Dansk mad!

Tonight, my Danish class enjoyed a quasi-traditional Danish dinner!  Nina, our teacher, set things up and gave up preparation instructions, which included literally whipping cream (something I'm apparently horrible at), setting the table (Danes put plates in the very edge), and putting together a couple of layer cakes (think thick crepes with Nutella-infused whipped cream in between).  For dinner, we enjoyed traditional smørrebrød, open sandwiches with interesting combinations of things on rye bread.  There were some delicious vegetarian options, too, fortunately-- the mushrooms, tomatoes, and cucumbers in a sort of egg salad was my personal favorite.  

There were candles on the tables, of course, as Danes love having candles everywhere.  There's even a trio in the entryway of my gym every morning!  After eating, we sang a long, Danish "Happy Birthday" song to one of my classmates, which was entertaining both in its repeated mentions of "lovely chocolate" and our utter mangling of the words and tune.  

The night ended with a screening of "The Celebration," a Danish "Dogma"-style film.  I'd already seen it, and the Dogma handheld camera style had given me a bad case of motion sickness, so I was excused from a second screening, to my full and otherwise happy stomach's relief.

On the upside, I heartily approve of Danish vegetarian food, as well as desserts.  (But we knew about the latter already!)

Sammen med min kæreste

Cambridge was absolutely lovely!

Apparently the trade-off to flying cheaply, at least on EasyJet, is significant delays; at least they like apologizing for them profusely.  We got into Stansted about two hours late, but once I'd finally made it through customs and everything all the frustration sort of melted away when Andy met me on the other side.  We had an hour or so to cuddle and catch up on the bus ride back to Cambridge, which looked only vaguely familiar (I'd been there on a day trip in 2003 when I did a summer program at Oxford). 

After a delightfully late start on Saturday (neither of us had been sleeping well the week before), we did a bit of sight-seeing on the quick-fast half-hour walk to the train station, where (after some credit card frustration) we caught a train at the last second to London.  Lunch, a couple of Tube transfers, and one inconveniently closed Victoria line later, we made it to the theater for Billy Elliot: The Musical.  Major brownie points to the boy, whose idea seeing a West End show was.  

The show itself was pretty cute-- I like Elton John scores!  The set had a solid working-class feel to it, even as stuff moved around on hydraulics (and we were sitting high enough to see backstage a bit, which was nifty).  I thought it trivialized a few things I remembered from the movie (like the gay best friend and the father's epiphany), and some of the artistic choices (dancing dresses and the entire cast doing a curtain call/finale in tutus) were less than wise.  But overall, it was incredibly endearing and uplifting, the music was fun, and the performances were stellar, particularly the super-talented little teenage kid who played Billy.  The choreography was really remarkable, too.

After the show, we high-tailed it back to Cambridge.  We missed the train we'd meant to take, and the later one got us back just in time to rush to Andy's room to change and be slightly late for Formal Hall.  For those unfamiliar with this Cambridge tradition (as I was), it involves a formal dinner with the college fellows-- formal as in wearing long black academic robesover your suit.  And everyone brings their own wine bottle to finish over the course of the meal.  If someone tosses a penny successfully in your glass, you have to drain it on the spot.  A fun bit of tradition, I discovered, even though there were inexplicably no fellows that night.  (And I'm not a big wine drinker.)  They even had a vegetarian option and excellent creme brulee.  

After dinner, we met some of Andy's British and Americans-in-Britain friends over at the Eagle, the nearby pub where Watson and Crick announced their discovery of DNA.  A few of the people in the group actually go to Brown, though I'd never met them before.  That's something I've found here in Denmark, too-- I had forgotten how big my school is.  There are about 20 Brown kids here, and I didn't really know any of them coming into this.  It sounded like the same story at Cambridge: you meet someone new, exchange pleasantries, and then sort of goggle awkwardly when you realize you've probably had classes together in the last two and half years and never noticed.

In any case, that was the end of Saturday-- nice folks in a non-smoking pub with some kind of sweet pear cider.  

Sunday brought another late morning, followed by a two-mile walk through the countryside to the Orchard, a brunch sort of place where Virginia Woolf and various other notables had once worked.  We had tea and scones and baguette sandwiches (brie and cranberry sauce-- major Oxford flashbacks for me!) outside under the trees, where it was wonderfully not that chilly.  I'd also forgotten how much I love a real British scone--possibly more than wienerbrød here (not that I'm complaining).  

On the way back, we wandered through the town-- Andy had several of the grander collegiate sights he wanted to show me, and wow.  Kind of crazy to think that people go to school in some of those places (try Googling Trinity College!), rather than, like, languish there as royalty.  The gardens and college-specific cathedrals were just as stunning.  I'll post pictures soon.

The trip back to Copenhagen involved far fewer delays, although there was one incident in which I had to dash down an "up" escalator at the airport to retrieve the purse I'd left on the bus.  So now I'm back in class-mode for another couple of weeks before spring break, missing the boy already. But it was a wonderful, wonderful weekend; it's hard to believe but very happy to realize that it's been two whole years together!

Hygge og glad!

With the exception of Netto's recycling station on Monday where a local kept insulting me, apparently Denmark is the happiest country in the world.  The U.S. ranks somewhere around 23-- well below Canada and Costa Rica, according to "60 Minutes," but way ahead of Pakistan and Iraq.  Definitely something to be proud of there. 

