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.