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One year later, these are the things I miss about Denmark:
The kakao maelk:
And King's cigaret (Photo courtesy of The House of Prince site - and yes, that really is the name of the premiere cigarette manufacturer in Denmark):
and why do I love them so? I think it's because the filters are the size of the nail on my pinky finger. And also because they have the best warning slogans - "Smoking can hurt," and "Smoking is maybe harmful for you and a fetus."
While wasting my time on The House of Prince site, I found this marvelous gem under "View of Smoking":
We know that many people find it difficult to quit smoking. Some may use the expression that they have become addicted to smoking. We believe that everybody can quit smoking. Millions of people all over the world quit every year, simply because they decide to do so and add will power to their decision.
Smoking is a choice that should be left with adults only. In our opinion nobody under the age of 18 should smoke."
Really? My first memory on Danish soil is of a middle-aged Danish woman lighting a cigarette in the airport at baggage claim, and then giving it to her 12-year-old son. 18 my ass.
And I probably miss this most of all. I tried making some myself, but I had to use Svensk vodka and Hall's cough drops, and...it was miserable. It just tasted like shots of vodka that smelled like sickness. It was sort of tragic. And chunky...not all of the cough drops dissolved all the way.
I'm pretty sure that a lack of mentholated vodka is the source of my bad health. And the red King's. And not enough chocolate milk. Screw all natural foods...I miss the Danish diet.
I miss the school-sponsored alcoholism, the non-stop haze of cigarette smoke, and The Danish Film Institute. Too bad they only get 4 hours of sunlight.
I head back to the States tomorrow morning, and I'll be back in Chicago sometime around 2 pm. I'm outrageously excited about being back in the States, but I'm extremely worried about how foreign the familiar will likely feel to me once I'm back on US soil.
For the most part, I guess I haven't really LOVED Denmark while I've been here, but I'm incredibly glad I came. While at times painful, my original intuition that going on study abroad without my K people would make me more independent has held true, and at the risk of sounding like a cheap cliche, I can already see how this experience has made me a stronger individual. I guess that makes all the stuggles with Danish libraries and socialized medicine worth it?
Things I will greatly miss about Denmark:
frikadellar, and how it can be used in EVERYTHING
kaergarden, and how the lack of trans-fats make it the butter of the gods
haribo's gummy fried eggs and hamburger pieces. and the frogs too.
how many kinds of Ritter they have here
the smell of King cigarettes (only the red ones)
Christiana
being able to walk across the entire town
open container laws
doing sudokus with Hillevi on the train
The Red-Green Alliance, and how much they love it when I show up, walk in, and just take a bunch of posters
fisherman's
the wall
the milk here, and seeing women buy five of the little cartons at once at the grocery store
drunk Santas
7-11's
the young kid and the old man who work at the Albertslund kiosk
public transportation
Anders
Jacob and how he is "totally bananas!"
the people I've met
Things I will likely not miss a bit:
the outrageously high taxes on EVERYTHING
seeing the fugly sculpture behind DIK everytime I go to buy groceries
the "safety" of Albertslund
Turkish immigrants
political in-correctness
the black mold in my bathroom
Danish weather
Jantelov
the Danish language, and my inability to pronounce it
spending so much on "cheap" groceries
my inability to afford to see movies
Michael's bad rap music, at 3 am
Michael's inability to clean his dishes, even after a month's time
Michael's general creepiness
my kitchen, and its flies/general disgustingness
drinking out of bowls because I am too cheap to buy both glasses and bowls
the Israeli guy who works at the coffee kiosk
it taking so long to get into town
locking myself out of my room so often
photojournalism
Anders
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.
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.
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.
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.
