Oslo!

I'm home. Has it sunk in yet? I'm not sure. There are so many things to process and so many thoughts to put in order. The flight from London to Chicago was really the beginning of it: American accents making official announcements, that different, perhaps even Midwestern rather than simply American, concept of politeness demonstrated by the flight attendants (they smile a lot more than SAS flight attendants, for example - and open their eyes wide, earnest).

But I have many stories to tell and I have failed rather spectacularly to update this blog. So I'll try to post in three separate posts the adventures John and I have had these past two weeks. Then I'll make an attempt at a summary of what I've learned and what it's like to be home again. I will fail. I'm okay with that.

So up first is Oslo.

John arrived in Copenhagen around noon on Saturday the 15^th. His flight was scheduled to arrive at 9, but he missed a connection, which I figured out with the help of a very kind information desk attendant at Københavns Lufthavn. But he arrived without further incident and all was well.

We left the next day via bus through Sweden. We got on at the Copenhagen central station and found seats together near the back. The bus trip was okay. It was long, and we were joined in the back in Lund by a group of noisy Swedish adolescents. They were okay companions for the most part, until they got bored and started to pull the same practical joke on everyone who came back to use the bathroom – one would stick his head out and say “oooowwww” whenever someone opened the door. It got old. Fast.

In Oslo, we were met by Margarete (I'm butchering the spelling), who is the daughter of Erik Foss, a good friend of my grandpa. Erik hosted us while we were in Oslo, which was wonderful! It was so nice to have a proper house to go back to in the evenings, and he and his family were able to show us around, which was very good. Also, we had amazing home-cooked meals!

The point of going to Oslo was mainly to see Syttende Mai (17^th May). Some of you may know that Syttende Mai is Norwegian Constitution Day. I was really excited to see how the Norwegians celebrate it in their capital!

The day began early, much to John's jet-lagged disgruntlement. We woke up around seven in order to go see the Norwegian children's parade near Erik's home. All of the schoolchildren march with all of the other children from their school up to the home of the crown prince (which, as I mentioned, is very close to where Erik lives!). Everyone has flags flying in front of their houses, and many people wave flags at the parade. The fun thing to see was that every Norwegian gets really dressed up. Many (especially women) wear the traditional costumes, or bunads. A lot of men, and some women, simply wear their best clothes. Also fun to see were the russ. The russ are graduating from gymnasium, so they're about 19. They are easily identifiable by their red or blue overalls and matching caps. The overalls are painted and decorated, and the russ have been wearing them for the past seventeen days, partying in the same clothes the entire time. Jens, Erik's grandson, who showed us around later that day, told us that they aren't allowed to take off the clothes except in order to sleep, and that there are four events for all the russ in Norway throughout those seventeen days – three of which are in Oslo. Parents and schools go all out to make sure the russ have a spectacular time. After seeing the children's parade by Erik's house, we went to see the bigger parade in Oslo with Erik's daughter Barbaro and her friend. We also saw the royal family! From a great distance, although later we got to see the King up close, because he came to visit near where Barbaro works. And...we went to a bar with Jens (Barbaro's son) to see how Norwegians party on their Independence Day. John described it well, at least for Mac people: it's like a combination of Founder's Day (because everyone is super dressed up) and Springfest (because everyone is drunk by two in the afternoon), times Norway. It was pretty excellent.

We also took in the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo, which was baller! The ships were burial ships, so there were lots of great artifacts there as well. Erik took us to see the new ski jump, which has been designed for the upcoming ski jump and biathlon world championships. At the ski jump we went through a ski museum, which was really fun to see – they had a lot of super old skis! We also saw Vigelandsparken (a sculpture garden) and the Munch museum that day. The next day, John and I went to see the opera house – which is a pretty fun modern building. And we saw the national gallery and the resistance museum. That was our last dayin Oslo. Oslo is a great town, but super expensive, so it was nice to go on to Berlin, which is rather cheaper!

Copenhagen! As a Tourist!

So I've spent this second week of spring break doing some of the touristy things around Copenhagen that I haven't had a chance or time to do earlier this semester.