In other news, Jackie and I visited the Glyptotek yesterday; the museum's name actually means something akin to "collection of sculptures," and that is indeed what we saw.  Lots of marble (and bronze and wood)-- the catch is that most of them were made in the last couple of centuries, so the poses and styles are a bit different than, say, Renaissance art.  You also get busts of Victor Hugo and the like.  There was an excellent French selection (Degas!  Little Dancers!) and a bunch of Van Goghs and Impressionist work, which we definitely preferred to the ancient artifact rooms.  I'm starting to be really impressed with the productivity of the Greeks and Egyptians, though-- it seems like every museum has wings for artifacts from those two ancient societies, so they must have left behind and preserved an awful lot.

I was going to spend this afternoon exploring, but the weather is frigid and windy and overcast today, so I'm thinking a better use of time would be working-- I have a test, paper, and in-class debate tomorrow, and it'd be nice to get a chunk of work for next week done so I can really enjoy my weekend in Cambridge with Andy, which starts tomorrow night!

In other news, there's a bagel place right near DIS that serves tomato bagels warm with pesto cream cheese.  Holy cow.  This is the happiest place on Earth.  And you thought Mickey Mouse was a necessary ingredient!

UPDATE: I decided to brave the weather and wandered all the way to the end of the Strøget to Kongens Nytorv (big round plaza with a seasonal skating rink) and wandered up and down Nyhavn (the short stretch of old harbor that you see in all the pictures), finally.  Not the nicest day for it, but the area's adorable with lots of nice-looking restaurants and a bar called Havfrue with a carved mermaid out front that made me think of home :)

Jeg slapper af i Sønderborg

Skål (cheers) to the short study tour! (See Facebook for pictures of everything.)

It began unfavorably early on Thursday; the bus was motoring out of Frue Plads before the klokken struck 8.  Fortunately, we had a decently long drive to our first stop, Lolland Kommune, where we learned about governing a shrinking, rural-ish municipality in Denmark and how such a thing relates to the EU (because it does).  More napping preceded a short but pleasant ferry ride from the southern bit of Sjælland to northern Germany, which was made marginally more exciting than it might've been because the ferry route will be replaced by a bridge someday quasi-soon.  

We ended up in Lübeck, a large town in northern Germany that among other things is home to an inimitable tour guide named Manfred.  He knew his stuff, for sure, but his English alone was mildly entertaining ("literation" instead of "litearture," for instance-- I seriously thought he was bragging about historical figures' ability to repeat consonant sounds for a while).  And he had some dramatic rhetoric, coupled with a strange lack of respect for the girls' personal space.  Cases in point: poking about five of us in the bellies to make a point about the Devil lacking a navel; getting right in the face of Sara to inform her that women like Mrs. Putin (who apparently came to Lübeck desperate for some of its famous marzipan) will do what they will--"Have you ever heard the story of the serpent and the apple?"  Ridiculous, but memorable.  I think someone started a Facebook group called "WWMD -- What Would Manfred Do?"  It's one of those odd things that gets the 23-person group (including two chaperones) to bond quite immediately.

Thursday's dinner was provided by DIS, at a Marine lodge complete with wooden model ships hanging from the ceiling, dark murals, and long tables that dated back to something like the sixteenth century.  Amazing hot chocolate and ice cream bookended an actual (and actually good) vegetarian meal-- for once I didn't just get the main dish sans flesh!

After dinner we drove to the Jugendherberge Kiel, our hostel for the night in Kiel, Germany, which was absolutely freezing but otherwise fine for one night.  The town itself was fairly quiet; I ended up exploring a bit in the cold with a couple of my roommates, Kate and Alissa, but we gave up and played Go Fish over a can of Pringles.

Friday brought a guided tour of the Kiel Maritime Museum, which everyone including our tour leaders agreed was utterly dull, except for the life-size model of a 1930s German submarine that was made with two leather arm-mittens on the front so that someone could chuck dynamite at an enemy ship.  How one might do that underwater, in mittens, and get away fast enough on a pedal-powered craft apparently never occurred to the designer.

After lunch (more good vegetarian dining and dessert), we went to the Kieler Landtag, the regional parliament for the Schleswig-Holstein region of Germany.  The chairwoman of the Danish minority's political party spoke for a bit, and kindly answered my many questions afterwards.  The SSW sounds an awful lot like an ethnic party (including its specially lowered threshold of representation in the Landtag), but Anke Spoorendonk did her best to explain to me why this wasn't the case.  I'm still debating what I think of her response, but I think I'm writing a paper on the subject for Friday, so that should be resolved soon.

Later on, we crossed back into Denmark without any more fanfare than a "Velkommen til Danmark" sign (the Schengen Agreement nixed the need for passports between EU states) and met with the editor-in-chief of Denmark's German-language newspaper, Der Nordschleswiger, which was much less interesting than it sounds, unfortunately.  The evening got much better, though-- we checked into the Danhostel of Sønderborg City and spent the rest of the evening by the waterfront, having dinner and then checking out the nightlife.  

