Norge og forældre!

My parents are the best, really.  No sooner did Andy return to Cambridge than Mum and Dad appeared on our doorstep, bearing Luna Bars and some abnormally large birthday cards from the sisters!  I had class for much of Friday, when they got in, but we spent the afternoon catching up over salads (no croutons, please) before catching an evening flight to Oslo.

Norway, or at least its capital, is pretty awesome.  I don't think it's quite as low-key as Copenhagen-- it reminded me of a scaled-down Brussels, for some reason--but we were definitely in Scandinavia and thus it was definitely beautiful.  Saturday began with a walk through the Vigelund Sculpture Garden, which provoked important questions like, "How did one man make so many incredible statues?"  "Do babies really grow on trees?"  and "Why aren't my sisters here to pose in front of the gate with three female silhouettes?"  (Dad has pictures of my attempt to do this solo; tell him to email them to me so I can post them!)

After the sculptures, we attended the Norwegian Changing of the Guard.  The palace, like Amelianborg here, has no fences, just a few guards in slightly ridiculous period costumes.  I never quite figured out which guards were switch with which, but it didn't really matter-- we were treated to a show of very straight marching and standing (and the guards' penguin waddle to maintain their lines) by guys with oversized green epaulets and major hat-feather action going on.

After lunch, we made our way to the Münch Museum.  For the record, it does not house a copy of The Scream, which was a bit disappointing, but it does have numerous other lovely works and a real lithograph machine.  It also has a great little café with tables perfect for a very tired and vaguely sick dad and daughter to nap for a solid hour.  Good times.  We did dinner at a funky place with excellent salads and less excellent chai near the university and were planning to call it an early night until we turned on the TV.  Bored of an endless BBC segment on the horrors of bottled water, we stumbled onto a mostly-English documentary on Chernobyl (Saturday was the 22nd anniversary of the disaster), followed by the movie The Mexican, which among other things answers the question of what happens when you put Julia Roberts, James Gandolfini, and Michael Cerveris in the same car.

Sunday morning, we wandered to the waterfront and caught a ferry across a very foggy fjord to the Kon-Tiki Museum, which celebrates the achievements of Thor Heyerdahl, a Norwegian best known for sailing papyrus and reed boats very long distances to prove that early people could have done it, too.  It was a fun museum, with a couple of the original boats, lots of memorable information, a walk-through cave, and a very friendly land-shark wandering about.  We followed this with a visit to Oslo's Viking ship museum, which, unlike Roskilde's, did some reconstruction work (and also has much more complete findings).  So two of the three ships had sides and decorations and curlicued hulls, and the back section had a ton of artifacts, including three gorgeously intricate sleds and some thousand-year-old textiles.  Apparently Vikings, like Egyptians, believed that after death you could, in fact, take it with you.

We enjoyed a delicious Passover-breaking lunch at the Nobel Peace Prize Museum's café.  (The goat cheese-on-French-bread salad was too good to resist.)  The museum itself was kind of amazing, too.  A little unnecessarily high-tech, but fun to be sure.  How can a museum be unnecessarily high-tech, you ask?  Try a fiber-optic garden with motion-sensitive displays on all the prize-winners (including Al Gore and the IPCC), followed by a projected, touch-operated 'storybook' on Alfred Nobel, followed by digital wallpaper that sorts and details all the prize-winners' work and the Nobel Committee and awards process.  Nifty gift shop, too!

We headed back to the airport after the Nobel museum, lingered over more chai and Taunte Bev's Passover granola (which is amazing even when it's not Passover), and stopped to demonstrate proper downhill luggage trolley riding technique to an amused Dad and a slightly skeptical Mum.  Then it was back to Copenhagen, which Mum, who studied on DIS in the spring of 1978, now refers to as "our city."

En glade fødselsdag til mig!

What a great birthday week!  Having Andy here was obviously a major treat boosting the celebrations, and we did a few random Copenhagen-y things while we were at it.