On Tuesday, I went to Malmö in Sweden. It's just a thirty-minute train ride from Copenhagen, and it's absolutely beautiful. It might just be the fact that it's spring, but Malmö felt beautifully green and clean. I mostly just wandered because I didn't want to spend any money (read: I was too lazy to either exchange Danish kroner to Swedish kroner or find an ATM), but I did go to Malmö Konsthallen (The Malmö Art Hall), which is a great free art museum. It's small, but it was great. There were two pieces that really spoke to me. One was called "100 Years" and was an entire room with a line of portraits arranged around the sides of the room. The portraits featured a different person in each one from every year from newborn to 100. It was really striking because of the variety of faces and apparent age - some folks in their 60s looked like some of the folks in their 40s, and some looked like some of those in their 80s. It was interesting to imagine the differences in their lives that may have made them seem so much older or younger than they actually were. Another piece I really liked (which I can't remember the name of) featured carousels of ordinary objects - one was a small model of the Statue of Liberty, another a crane. These carousels had mirrors for bases and the piece was in a darkened room with light shining on the objects, creating a really cool shadow effect. It really made me think about the way consumerism effects a person.

The next day, Wednesday, I went to see Rosenborg Slot and Statens Musuem for Kunst. Rosenborg Slot houses the Crown Jewels, among many other old, rich objects. It was a beautiful day, and I enjoyed a picnic lunch in the Royal gardens at the foot of Rosenborg Slot. It was a really interesting place to visit - it's one of the oldest museums in Denmark, as I understood it. It's been a museum since the mid-1800s. I thought what was particularly interesting was the reverence displayed for the beautiful objects. It really made me think about the values of modern society. Yes, these objects are beautiful, of course, but more importantly, they are expensive! The treasury, which is underground, felt almost temple-like: visitors were instructed to remain very quiet. Statens Museum for Kunst is huge and free! One of the best parts of Statens Museum for Kunst (The State's Museum of Art) - other than the fact that it was free - was the wide variety of art that it held. I don't think I saw near everything, but I started to get exhausted by the end of the day just from all the looking and thinking I'd been doing. And quite a bit of walking, too. The new picture up top is of Rosenborg Slot now that it's springtime! Yay!

Thursday brought a slightly different sort of entertainment. Rather than going to an art museum, I went to the Carlsberg Visitors' Center. It focused very much on the history of beer and specifically Carlsberg beer. Carlsberg is one of the largest - maybe the largest? - brewing companies in the world! I didn't actually realize that before I went. It was quite fun, and ended with two free beers (or rather, two beers were included in the price of admission) so I can't complain! They also have the largest collection of unopened beer bottles in the world (shown in the picture). A friend who visited there earlier thought it was a bit of a waste of perfectly good beer - but it's a fun collection to look at nonetheless.

Yesterday, I had planned on going to Christiania, but I think I'll save that visit for a time when I can go with some friends, since there isn't exactly a museum to go to or anything like that, and I thought I'd be a bit more comfortable wandering about with other folks. Instead, I just went into DIS and checked out The Kalevela. I'm excited to read it! I've just started and I'm really enjoying it. This semester has made me really enjoy and appreciate old sagas and stories derived from oral tales. I shouldn't be surprised, after all, three of my classes revolve around that concept! I took the book and sat in Rådhuspladsen (Town Hall Square) for a little while, reading and enjoying the people watching and the great view of the town hall and Palace Hotel. It was a bit chilly, though, so I left after reading the foreword and went to sit in a nice little coffee shop and drink hot chocolate. It was a fun, calm day.

Then, today, I went to the Louisiana Art Museum, which has a large collection of modern art. First of all, it was quite the adventure getting there! It is a long way away from my host family's house - I traveled through 6 zones in the transportation system (that is, just as many as it takes to get into Copenhagen)! Once I got there, though, it was lovely. They had two special exhibitions going on: the larger of the two was "Color in Art" and focused on (what else?) the way that art uses color. One of the very coolest parts of that exhibit was called "The Eternal Light of the Souls" or something like that. It was a small room which the viewer stepped into and then closed the door behind them. The room was entirely covered in reflective surfaces and hung with balls of light which changed colors. It was beautiful! Another favorite part of Louisiana was the other special exhibit - "Homo Sapiens Sapiens" This was an installation piece and was a movie which was projected onto the ceiling. There were cushions scattered around the floor to lay on, and you just lay there and looked up and the bizarre and beautiful video with dozens of other people around you. The video itself was really cool and focused on the body very closely, but also had elements of nature as a sort of backdrop - leaves and grass and fruit. It really plays with the way one sees the human body. Louisiana also has a great sculpture garden, and a view across the sound to Sweden! It was a really fun outing.