I ended up spending most of the night at a too-smoky bar called Penny Lane, enjoying Hoegaarden and about half a dozen of my classmates in a room that looked like someone's old-fashioned library.  We took an appropriately dignified picture or two, sang along to a techno cover of Paul Simon's "You Can Call Me Al," and turned in significantly earlier than the rest of the group, which was just fine with me.

Saturday began with a tour of Dybbøl Bank, the location of a key battle between Denmark and Germany in 1864 that was repeatedly referred to as the "Danish Gettysburg," which some people took offense to.  Not one of the more interesting stops on the trip, I'm afraid, but the all-you-can-eat Italian pizza buffet afterwards made up for the cold!

We took another ferry from Jylland (mainland Denmark) to Fyn, the big island in between Jylland and Sjælland, where Copenhagen is.  We stopped in Odense, Denmark's third-largest city, to tour the Brandts Kunstmuseum, which has a fantastic modern art collection.  Particularly notable were two series of rooms: they were totally separate exhibitions, but similar in that the pieces were a series of connected environments.  One involved children's play and included a slanted room decorated like a ship's belly with a video porthole-- I actually had to leave it to convince myself we weren't moving.  There was also a round black room with spinning dotted lights and big silver balls to roll around, which I especially loved.  

The second piece was called "From someone who nearly died, but survived."  It began with a room of stuffed ravens with creepy glowing eyes that followed you through several rooms of strange space-related technology reminiscent of The Matrix and 2001: A Space Odyssey, among other things (apparently what the artist intended), followed by a room filled with foam spikes, and lastly, a pegasus (I believe it was a taxidermied horse with wings attached) behind glass that was clouded in such a way that a viewer has to kneel before the display to see what's inside.  Crazy and bizarre, but that's part of why I love modern art.  

We hit Copenhagen around dinnertime, but not before the bus's Denmark trivia contest, in which I scored fourth place (did you know Denmark has one peninsula and 406 islands?) and thus some gummies.

Overall, I had a great time.  The people were pretty fun, and our tour leaders were particularly great.  One of them, Jakob, teaches my Migrants, Minorities, and Multiculturalism class, so I was happy to get to know him outside of the classroom; the other, Tyler, is the European Politics program assistant, who, besides being generally great, was on DIS two years ago with my friend Desha.  Small world!

Of course, all the fun meant I spent most of today getting work done, but at least I've mostly caught up on sleep, too.  This week should be a busy one with work, but I get to head to Cambridge at the end of it!  Plus, Jackie and Dara and I had a lovely dinner at Café Katz and decided we should maybe make Sunday suppers a weekly thing so as to hit up all the cafés on our communal to-do list.  

Actually, speaking of which, skål to goat cheese as well!

Min tirsday og onsdag

This Tuesday had two events of note.  First off, I was standing in the DIS building with Jen when I noticed a package slip fall into the mail folder with a name on it that I recognized.  I sort of yelped and then explain to Jen that I wasn't (entirely) crazy-- "I think I went to camp with that girl."  It had to be the same person-- her name is pretty distinct.  Someone behind me says, "That's me."  I turn around, and lo and behold, it's Yarden from my Environmental History of Europe class.  She's a full-year student and we've already met.  I say, "I think you came to my Bat Mitzvah" (she did), and immediately she makes the connection and we both get excited for several minutes while playing quick catch-up trying to figure out how the heck we hadn't recognized each other.  Talk about your small world!  We both had places to be, but hopefully we can do coffee or something after class and catch up properly.

Later on, my three roommates and I went to La Glace, the pastry shop and oldest bakery in Denmark, which is across the street, in celebration of Jackie's birthday.  I had a flat wafer-y thing that tasted like a delicious apricot hamantaschen; the others opted for something called a "Sport Cake" that seemed to consist almost entirely of mousse.  Dara's and my birthdays will both be during our stay in Copenhagen, too, so that's definitively going to be a place to return to.  Those chocolate croissants looked positively deadly.

I had Wednesday off again (no classes and no field trips for any of said classes), so after a leisurely morning filled with exercise and dried fruit from a street vendor on the Strøget (the big walking street), I found Jen over in Østerbro and we explored her neighborhood.  Good sushi, cute little boutiques of every sort, and a cheaper-than-Netto grocery store-- she may have to commute to DIS, but it's not a bad area to live at all.  In my own wanderings, I also found the gorgeous little Ørsteds Parken (near Nørreport Station)-- check the links from my last post for pictures.

Vi ses på lørdag (after the short study tour)!

Jeg skal spille computerspil!

After much effort and one evening when I just couldn't fall asleep, I present you all with the long-awaited photos!

Set 1

Set 2, or the beginnings thereof

Enjoy!  I firmly plan on trying to get some sleep now.

En fødselsdag, to museeter, og syv timer i Malmö

Jackie's 21st birthday was delightful! Pussy Galore's Flying Circus turned out to be merely a funky café with some *interesting* wall art, but the food was good, and my grilled tuna salad was big enough to provide lunch the next day, too. As for the Absolut Ice Bar, it was totally touristy and gimmicky and completely worth it. It's not a huge place, but the entire room is in fact made out of ice, down to the benches and glasses. Picture-taking took up most of our stay, and as other people have managed to upload them, I will find a way to do so soon. I have to warn you, though, they're a bit ridiculous-- everyone was issued a giant blue poncho-parka upon entry (apparently more to keep your body heat from melting things than to keep you warm), so we all look more silly than we might otherwise. Dara and I saved our ice-glasses! Not sure what to do with them, as they can't really live outside of the freezer, but they're still fun to show off for now.

