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

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."