The Holiness of the Inhospitable

Wow, I'm sorry I haven't posted in such a long time. That last week in March was full of midterm papers and such, and then I've been in Iceland for the past week - which is what I really want to talk about. Hopefully I'll get a chance to write a more detailed account of my classes soon - they're really cool and I want to tell you all about them. But first things first: ICELAND!

I think that the past week has been one of the most amazing trips of my life - and I've been on a lot of great trips! It was a combination of many awesome things: we had a great, small group of students (there were 11 of us), we had amazing leaders and guides, there was a lot of excellent (and surprising) food, and everything we saw and experienced was positive; I can't think of a single low point of the trip, and it's hard to pick out any one highlight. We saw the volcano erupting (from a safe distance), saw the Northern Lights twice - once when we were at the volcano, went horseback riding on Icelandic horses through lava fields, saw many glorious mountains and waterfalls and hot springs and a geysir erupting three times, we went to the Blue Lagoon, we ate delicious food, and most of all we shivered and tried to comprehend how the Vikings could have possibly settled on Iceland. You can see the best pictures I took here.

The landscape of Iceland is so barren and unlike anything I've ever seen before. When we first arrived and were driving from Keflavik airport to our hotel in Reykajvik, I honestly thought we could have been on the moon or Mars! If I hadn't been able to see the clear blue sky and telephone poles and road we were on, I wouldn't have known where to look. I think that is one of the single most startling things about Iceland. The landscape is entirely uninviting - beautiful, but very uninviting - and the weather was really harsh while we were there. It was so hard to imagine the settlers arriving from Norway and carving a life out of these desolate rocks. Granted, the landscape was very different when they arrived: there were trees, for example, and the climate was warmer then. Human habitation has not been kind to Iceland.

Despite the strangeness of the landscape, though, everything felt holier in a way that is hard to describe. It's easy to see why many Icelanders believe in elves and otherworldly creatures. On Tuesday, when we did the "Golden Circle Tour" - the tour almost every tourist goes on of the geysirs and waterfalls and the Althing - we made a stop at a small church. The church is where the bishop's seat used to be (it later moved to Reykjavik). When we went into the church, the light from the stained glass windows was casting the simple white sanctuary in a brilliant red and yellow pattern of lights. I felt when we entered that this church, of all the churches I've visited this semester on tours, was the only one that felt properly holy and sacred. Even as we took our pictures and my travel companions posed, I felt like this was a sanctuary that was actually sanctified. I felt a little bizarre taking pictures, but I did anyway, trying to capture the way the light fell and hallowed the space. I think, even though Icelanders, like Danes and most Scandinavians, no longer practice Christianity to a great extent, the barrenness of the landscape combined with the simple, elegant beauty of the space made this small church feel worshipful in a way the cathedral in Ribe - with its tourist information desk and large, numerous tour groups - could not.

There's a lot more I could say about Iceland, but I think that was what I drew most from the trip: the delicacy and preciousness of life in an inhospitable, difficult setting feels much closer than in a place where it is easy to live.

A musical week

This past Tuesday, I got to go to a 30 Seconds to Mars concert with Keemi, a new friend from DIS who also plays rugby and is in Nordic Mythology and European Storytelling with me. It was a lot of fun! I especially enjoyed the opening act - Street Drum Corps. They're a group from LA, and the lead singer was so energetic and fun, and they had a fun variety of music. Then Carpark North played, a local group. The rest of the (rather young) crowd went crazy, but Keemi and I were less excited about them. Their style was a little bit sleepier, I think. They did have a keytar, though, so that was pretty cool!

Then, 30 Seconds to Mars was up. I didn't know much about them, really just one song, but I always like going to concerts. They were definitely a great presence on stage. Their lead singer, Jared Leto, really created a cohesive performance and was really entertaining. It was also somebody's birthday in the crowd. I don't know if they were all his friends, but a bunch of people had signs saying, "Happy Birthday Shannon" on them. About midway through the performance, Jared Leto invited Shannon up on stage, and the entire crowd sang the Danish birthday song to him. Luckily, I had learned it in my Danish class just the day before. It's got a very different melody than our birthday song, but it's really fun! It goes like this:

I dag er det "Name of person celebrated"'s fødselssdag (Today is ____'s birthday)
Hurra, hurra, hurra!
Han sikkert sig en gave får (He'll probably get a gift)
som han har ønsket sig i år (That he's been wishing for this year)
med dejlig chokolade og kager til. (With yummy chocolate and cakes)

It was great to be in the crowd and be able to hum along a little bit (I could only remember the first two lines and the last line). It was just really fun - and also fun to watch the reactions of the band, who were baffled but seemed to enjoy it.