Thursday also brought a trip to the Frihedsmuseet, the Danish Resistance Museum, with a couple of girls I found through the Jewish Students group on the DIS Forum. The trip to Østerbro alone was nice-- I love seeing different neighborhoods, as it's all too easy to just hang around in my own--and the area was all along the water and quite lovely. Plus, we found a small but endearing (and blue) cafè on the walk back.

The museum itself was small but well-done, which seems to be a trend. What I think was most interesting was that in all of the time I've spent learning about World War II and Nazis and the Holocaust, I don't think I'd ever considered the experience of any Gentiles off the front lines. This comes back to the utter lack of Scandinavian history to be found in American schools, as far as I or anyone else with whom I've discussed this can tell. I know all about hiding people in attics and French Resistance and food rations in American, but other than reading Lois Lowry's Number the Stars ages ago, nothing of smuggling Jews in fishing boats to neutral Sweden or King Christian & co.'s acquiescence to occupation or Danish plots to divert trains and take down planes. So the museum contained a lot of totally new information, and the sheer amount of artifacts it contained to back all of that history up was amazing.

After an uneventful Friday, I met up with half a dozen other girls (Jackie, Dara, Jen, and new friends Ilana, Hannah, and Sara) Saturday morning to catch a train to Sweden! Yes, the country is so close to København that we can take a day trip to Malmö and still be home in time for dinner (I had an omelette). We didn't even need passports, which was kind of disappointing to those of us seeking new stamps.

Malmö was quite fun-- we kept marveling at how different it was from other European cities we'd each been to, including Danish ones. There were a few squares that made you go, 'Oh, I'm definitely in Europe,' but a lot of the city (and, for reasons I'll get into in a moment, we saw a lot of it) was surprisingly modern, with a whole different aesthetic. Before hunting down lunch, we hit up the Turning Torso, an apartment building whose structure twists 90 degrees from base to top, and the waterfront, where we had an amazing view of the Øresund Sound and the bridge from Sjælland to Sweden, which only just opened in 2000.

After a quick lunch, we backtracked slightly to Malmöhus Castle. Though it's almost 500 years old and clearly holds a lot of history, we didn't get much out of it-- almost all of the exhibits were only in Swedish. And most of them seemed to have little to do with each other, or even with the castle! Cases in point included the aquarium downstairs (accompanied by an exhibit of nocturnal creatures), some strange mirror-tunnel painted with stars, a hall of taxidermied megatrons literally entitled "Really Old Stuff" (of all the things to translate into English there...), and a two-room installation of modern art called "Law and Disorder." Bizarre, all of it, but at least it only cost 20 kr., which in Sweden meant about $3.

After that jaunt, we made it to a few quick sightseeing sights-- City Hall and St. Petri Church in the Stortorget square, the smaller square Lilla Torg, and the pedestrian shopping street Södergatan. Mid-afternoon, we split into two groups; Ilana, Dara, Jackie, and I went in search of the Malmö synagogue. I don't think there was anything of extra significance about it (other than being the only one marked on our tourist map), but it seemed exciting to find Jews in Sweden.

We got majorly lost on the way despite my otherwise superior map-reading skills, which is why we've now seen so much of the city-- although in my defense, I did get us un-lost, to the synagogue, and to a bus stop just in time to meet the others at the train states. The synagogue was lovely from the outside but closed; still, it was worth seeing and we were all glad to have found it. At that point, we pretty much made it home just in time to crash.

Today was entirely quiet and almost unscheduled-- slept in, Pilates class and workout at the nearby gym, some reading, etc. I did go to a screening of the apparently landmark Danish film "The Celebration," which left me more than a bit nauseated (hand-held camera technique) and a bit horrified with humanity.

On the upside, the screening was preceeded by my ordering a chai at Baresso entirely in Danish! The barista even responded in kind, which they never do when it's totally obvious you're not a native speaker, and we only switched to 'Engelsk' when I didn't understand her query if I wanted the drink to go or not. Definitely exciting, however minor. It's like discovering the boots-over-jeans fashion statement-- the little bits of things that click and make you feel kind of assimilated are really, really fun, no matter how trivial or unnecessary. And it's an added bonus that I'm surrounded by Americans that totally understand my reaction.

It's a short week of classes, as we leave Thursday morning for the short study tour, where I'll be learning about local government and the Danish and German minorities on either side of the Danish-German border. Hej-hej!

Jeg skal på Nationalmuseet.

Apparently DIS-provided Internet does not want to allow me to upload pictures, so that project is at least temporarily on hold.  My apologies.

I finally saw Tåsingegade, one of the other DIS apartment buildings where Jen and my new friend Ilana live.  It's much more of a 'normal' building than mine is; actually, it looks kind of like a dorm.  The rooms are all identical doubles along one long hallway (DIS only owns one floor of the building), plus there's a common room with a television and a bigger kitchen than the ones in each room.  While I'm over the moon about my location, it'd be kind of nice to have that dorm-style setup, just in terms of meeting people.  We do have a common room here, fortunately, complete with a foosball table and some couches, if no television, but people don't use it much because it's kind of tucked away in the back behind the courtyard.