Monday, in between my classes, we found lunch on Nyhavn and took a canal tour, both awesome.  This is such a gorgeous city, and I had yet to see it from the water.  Plus, rather than the haphazard history that all the DIS junior staffers are stocked with, we got the full-on tour.  Now I can tell you that the three crowns atop the stock exchange spire represent Denmark, Sweden, and Norway; which building is the oldest on Nyhavn, and what the back of the Little Mermaid statue looks like.  After my later class we had some downtime (and I had work to do), which included a lovely in-house dinner of spinach soup and matzah with various spreads.  Yum.

My 21st birthday on Tuesday began with two big, kosher-for-Passover cakes on my desks from the roommates!  (Dara's parents are here for the week from Long Island and may have had something to do with that.)  Three classes and a spot of chocolate layer cake later, I had registered for fall classes at Brown (not without Banner mishaps, mind you), spoken to grandparents, siblings, and parents, and received a card from my loving Taunte Rachel & co. in Los Angeles.  Andy, who had spent the morning checking out the Nationalmuseet and the Rådhus, met me at home with two big chais from Baresso in hand (with a pump of vanilla like I like at home, even!) and a set of amazing-looking British teas, complete with a new tea ball.  (This guy is good!)

We wandered to the Botanical Gardens and the King's Gardens up by Nørreport; the former was closed and the latter not super-exciting.  The Danish Design Museum merited some peeking-in, but they were also on the verge of closing when we got there, so I ended up taking Andy to see Christiania, which is of course quite the experience.  We admired the public art and the playground's swing set and seesaw, sampled raspberry juice (bottled), and avoided lingering for too long by any of the fire-burning trash cans.

For dinner, Jackie and Jen joined us at a place that just opened across the street from our apartment-- and by "just," I mean it's new enough that they don't have English menus, a marquee sign, or prices up on their little sandwich board outside yet.  But it was yummy, and involved a crouton-less salad and champagne!  And the commute was certainly appealing.

Yuri and Ilana met us at home to devour the rest of the cakes (which were actually quite good despite their lack of flour), and then, with a few more additions, we went to the Happy Pig, a bar just around the corner from Skindergade that's a frequent DIS student haunt on Tuesday nights.  It was so much fun-- good music, good friends, and (as you can see here) great photo opportunities.  Definitely a great birthday!

And now, time to actually get some work done so I can have fun with my parents in Oslo this weekend!

Til København i weekended med Andy

For recent pictures, from Dyrehaven to the Queen's birthday to my birthday, click here and here!

On a chronologically misplaced note, Yuri and I spent last Wednesday evening on a DIS trip to the Louisiana Museum just outside town.  It was awesome!  In retrospect, I could've done without most of the guided tour of the Cezanne-Giacometti exhibit, but the exhibit itself was lovely, as was the rest of the museum.  I rather love crazy modern art that may or may not actually make much sense to the quasi-casual viewer, and this museum had it in excess.

In any case, Andy and I arrived at Kastrup earlier on Saturday morning than we'd woken up the day before.  After some recovery/down time at my apartment, we went walking.  The first stop was La Glace, for a proper wienerbrød experience.  Then we went all the way down the Strøget to Kongens Nytorv, around Nyhavn, and up Bredgade to find smørrebrød before Passover started.  We walked more after that-- over to Amelianborg and along the water all the way to the Little Mermaid statue, which is a pretty decent walk overall.  We then looked at the time and realized if we wanted to get to the Carlsberg Brewery Museum & Visitors' Center before closing, we'd have to book it.  (Saturday was our only day to do this-- beer is grain-based and thus unkosher for Passover.)

Carlsberg was really fun, despite the lack of touring of the brewery itself.  You do get a full look at the process, as well as a detailed history of brewing in Denmark and of Carlsberg.  We did some learning-- apparently Carlsberg owns, among many other brands, Baltika, which was served everywhere I went in Russia.  Also, a Jewish star (though not intended as the Star of David) used to be the brewer's seal!  Carlsberg also has a stable of horses (think Budweiser), several old delivery carriages, and--included in the price of admission--two drinks at a full bar.  Between the two of us, we tried the honey-flavored Carlsberg, Jacobson special dark ale, Carlsberg Special, and a Tuborg that I liked.  Good times!