One weird thing I noticed - and maybe I just haven't been to the right performances - was that there were two beautiful blonde women sitting on the stage off to the side, facing the band. They were seated in a little box, it seemed. They were onstage for both Carpark North and 30 Seconds to Mars. Maybe they were groupies? I can't think of any other explanation, though what was striking was how disinterested they seemed - or at least, not very excited. I don't know what was going on with that at all.

Then, on Wednesday, I got to see "The Magic Flute" at the Royal Theater through DIS. It was an interesting experience, since it was performed in Danish, with Danish supertitles. Even though I'm familiar with the story and the opera (The Queen of the Night aria was performed exceedingly well!) I got a little lost rather often. It was exciting when I actually understood most of a song, though - the one that Papageno and Papagena sing together near the end! The set was also strange - it seemed very minimalistic at first, but there were an excessive (in my opinion) amount of trap doors and mechanical workings. It was fun all the same, since it's one of my favorite operas/the only opera I really have much familiarity with.

The Royal Theater itself is absolutely gorgeous! It's very vertically oriented, which is interesting - there are three balconies one on top of the other, and they each have maybe four rows or so, set at a very steep angle, so that you can actually see over the person in front of you if you (like I) are seated in the last row of the theater. Interestingly enough, we had just learned about Heiberg in my Philosophy and Religion of the Danish Golden Age class. Heiberg, as well as being a philosopher, was the director of the theater for many years, as well as primary playwright. Over the stage, in huge gold letters, is written "Ei blot til lyst" - which roughly translates to "It's not just for fun," meaning that you should seek the deeper meaning in every performance and every work of art. Something worth thinking about.

A Trip to the Czech Republic

I've just returned from a week-long trip to the Czech Republic. It was a wonderful week, full of gorgeous architecture, great conversations, thought-provoking art and speakers, and lots of good, hearty food and yummy beer. There were also moments of frustration (our first night we waited four hours for meals in a bar and had a conversation with young Czech women who expressed frustratingly intolerant views towards the Roma people) and sadness (the Holocaust memorial in the Jewish quarter and the memorial to the town of Lidice which was utterly destroyed by Nazis). Czech history (especially over the last 90 years or so) is a history of optimism, revolution, and disappointment, and that history was at the forefront of our trip, largely because that was the focus of our class.

First, though, I'll focus on the amazing architectural variety. There are just dozens of gorgeous buildings, all built next to each other. It is really interesting to see a Gothic city gate next to an art nouveau theater, for example. One of the first things we did was take a walking tour of the city, which was peppered with student presentations about various historical moments and figures, or art styles and famous artists who espoused them. It was really a fun way to start the trip, even though we all felt a bit gross after the incredibly long bus and ferry trip. Understandably, we took a lot of pictures, too! I just uploaded my pictures from the week and I had taken nearly 200 over the course of the week. You can see the best of them here

We sort of organized the trip around the famous 8s of Czech history: the creation of Czechoslovakia in 1918, the occupation by Hitler in 1938, the vote and switch to Communism in 1948, the "Prague Spring" of 1968 - a time of greater openness culturally and politically, which was followed that same year by a harsh Soviet invasion and clampdown, and finally 1989 (the 8 is at the beginning of that one) when Communism collapsed. It is interesting to travel to Prague now, 20 years after the collapse of Communism, and see what one classmate called "self-conscious capitalism." For example, when we went to the symphony on Tuesday night (a rather disappointing but culturally interesting experience) we noted the billboards placed shamelessly on the stage behind the musicians. I don't know whether or not you can really see them in the picture, but there they are, amongst this beautiful art nouveau decoration, advertising for who knows what. The symphony was also interesting because there were maybe 50 people there. Definitely no more than a hundred. They didn't know proper concert etiquette, and clapped in between movements, which is something that always annoys me. The musicians themselves hardly seemed engaged. One young woman in particular - the cello player - always looked terribly sad or perhaps disappointed whenever the group bowed. It was frustrating, but perhaps revealing. Our teacher suggested later that evening that the lack of enthusiasm for classical music stems from its encouragement during the Communist years because there was no way for it to be subversive. I'm not sure I buy that, but it's an interesting suggestion to be sure.