Skindergade's layout, on the other hand, is just downright bizarre.  Each floor is the same size and shape, but they're all laid out totally differently.  The front room that's a huge double on the first floor is two smallish doubles on the second, and it's a living room with a small single on the third.  The middle room on each floor is a double, but it's size and orientation varies, and do the kitchens on each floor.  The back rooms on the other floors are like ours-- a bathroom and two walk-through bedrooms-- but we got lucky enough to have our little downstairs space with the kitchen and dining table, whereas the other floors have 8-10 people sharing one kitchen.  And then on the ground floor in the front is an apartment for the guys who serve as our RAs (ignoring for now that Morten is only 18), and nestled in the back of the ground floor is another tiny little double with its own kitchen.

I'm still counting myself lucky, despite the quad thing.  The girls I'm living with are really great and we've been doing a lot of food and touring together, though I'm of course trying to meet new people.  We're talking about a day trip to Sweden (specifically to Malmö, which is something like half an hour by train from Sjælland and apparently very fun to visit) and more København sight-seeing this weekend.  The following weekend is a short study tour with our respective academic programs (the European Politics & Society track goes to Jylland (mainland Denmark) and northern Germany to see local government in action), and the weekend after that I'm off to Cambridge to visit Andy.  So, we need to pack in some good activities!  Fortunately, we're keeping a running to-do list.

Today was my first field study, with my European Union class.  We don't have Wednesday classes here; the day is reserved for field studies with your various classes, and if you happen not to have a field study, it's a free day to wander around the city!  I managed to do a bit of both today.  My class went to the Folketing, which is the Danish Parliament, which is within easy walking distance of home.  We didn't really see Parliament itself (disappointing), but we did get to sit and talk for an hour and a half with the chairman of the European Affairs Committee (which controls Denmark's EU policy) in the committee room, which was interesting and very, very cool.  He and our teacher apparently led an effort to get Denmark into the Eurozone when said teacher was in Parliament himself, but that (obviously) failed, and Denmark is still on the kroner, which exchanges at about 5 to the dollar.  Of course, everything is way more expensive here, so it always feels more uneven.  He also seemed pretty okay with the controversial idea of adding Turkey to the EU, which was surprising.

Afterwards, a couple girls from the class and I wandered to the Nationalmuseet, which was on the way back.  It's basically a big history museum, charting Denmark's saga from the Middle Ages to the present, as well as, inexplicably, ancient Greek and Egyptian history.  We got a bit lost trying to get out of the drinking horn display room, and a couple of guards grumbled at us for not checking our schoolbags (we didn't know!  we swear!), but it was otherwise very interesting.  Why don't European history classes at home cover Scandinavia at all?  I feel like I could explain a lot of the stuff to see in Paris or even maybe Germany, but I hadn't a clue what went on up here before I arrived.  I've also come to realize that recounting Danish history is just a little bit funny-sad, because the short version of it is that the Danes ruled a huge chunk of Scandinavia, including Sweden and Norway, and now Denmark is just this cute, charming little country that looks on a map like it's being eaten by Sweden and Norway.

Tomorrow is my roommate Jackie's 21st birthday, so we're going to the pastry shop La Glace, out to dinner at a place in Nørrebro called Pussy Galore's Flying Circus (?), and for drinks at the Absolut Ice Bar.  The latter is clearly a gimmick but involves a bar that is actually made out of ice, so we're falling for it.

Vi ses i weekenden!

Helsingør og min weekenden!

Two notes: 

1) I fixed the commenting function, so you should be able to leave me comments whether you have an account set up or not. Please do!

2) I tried to post pictures last night, but the wireless in Skindergade has been irritatingly problematic and uncooperative this week. Sorry; I'm working on it.

After a mostly-uneventful week, this weekend was wonderfully interesting without being too busy (i.e., I've caught up on some much-needed sleep). Saturday, seven of us managed to coordinate a trip via train out to Elsinore (in Danish, Helsingør), one of two Danish cities (the other being Copenhagen) to have a separate English name. This is thanks to William Shakespeare (or whoever you think wrote Hamlet), who set the play at Kronberg Slot, the castle just on the edge of town by the water.

We had a great group of people-- me, roommates Dara and Jackie, Ilana from upstairs, my friend Jen, Hannah from Dara's psychology class, and Eugene from my Migrants class (who also happens to attend UVa with a quarter of my high school and blogs for Campus Progress-- small world). It's not a very big town, so upon arrival we went in search of food-- meaty smørrebrød for those who wanted, veggie sandwiches for those of us who didn't. Someone thought it was supposed to rain, but, aside from the wind that we all could have done without, the day was absolutely gorgeous. We also saw three of the biggest dogs that, I think, have ever walked the Earth. Do the Danish genes carry over to canines? The coastline, like in Roskilde, is rocky and gorgeous-- we snapped several pictures of waves breaking on the shore and of Helsingborg, Sweden, which is only a very short boat ride away.

Kronberg Slot itself was very cool. We took a guided tour of the casements, which included dungeons, storerooms, stables, defense set-ups, and such. Think stony, extremely dark, extremely cold, and extremely eerie spaces-- particularly the prison cell that narrowed to a point in the back of the room, forcing at least one unlucky prisoner in a crowded cell to stay standing.  There was also a statue of Holger the Dane, who is supposed to awaken if the country is in trouble, with lighting that slowly dimmed.

