Classes wrapped up, exams occupied most of the last week (minus a trip to the Botanical Gardens in perfect weather again), and now I'm all packed to meet Emily in Paris in about 11 hours! To recap the recap-worthy parts of my last days in the city...
Friday afternoon brought, along with the end of classes, a roommate trip to La Glace for our last pastries-- very worthwhile, of course, and the company was hard to beat. That night found Dara and I too restless to do the work we should've, so we took a rather long walk, all the way to the Little Mermaid statue. This resulted in barefoot climbing on the rocks around her and a photo session with her and a Brown t-shirt...the Campaign for Academic Enrichment likes that kind of thing, apparently. Pictures to follow, possibly from multiple sources.
We took a short bus ride to Fælledparken, where there was some sort of Carnivale celebration going on. It turned out to be pretty basic-- a few rides, mostly a lot of food and merchant booths, with some DJed music and various Brazilian flags. We looped about and, as it was early yet, walked home, totaling about 4.5 miles for the night. (Go us.)
The weekend was otherwise all work-filled, mostly because the final for my Human Rights in Africa class (which was through Københavns Universitet) was an oral final with a synopsis and 1,000-pages-of-reading bibliography, and I didn't have a great idea of how to approach it. This worrying fortunately paid off, though, as I can now dazzle you all with my scholarly-literature-based arguments for genocide intervention. I also wrapped up a Danish oral exam, an essay exam for Migrants, Minorities, and Multiculturalism, and a 10-pager on EU language policy for European Politics (thank you, Professor Stultz from Brown, without whom I'd've had to write about Turkey like everyone else).
Tuesday night, in the midst of learning about English dominance as a working language and the failures of the statist system, the four of us roommates put together a little dinner with our remaining food. It was Jackie's last night (she starts her internship on Monday in New York, so she had to get back), so we had pasta with vegetables and pancakes with blueberries and marveled over how ridiculously lucky we've been to have landed in the group we did. I'm the next one to go-- Yuri and Dara are around until Sunday.
On Thursday, I went straight from handing in my EU paper to Høje Taastrup, where I'd volunteered to go speak to an English class at a Danish højskole. This ended up being nearly two hours (with a break) that flew by as eighteen-year-olds peppered me with questions ranging from "Have you ever been to spring break?" (as in Florida) to "Have you been to see the Little Mermaid?" (yes, see above) to "What do you think of carbon emissions?" and everything in between. I did my best to answer honestly and thoroughly, pulled out a few good stories, and, in retrospect, probably used some big words. To be fair, some of those kids have really good English, which I guess is what you get when you've been learning it intensely since the fourth grade. I asked them a few questions about what they thought of Americans-- nothing surprising there, though I liked how enthusiastic they were about southern California. Danes do love their warm weather--my Danish teacher Nina claims this wouldn't be the case without the never-ending winters, of course. Go figure!
It's so interesting to me how much the rest of the world can be focused on the U.S. I mean, I'm used to the American outlook, being American, but you'd think someone from, say, Denmark would be more interested in Denmark and not in a place 6 or 8 time zones out. But they watch Cartoon Network and complain that they didn't touch war for 450 years until Iraq came along and have not only McDonald's but also Burget King and KFC (all on the same Strøget block, no less). Not so different, are we?
After that experience, I met Dara at the Arken Museum of Modern Art in Ishøj. It's not a huge museum, but the collection was great, as were the café muffins, particularly the free chocolate one the guy gave us just in case we didn't like the rhubarb-that-we-thought-was-cranberry version. We then decided to be a bit spontaneous and, after a good walk back to the train station, ended up in Køge, a little town at the end of the purple S-Tog line pronounced "coo," which a friend of mine from my EU class had recommended for wanderings. We discovered that there really isn't much there (aside from some Danish children playing in -- no joke -- a sand-filled dumpster on the street), so we made it back to the train and home just in time for the time on our original stamped tickets to expire.
Next came a quick turnaround for dinner at Café Retro, where my last chai there came with a cinnamon star atop the foam, and I showed Jen a few more wondrous things her PowerBook can do. The three of us, plus two other friends of Jen's, took the Metro to the beach at Amager Strand, where we toasted champagne to the sunset and the end of a fabulous semester (Jen's brilliant plan). This was followed by a trip to Heidi's, a pub down the street, and the stor Hoegaarden I'd meant to try for a while. Ridiculously sized glass, that.
Today started bright and early, as Dara and I had a whole day planned for ourselves. Thai Bo filled our last trip to the gym, and then the Statens Museum for Kunst followed a mid-morning Baresso run. The museum had a great modern art collection-- you've got to love a city that has three of those within the public transit system. We tried to do smørrebrød for lunch, but the takeout place that I'd been trying to find for a second time all semester didn't have any veggie options, so we ended up enjoying the fine products of Bagels & Dreams around the corner. (Tomato bagel with pesto cream cheese--perfect!)
The afternoon brought the DIS closing ceremonies, which were surprisingly sweet, and a candid of me on the short study tour in Lubeck showed up in the slide show. Yuri also nabbed a couple of awards, which is doubly impressive given that they only doled out about six! The rest of the afternoon was packing and organizing travel stuff, plus dinner at Café Katz and a stop at the DIS-sponsored party at Celsius Club at Rådhusplasen. I ducked out early to finish packing (which I have) and take a stab at an almost-decent night's sleep. My plane leaves quite early tomorrow morning, but there's Paris and a sister and my cousin Andrew on the other end!
I promise to reflect more on all these experiences in good time. I also promise to post photos of everything I've blogged about since my birthday or so. Both of these things, however, will likely have to wait until I'm back Stateside. In the meantime, vi ses til alle, og jeg elsker Danmark!
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