For the first seder, we went to the Mosaic Society's building--basically, a headquarters of the local Jewish community.  It was mostly adults, but there were a few other DIS students there, so it wasn't that weird.  The rabbi conducted most of the seder in English, even though the Haggadahs were in Hebrew, so we felt very included.  And, as in Stockholm, it was kind of wonderful to experience all these familiar Jewish things in such a different setting.  Sure, the tunes were a bit different, and I've never heard Maggid chanted before, but it was definitely a seder, and I was happy.

Sunday night brought the second seder; this one took place at the Copenhagen synagogue and attracted a much younger crowd, though still not very many DIS students, which was strange, given how many Jewish students are on this program.  This seder incorporated much more Hebrew and Danish (though there was still sufficient English for us), and the vegetarian-options-included dinner was much better than the previous night (which featured liver paté and chicken).  Unfortunately, things got started way late (as the sun doesn't set until nine or so), so the whole thing moved quickly, and yet we still had to scoot out just after the Afikomen, around 12:15am, given that some of us had class the next morning.  On the upside, it was definitely worth it to be at a proper seder, and I brought paper to copy down the Four Questions in Danish for my family's seder next year.  (We have a tradition of doing them in as many tongues as we can muster.)

Of psychics, synagogues, and long canal walks.

Stockholm, for the record, is an absolutely gorgeous city.

I arrived at Arlanda bright and rather early on Thursday morning.  Andy wasn't scheduled to get there until lunchtime, so I took myself to the National Museum for a couple of hours.  It was lovely-- I'd been pretty museum-ed out after the travel break, but the place was small and interesting enough to be great.  There was a funky Toulouse-Lautrec exhibit, and a whole floor on Scandinavian design to make me happy.

Andy arrived with surprising punctuality, and we split some excellent vegetarian salads and pastries at the museum's café.  We spent the rest of the day roaming around the city-- through the downtown area, into Gamla Stan (the old town), and down to Sondermälm, a more southern island (the whole city is crisscrossed by canals), where we found our dinner and our hotel.  It was on a boat!  Fortunately, the boat was docked and on calm waters, so it was mostly just fun in concept.  Dinner was Swedish meatballs (for Andy) and a sandwich (for me), followed up by a quartet of fresh chocolate chip cookies from a store that was apparently about to close for the last time ever.

Friday morning began with more touring of Gamla Stan.  We then moved north a bit and found Stockholm's Great Synagogue.  It was beautiful from the outside, but it transpired that you can't go inside except on tours, which are only offered in the summer.  Instead, the woman at the desk suggested, we could come back for Friday night services at 5:30.  Hm...

We headed to Skansen next and promptly spent several hours in the Vasa Museum, which contains a massive, ornate wooden ship from 1628 or so that sunk on its maiden voyage in the Stockholm harbor due to its top-heaviness.  It was recovered in 1961 and put in a museum setting.  You can't actually go on the ship, but you can walk pretty much all the way around it on six stories while getting a full feel for the history surrounding it.  Other than the building's smelling a bit like the mud it was pulled from, the place was amazing.  We did some more walking around Skansen after the Vasa and then caught a boat around the more open water to get back to the area where the synagogue is.  

Services were really nice!  The interior of the building was amazing-- all wood and colorful geometric accents.  My parents had said it looked like a Viking ship, and I definitely got that.  The service itself was reform, and mainly in Hebrew, which made everything but the announcements fairly easy to follow.  I thought of the old Camp Tevya song "Wherever You Go, There's Always Someone Jewish" and felt wonderfully comfortable in such a familiar setting, despite being six time zones and several degrees of latitude away from home.  We sat with another American student who had come for roughly the same purpose, and a few English-speaking congregants came to welcome us.  Two of them were chatting with Andy and me afterwards, and one walked us several blocks to recommend a few places for dinner.  