The royal apartments were elegant and classy, but simpler than you'd expect. Like Roskilde Cathedral, the castle lacked a lot of the embellishments and expenses of the Danes' western neighbors. That's not to say the place lacked splendor: there were rooms of tapestries and large paintings detailing much of Danish history, including a table canopy, a prop that we'd never heard of. Apparently it's a canopy that hangs over a table and behind the diners on one side of it; in this case, that would be the king and queen who commissioned it.  The chapel was a bit more intricate, with great tiled floors, brightly painted woodcarvings, and a big organ.  

At this point, though, Kronberg was closing (at three in the afternoon!), so there was little else to do but sample the local pastry shop and catch the train home. For the record, in Danish, danishes are called wienerbrød--literally, "Vienna bread"--even though I'm told the Austrians call them danishes.

Back in København, a group from the building hit up a nearby dance club called Celcius for the night. It was my first time at a club, and it was excellent (minus the apparent lack of ventilation)! Well worth the cover charge, and quite a cultural experience, even if none of us managed to talk to any Danes (aside from a couple of guys who asked if I knew of the NFL, and then walked off when I said I didn't know much). They played lots of American pop music-- the kind that it's fun to half-belt along to while you're grooving, even if it's a bit outdated-- and some seriously strange techno was involved, too.

Today brought a late morning (thank goodness), and a short visit with Jackie and Dara to the Dansk Jødisk Museum at the Royal Library. Their collection of Danish Judaica and related artifacts were great, with plenty of depth and variety despite the surprisingly small building. The architecture of the place was interesting but a little disorienting; everything (including some of the floor) was at a slant. Dara said she'd heard the architect used no right angles, which I believe. The snapshot stories of Danish Jews' assimilation (never quite complete but much more smooth than those of other European countries) made me particularly interested in visiting some of the nearby synagogues and especially the Danish Resistance Museum, which gets into how Denmark saved most of its Jews from the Holocaust by smuggling them to Sweden in 1943. It's only open until 3 pm, but I'm hoping to get there in the next week or two.

Vi ses i morgen!

Tirsdag, jeg er dansker.

I've been feeling very Danish for the last twenty-four hours, minus, you know, not being super-tall, blonde, and highly tolerant of alcohol.

It started yesterday afternoon, when Dara and I headed over to Rådhuspladsen (the big square by City Hall) for a sort of after-the-fact pep rally in celebration of the Danish men's handball (a super-intense quasi-hybrid of basketball and soccer) victory over Croatia to win the European championship and a big gold plate.  The crowd was huge but not very mob-like; if we'd been in the U.S., something like this would have been an utter madhouse.  It was pretty exciting, but not wild-- just a lot of really happy Danes waving flags and cheering like crazy every time a different team member came out onto the steps or the balcony of City Hall to hold the trophy-plate aloft.  Then there was a great fireworks show, followed by more cheering and flags and handball player worship and flag-waving.  Neither of us knew anything about handball, or what people were yelling, but it was very fun!  It almost felt like we were a part of things...though that spell lifted briefly when a guy next to me asked me something in very, very fast Danish about his text message, and I blanked on the Danish I'd been practicing just that morning to tell him I'd be of no use (retroactively, it's "jeg taler ikke dansk").

Last night, Jackie (roommate from Cornell) and a few guys from our building went out for a bit.  We ended up meeting a bunch of other DIS kids who were celebrating one girl's birthday; the group included two girls from Bowdoin who were both really enthusiastic about knowing Ben Freedman (my cousin there).  It was almost like sleep-away camp all over again.  While we were there, a quartet of really not-sober Danes were (still) celebrating the handball victory, complete with jumping and dancing and singing, alternately, Danish nationalist songs and American pop hits from the 90's.  And once they found out that it was the one girl's birthday, they got even happier and jumpier.  

Meanwhile, Jackie and I struck up a conversation, about sports of all things, with a random Danish guy who was quite enthusiastic about San Francisco and American football.  This was great, particularly because numerous people have made the point that we'll have to go out of our way to interact with Danes, as we live in a building where all the residents are on DIS.

Today, I tucked my jeans into my boots.  This sounds very minor, but it was actually quite the conversation-starter among Americans today for the following reason: it's possible that every single Danish woman in the København area owns a pair of skinny jeans and really gorgeous zip-up boots.  And every girl I've met has wanted to be that fashionable, particularly because all the stores are in January sale mode ("udsalg"), so the high-fashion shoes are marked way down for another few days.  So the fact that my jeans fit into the lovely brown boots I got prior to my departure was fairly exciting, and I felt oh-so-hip all day today.

Also, I realized that I really, really like being in this city.  I had a very long-running debate for the better part of a year and a half of college regarding whether or not I wanted to go abroad at all.  By the end of the summer, I was thinking I wanted to travel abroad more than I wanted to live abroad.  Coming here was incredibly last minute-- I met with the Brown Office of International Programs about two weeks before everything was due to DIS, and I didn't get my plane ticket until winter break.  But, language barriers and eerily high prices on everything aside, København became very a comfortable fit very quickly.  I was talking about this with my friend Jen, who agreed-- we sort of forget we're in this whole 'foreign' place a lot of the time, because we're just settled and happy about it.  I'm still super-psyched to travel-- I'll definitely be in Russia, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, France, and at least a couple of others before I hit the States again-- but I'm really happy that I'm living in a place, instead of just swinging through.  And there's a whole four months to get to know the place!

