to which flight was at which belt, I was more than a little put out that I had to wait so long for my suitcases.
After more confusion concerning telephones, kroners, and calling cards I managed to get out of the airport and into a taxi. Upon my arrival at my kollegium (rough equivalent: a dorm), I was given a key and the instructions for the telephone in my room.
After a mere half an hour of unpacking, DIS took all the DIS students in our kollegium out to dinner together. While eating our free food, we got to talking about how badly we wanted to see the Copenhagen outside of the airport. Thus, instead of going back to our rooms and unpacking/sleeping/showering (which none of us had done in well over 24 hours), we found ourselves attempting to navigate the train system, something none of us had a clue about. So we guessed, correctly as it turned out.
Being a Sunday night in Denmark, and after 10 pm, we found that there were not many non-7-11's open. Eventually we did find a self-proclaimed "Scottish Pub," showing ''The Crow III' and playing Ricky Martin music. It even had a singing moose. After consuming approximately one beer each and watching the locals and the singing moose, we caught the last bus back to Albertslund, walked home in the rain, and promptly fell asleep.

My kollegium is only about 20 minutes away from the city proper, and the train station is a five minute walk, next to a grocery store, conveinence store, and a Danish blockbuster. Most of the kollegiums are not near so many things, nor are they so close to a train station which is so close to the city (on average, most kollegiums are about 40 minutes away, but sometimes you end up with a commute that's over an hour long). Conclusion: I am lucky to live at DIK.