This guy claimed to be psychic, but he seemed very sincere and genuine about it.  He had come up to Andy during the service to say that Andy had a great job coming--we thought this meant they needed someone to hold a Torah--and then came back to elaborate that this would be in politics, and not necessarily his first offer.  On the walk to dinner, I was told I'd go into business (?), and that I was much calmer than my mother.  Whether or not the guy (whose name we never learned) was for real was almost beside the point-- it was so interesting to talk to him!  Apparently the 'seeing' thing runs in his family, and the congregation of the temple has generally accepted his gift, as has he.  Also, his dinner recommendations ended up proving excellent, as we enjoyed a whole vegetarian buffet overlooking an indoor marketplace.

We took a long walk before hopping the metro home; this led us to a small island with a small castle (apparently used for military men to reside and dine in) and past the modern art museum with its funky sculpture garden.  We wrapped the night up early after that, as our flight to Copenhagen the next morning merited a 6am alarm.

For pictures, click here!

Hav en god fødselsdag, Dronning Margrethe!

Today is the Queen of Denmark's 68th birthday!  DIS had given everyone the heads-up, so I headed to Amelianborg with a few people to watch her come out and greet the subjects.  The crowd was pretty decent-sized but totally subdued-- the police told everyone where they couldn't crowd past, and that was that, no ropes necessary.  There were quite a few Danish elementary school classes, replete with paper flags and, in some cases, crowns.  Queen Margrethe and her family came out onto the palace balcony and waved a few times while a marching band that looked like British Beefeaters played a spiffy version of "Happy Birthday."  Very fun indeed!

In other news, Jackie, Dara, Jen, and I trekked just off the edge of the map into Østerbro yesterday in search of a fabled Jewish market.  We were successful, fortunately, and the apartment is now very well-stocked with matzahs.  I almost got brownie mix, but then I remembered we don't actually have an oven here (just a stove and microwave, weirdly enough), and they didn't have Manischewitz wine (or much else from that brand, come to think of it).  DIS is sponsoring however many students to go to both seders with the local Jewish community, so that should be fun, too.  Plus, Andy will be in town by that point-- we're meeting up in Stockholm, Sweden tomorrow, and then we'll be back in Copenhagen over the weekend, and he stays through my birthday next week!  Quite exciting.

To nogeter i dag

Some confessions on this Sunday evening, when I'm seven pages into my 10-page paper on integration for Tuesday:

1) Copenhagen in the spring isn't all that different from Copenhagen in the winter, but it's a lot more fun to wander around.  It still rains about as much as Providence here, and the weather gods haven't quite realized that April means full-on springtime, but you know what?  There's full daylight until well after 8 pm because we're so far north, and that, my friends, is awesome.  The Strøget is also much richer with musicians busking for a few öre (although this also means that those annoying guys selling these bird-calling mouthpieces are more plentiful, too).  And all the restaurants and cafés have tables set up out on the cobblestones, complete with space heaters and fleece blankets as necessary.  Now it just needs to warm up enough so I can do my coffeeshop-studying routine al fresco!

2) I rather dislike having my hair long, so on Friday I spent the better part of an hour and 75 kr. (about $15) on a haircut through DIS, as salons (like most other Danish things) are fairly expensive.  This may have been a less-than-good plan, though, as I ended up with a bit less hair and a bit more angles than I'm pretty sure I asked for.  Silly language barrier, or maybe I just wasn't specific enough, because, to be fair, the woman was a trained beautician and did know what she was doing in general.  On the upside, I definitely won't need another haircut before I get back home to Virginia, and it's definitely worth it to have my hair no longer hanging at my shoulders.  Honestly, it's not that bad, though, and even if it's not my best look, it's growing on me.  It's also settling down after a couple of days, which is good, and (as we discovered while preparing for Vega on Friday night) will look great with tank tops once the weather gods' spring plans kick in (hint, hint).

And now, back to government-sponsored housing and preschool policies!

Vi spillede rundbold i Dyrehaven med vores dansk klasse!

Wow, my post titles are getting quite long and grammar-intensive.  Nina should be proud.  And I should update this thing more often, because these entries get really long when I don't.