Ja, det kan jeg godt.

What a weekend!

Friday night, DIS hosted a semester kickoff party at a bar called LUUX, which, aside from some very strange videos on display, was quite classy and very fun.  The best part was dancing to techno-ish remixes of American pop songs, like "We Will Rock You."  I didn't even know you could do that to a Queen song.

Saturday brought a lot of wind and rain and busted umbrella that my sisters had so kindly decorated for me.  Seriously, if I wanted this weather, I could've just stayed in Providence.  But that didn't stop the walking tours to "the Other Copenhagen," i.e. the downtown area on the other side of the central square from where I'm living (which is still only about a ten- or fifteen-minute walk from home or the DIS complex).  The tour included several cafes and shops and stores worth going to, as well as a general sense of what comprises 'downtown Copenhagen' and the nearby neighborhoods.  I also discovered, at a mosaic-and-mirrors-encrusted cafe on Vesterbrogade, that a chai without the latte is actually very good.  

Saturday afternoon included a trip to the Danish Design Museum, which was small but very funky, and I had the fortune to wander into it with a few architecture/interior design students (one of whom was really into chairs), who provided some additional insight.  The day ended with a trip a bit outside of town to one of the kollegiums (big dorms for students at various local universities including DIS), where Dara (one of my roommates who also goes to Brown), Hannah (a neighbor from William & Mary), and I joined some random people for ice cream and a screening of "10 Things I Hate About You."  It's one of my favorite movies, but it proved a bit bittersweet given this week's events.  It's a shame we aren't living among Danes or in singles here at Skindergade like the kollegium residents do, but this building is so much nicer and about a half-hour closer to everything than that kollegium is, so it made the three of us really glad to be where we are, all things considered.  I think they were banking on that when they assigned us all to such tight quarters.

Today, I rolled out of bed with just enough time to run over to the gym (how is everything so close to home?) before nearly missing the bus to Roskilde.  Roskilde is home to Roskilde Catherdral, sort of Denmark's version of Westminster Abbey.  It's really, really lovely.  Rather than lots of gold filigree crosses and imposing figures, the main chamber is whitewashed with some small flowered frescoes on the ceiling.  The front area is elaborate, of course, but most of it is exquisitely hewed wooden reliefs.  The windows were apparently stained glass at one point, but now they're simply lined in brick Gothic arches.  The side rooms were a little fancier (and colder!), but even then, all of Denmark's deceased royalty rested peacefully without too much garish decoration.  I'm not a big church person, but I did like this one.  There was also a big column in one room on which numerous luminaries' (including the current Danish monarchs, Peter the Great, and Constantine) measured heights were marked.  I'm a huge fan of whoever came up with that idea!

Roskilde is also home to the Vikingeskibsmuseet (Viking Ship Museum), which houses five reconstructed vessels unearthed from the depths of the sea, where they had been sunk to block unwelcome ships from entering an important Danish port something like a millennium ago.  The museum is situated on the water, so you can look at these ancient partially-skeletal ships through the windows and really let the imagination go.  If that's not enough, there's a side room with partial replicas (including shields, chickens, and costumes) to play on.  

I'll put up pictures of all of this soon, I promise.

However now, unbelievably enough, I have schoolwork to do.  But apparently my Danish pronunciation's not half bad, according to several sources-- thanks for the head start, Mum!  As at least one native speaker has described the tongue to me as a throat disease (someone definitely said the same thing about Hungarian when I went there in 2004), so this is rather exciting.

Jeg er tyve år.

I wasn't going to update today, but given this evening's observations I thought I should.

I've spent a lot of the last day or so hearing about last year's youth riots, which have carried over somewhat until today.  I've put together the story from parts relayed by Nitte, my Survival Danish teacher from earlier in the week; Nina, my Danish teacher for the rest of the semester; and a random guy with a bike and a red scarf in the street this afternoon.  It's kind of an interesting and still-ongoing saga, and given our proximity to several of the pertinent locations and events, I was interested in what the deal was.

It transpires that a year or so ago, the Danish government decided to sell a youth house that it owned in the Nørrebro neighborhood of København.  The place was full of "subculture" types who had habits like serving alcohol to teenagers and not allowing firefighters to enter the premises, even though it was government-owned.  The government worried more than a bit about the place burning to the ground with 200 kids inside of it (and receiving the blame), so they put it up for sale, which the lefty students weren't happy about.  The property was bought and later torn down by a Christian group headed up by a woman called Ruth who was quite unpopular, which the lefties were even less happy about it.  Crazy riots ensued; the protesters threw bricks at policemen and covered their faces, which is apparently illegal here.  Of course, in true Danish fashion, they still stopped at red lights when crossing streets (true story).  

In any case, the rioters settled down somewhat, but they still protest weekly in the square at Gammel Torv, which is conveniently on my block.  I'd spent a chunk of the afternoon reading about the EU and man's historical views on dominance over the environment for tomorrow's classes, and I heard serious shouting as I walked out of the Baresso to head home around 5.