The work is starting to step up this week, though I've still managed to work some fun into things!  The FCK football game on Sunday was fun (if surprisingly cold) and I went to dinner with Dara, Nadine, and a couple of Dara's psych-program friends at the Laundromat Café in Østerbro, which had been on Dara's and my list all semester.  The laundry machines do in fact exist in the main restaurant area, but they're sort of hidden in the back near the restrooms, which let me enjoy my single but massive piece of tomato bruschetta in peace.

Monday brought a meeting with a bunch of the Brown kids here-- there's a big educators' workshop going down at DIS at the moment, so the woman from Brown wanted to see how we're all doing and liking the program (by all accounts, good and a lot).  I felt that, if nothing else, I needed to go to thank her again for processing most of my application in less than two weeks and tell her how glad I am that its worked out so wonderfully.

Tuesday, there was a panel discussion in conjunction with my Migrants, Minorities, and Multiculturalism class regarding immigrant integration.  There was a scholarly expert on the subject and two guys from opposing political parties on the issue.  It was an interesting discussion on a definitely interesting topic (which I now should be writing a paper on, come to think of it), but the event got a bit sidetracked by personality.  The expert and the social liberal were more than a bit overshadowed by a representative of the Dansk Folkparti, the Danish People's Party best known in my class for their essentially racist anti-immigrant views.  This guy was more than a bit over-the-top, though-- he didn't answer anyone's questions (except to get excited about Fox News when someone asked if he was a fan) directly, and wouldn't stop talking despite the moderator's best efforts.  He definitely came off as a bit of a nutjob--suggesting we read Jerry Falwell's biography to learn about putting religion in public life, likening wearing a headscarf in Parliament to being naked in Parliament, and rattling off way too many statistics--and that impression was capped off by his likening of the liberal politician to Galinda from Wicked.  Yes, the Broadway musical.  It didn't help that the liberal guy sounded like a Muppet and couldn't get a word in edgewise.

On Wednesday, my Danish class went to Dyrehaven, the old royal hunting grounds, for our field study.  Now, previous field studies have included a trip to Parliament and one to an asylum center.  This one included a walk through a huge public park (complete with riders on horseback!), rundbold (Danish-style baseball, which is similar but much more confusing and there's no keeping of score), and amazingly rich (and DIS-sponsored) hot chocolate.  I have to say, taking Danish appears to be a very hit-or-miss thing in terms of one's enjoyment, and it mostly depends on teachers, as far as I can tell.  I've talked to several people who like learning languages but really can't get into dansk-mode, whereas I usually don't enjoy learning languages at all but really like the class.  Nina, our teacher, is delightfully enthusiastic, which can be contagious most days; plus, the group of students is mostly great, and it helps that we seem to be learning a lot-- more than students from other classes are, anyway.

Thursday I had my lone morning class and spent the rest of the day getting work done, including an interview for the aforementioned MMM paper.  That actually turned out to be very interesting: the paper is on the criteria for successful integration into Danish society, so, among other sources, we had to interview both ethnic Danes and immigrants in groups.  My part was to find the former, so, lacking a host family or immediate access to Danes excepting the 20-something guys who are technically the authority figures in our building, I wandered into Café Retro, which had repeatedly struck me as a local sort of place.  I ended up chatting with an older-middle-aged couple, Gitte and Leif, who were very talkative once we got going.  It was an interesting context to have met people, too.  I feel like with a lot of the Danes and Russians I've interacted with, the effort was more focused on finding banal things in common, whereas in this case I could legitimately ask, "What do you think of this?" and have a whole discussion about the answer.  Of course, now I actually have to write the paper, but that's another story...

Friday was quiet until it technically wasn't Friday anymore: Dara, Jen, and I tried out a club in Vesterbro called Vega, which is one of those places that all the DIS kids go to but we hadn't yet.  It was fun!  The place had no cover charge before 1 am and multiple stories, so you could dance to techno on one floor or sit on couches and chat on another one.  Good times, and now I know that the night bus requires two stamps on my klippekort.  I'm also getting a hang of the bus system.

This afternoon, the entirety of the European Politics & Society program was invited to our EU politics professor's house for a light lunch.  This was fun in and of itself-- it's a good group, we got to see a really lovely little neighborhood in Hvidovre, and the food was just fine.  But the professor is quite a character, too-- he's this charming 60-something with an academic background that took a big detour into Parliament for a number of years.  He was Minister of Transportation for a while (which helped us get into a lot of places in Brussels, because European ministers serve in the Council of Ministers of the EU), until he got caught speeding in the midst of a campaign for lower speed limits.  Seriously, try Googling Jacob Buksti.  The upside is that now we get quite the insider's view of European politics, as well as plenty of wink-wink-nudge-nudge jokes about France.

And now, I really am going to work on that paper.  Really.

Jeg fotograferede Europa!

I have successfully uploaded eight Facebook albums' worth of pictures from my spring break.  At a max of 60 pictures per album, you can do the math and allocate time appropriately.  Go nuts!

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

In other news, Dara and I explored Christiania, Copenhagen's 'free town' over in Christianshavn.  Not much to report on that front: it was pretty much as I'd expected.  More than a bit run down, a lot of street art and people in their 20s and 30s lounging around, plus a few Americans that we definitely recognized from DIS.  All of the smoke was giving me a headache, though, so we didn't stay for more than an hour or so, max.  I think the best part was the sign as you leave that reads, "You are now entering the EU"!

It's been a delightfully quiet weekend!  Friday night, we met up for dinner with Al, a friend of mine from the Brown Democrats, who's studying in Prague for the semester but had couch-surfed his way to Copenhagen for the weekend.  Good times, good food at Café Klimt near Nørreport, and it was fun to see a Brown person in Copenhagen that I actually know, as I seem to keep meeting new people and then discovering I've been at school with them for two and a half years.  Otherwise, I've been getting reading done, enjoying my newly functional laptop, and putting up all those pictures for you fine readers!

This evening brings a football (that is, soccer) game in Østerbro, courtesy of DIS: FCK (the København team) is playing, so my Danish teacher instructed us to wear blue and white.  I'm not sure what to expect beyond a rather long fight song that we learned in class and, one presumes, a lot of Carlsberg.  I've actually never been to a professional soccer game, come to think of it, so this should be really interesting.

Hjemme i Skindergade!

And thus, spring break is over. I'm slowly getting back into Danish-speaking mode (though the guy at the falafel place earlier sounded impressed), restocking my omelet-making supplies, and getting jealous of everyone else's traveling experiences even as I'm thrilled to recount my own adventures.

I'll try to have pictures posted soon. There are more than 500 worth sharing, but my computer's currently undergoing an identity crisis of sorts that my Apple-savvy sources inform me will almost definitely require a reinstallation of the operating system to fix. The short version is that Safari (and various other much-used programs) won't open, and while Firefox has generally been behaving, it quits whenever I try to access the Facebook photo-uploader. Fortunately, Jen lent me an external hard drive (thanks for talking me out of bringing mine, Dad!), so my everything is backed up and, in an ideal world, the DIS IT guys will have things straightened out tomorrow and you all can get pictures to distract you at work by Monday morning. We'll see. I've been straightening all of this out while also trying to get a replacement for my broken room key last month, which still hasn't entirely happened: DIS lent me the master until such time as the one cut to replace mine comes back made to, you know, unlock the door to the building.

In the meantime, it has been wonderful to be back, even if I can only play music song-by-song via QuickTime. I've loved reunited with the roommates and friends from various classes, and it is so nice to have clothing in, you know, a bureau. I'm back to Bagel Dreams and the excellent mini-salads next door, not-quite-daily chai lattés, and attempting to make "jeg" sound like "ya" in speaking. Plus, I have my gym back! (I'm trying to get to Thai Bo more often.) My giant backpack is safely stowed under my bed until May, at which point it's coming with me to Paris, Madrid, and Barcelona, by the looks of things. For the next couple of weeks, though, I'm very happy to be staying in this one, single, beautiful city that has totally perked up with the coming of spring.

On an almost entirely unrelated note (and I say "almost" because she's the one traveling with me to Paris!), I'd like to take this time and space to say a major congratulations to my sister Emily, who this fall will be matriculating into Yale University's class of 2012!