According to the aforementioned man in the red scarf, they're demanding a new youth house, which the government is likely to provide, if only to get them to stop protesting.  There are two locations pending approval, but the subculture folks don't like either, and it's not clear what the next step is.  In the meantime, the weekly protest seems (based on this week's) to consist of shouting chants in Danish, blaring loud music, and then proceeding in a semi-orderly fashion to what I think the man in the red scarf said was a City Hall meeting.  The police presence at these things is major, given their history, and I was told to get away if/when the police said to start moving (not that I was planning on doing otherwise).  The scarf guy said that, essentially, they want society's rights without being part of society.  

And Nina suggested the social violence was a newer thing in Danish society, just like the immigrant population.  My class on Migrants, Minorities, and Multiculturalism starts tomorrow, and I'm thinking it's going to be interesting for more reasons than just the Mohammed cartoon incident that happened here a few years ago, particularly if the professor considers subculturists a minority.

I'm not really sure what to make of all this.  I know American students spend plenty of time getting angry (come on, I go to Brown!), but it's hard to envision a context in which people would take to brick-throwing to demand government issued housing back home (particularly when you think of the government housing Katrina victims ended up with).  The scarf guy said the people who had been evicted from the original house had all settled elsewhere, so it's not an issue of homelessness, but the whole incident has opened up several more questions I'd like to ask whatever Danish government workers we'll get to meet with through the EPS program.  Like, to what extent does a socialist government create the legal expectation for the provision of something like this?  Or are the protesters simply demanding it because they had it previously?  And does the government have reasons for attempting to recreate the housing beyond wanting to shut up a bunch of subculturists with speakers?  Things to probe in the near future.

En "Hej!" fra mig

The Danish-language text pauses here (for now, at least).  I've only had two days of "Survival Danish," plus the bits I've picked up from Mom over the years since her DIS experience, which (no offense to Mom or Nitte) doesn't add up to much yet.  But classes start tomorrow, and Danish Language 101 is my first, so who knows?  Maybe I'll be writing bilingual blog entries soon.

I've now been here since early Sunday morning, and we're all so settled in that it feels like longer.  I'm living on Skindergade (pronounced "skin-eh-gell"), which is two blocks from the DIS complex and within five blocks, it seems, of most other places worth getting to on a daily basis.  Given that the 370 or so DIS students who aren't in this particular housing option have to commute at least 20 minutes to get where we already are, it's hard to complain!  The building itself is lovely-- DIS only bought it a few months ago, but it has some character and seriously quirkly layouts to it-- and, again, the location can't be beat.  I'm living in a quad, admittedly, but I think it'll work out.  After some stressing about space-sharing and bonding with the very nice and helpful boys on our floor, we worked out our current set-up, which involves two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a kitchenette and dining area in a downstairs space.  We have to go through each others' bedrooms to get to the latter two places, but everyone seems easygoing and we at least have a couple walls.

Orientation has kept all of us pretty busy, though it's been fun and left me with plenty of time to settle in and socialize.  We gotten tips on interacting with Danes (who don't say "please" or "excuse me" often, apparently), introductions to various DIS resources and policies, multiple walking tours (cobblestones and heeled boots, no matter how new and cute, are a terrible combination), and previews of the program study tours.  My program, European Politics & Society, goes to Jutland (mainland Denmark-- Copenhagen is on an island) and northern Germany in February and spends a week visiting Brussels, the Hague, and Amsterdam in early March.  We had been told previously we'd visit Luxembourg, not the Netherlands, so this was a particularly exciting development!  Also, the program assistant, Tyler, is a former DIS student-- who happens to have studied alongside my friend Desha a few semesters back.  Small world, isn't it?

I did manage to do some grocery shopping yesterday, though.  For the record: anything with the suffix "kød" is not friendly if you're a vegetarian.  On the upside, I did find 0.5% mælk and multi-grain Cheerios, so I can hold fast to my morning cereal ritual.  I am trying new food groups here, of course, though every smørbrød shop I seem to pass disappears when I want to experiment with it.  There was a session this afternoon on vegetarian eating in Denmark, which was both incredibly helpful and filled with girls (and one boy) who were super-friendly and psyched about the possibility of having a potluck of sorts.  Also, I've become an immediate fan of Baresso, the Danish equivalent of Starbucks, which puts cinnamon on its Chai-Cino Classics.  Take that, one-pump-sugar-free-vanilla-Chai-latte!

Today, I had a couple of hours to kill and had left my keys in our locked room, so I spent two hours basically getting lost in the neighborhood on my own.  Navigating the area will take a lot more practice, but I'm starting to get the hang of it.  This city is so charming!  It's small and definitively not touristy or gimmicky, and it looks so different from the other big European cities I've been to.  It's a bit confusing that a single long street can change its name several times, with each kink in the line, but it's fun attempting to pronounce (and remember!) names like Købmagergade (my best estimate at the moment is "kueb-mah-ge-gell").  Danish is my only class tomorrow, and it's done by 11:30, so my friend Jen and I have a plan to register ourselves with the local kommune (which gives us a Danish SSN equivalent and thus access to the state health care system) and then wander around for a good while until we really start to connect all these "gader" (streets) together.  

Until that point, god aften!