Another theme of the trip was art and artists. We got to meet both David Cerny and Milan Knizek, two incredibly famous Czech artists who don't necessarily like each other very much. They are/were both subversive, but Milan Knizek's work really took place mostly in the 60s and 70s. He was part of the fluxus/anti-art movement/anti-movement, like John Cage. The concept is really to play with the idea of what art is and what it isn't. David Cerny is younger and rather humorous. The Czech Republic recently commissioned him to create a piece of artwork for the EU building during their presidency, and he created Entropa, which rather vividly pokes fun at the member states. We went and saw Entropa, and I found it quite amusing. A lot of my classmates didn't really like David Cerny, partly because he has a rather bizarre attitude - he seems to think of himself as something of a rockstar, aloof to the world of mere mortals and even to his own art. We met him on Monday. On Wednesday, Milan Knizek sprinted us through the contemporary art museum, which was frustrating, and then stood and talked with us about how art shouldn't be in museums, while standing in front of his works which are in the museum, of which he is some sort of director. It was a bizarre experience. That night, though, a number of friends and I had a great discussion about what makes art Art. I think Milan Knizek sparked many interesting conversations, because I participated in at least three that day. Maybe it was just that we were growing more comfortable together as a group, though. It's hard to say.

Another facet of the trip was delicious and cheap food and (for me) beer. We ate so many good meals and stopped at a lot of fun pubs or bars. One of the best meals for me was Tuesday, when I got to have lunch with Nika, a friend from Mac who is from Prague and taking the semester off and staying at home. We had such a good conversation and a delicious meal of gnocchi - and I also didn't feel like an idiot because I was with a native Czech speaker! We also ate a lot of dumplings and goulash type meals. I think I tried a different beer every night, which was fun. Some were better than others. Some were just disappointing or downright bad. One unfortunate meal experience was the first night, when our teacher had arranged for us to meet some young Czechs and hear from them, and they had agreed to take some of us to eat somewhere "off the beaten path." The Czech women (aside from their upsetting views of the Roma) were really sweet people, and I felt bad for what happened next. I think one problem was that we ALL wanted to eat somewhere authentic, so we all went with them to this tiny pub. The bartender/waitress was the only server there, and she spoke very little English, though she eventually got all of our orders. Then it took four hours for food to come. Some people never got food. The Czech woman who orchestrated it felt terrible, but it wasn't her fault. I felt really bad for the waitress too, because we were all beginning to get irritated towards the end and she couldn't do much about it. I guess the fault really lies with the cook - apparently one of them never came that night. It was a kind of unfortunate start to the trip, though. But other than that - and a strange fish dish on the last night that wasn't quite to my liking - the food was amazing and the meal experiences were really fun. DIS really spoiled us on some of the group meals - we had a number of very fancy meals at upscale restaurants or hotels.

We also visited Cesky Krumlow, which is a beautiful town in the Sudetenland. If your World War II history is a little hazy, I'll refresh your memory: the Sudetenland was a part of Czechoslovakia inhabited in large part by German-speakers and ethnic Germans. Hitler thought it should be part of Germany, and most of the Germans agreed, because they felt they were German. So he occupied the Sudetenland and was welcomed by many of the German-speakers, who probably had no idea about the evil that was coming. Many of the Czechs from that area were exiled. After the war, the president of Czechoslovakia exiled all the Germans in a similar manner. So it has a rather difficult past. Cesky Krumlow is gorgeous and contains a gigantic castle. It was also where the fascinating artist Egon Schiele did a lot of his work and is the town most featured in his landscapes. The town was simply beautiful and a lovely place to end the trip, even though it is important to remember its contentious past.

Overall the trip was amazing. I loved Prague and am anxious to return - probably at the end of the semester when John and I have a few weeks together in Europe! It was hard to shake the urge to compare it to Copenhagen, so I'll just make note of a few of the striking differences. Prague is much more tourist-y. There was a street that stretched from Old Town Square nearly to our hotel that was basically nothing but souvenir shops. It's also a lot cheaper, which makes sense given its comparative economic standing. There were more dogs and fewer babies, and a much greater variety of architecture, since it's an older city and also wasn't bombed to the ground in the early 19th century. Partly my experience of Copenhagen is colored by the fact that I live here and am staying with a Danish family and not in a hotel, but I think it is still a quite different atmosphere. I loved it, but I'm glad that I live in Copenhagen and got to visit Prague rather than the other way around.

Skiing in Sweden! Also the rest of my week.

Wow - it's been a really busy week, and it's looking like the busy-ness will simply continue! Wheee!

The week started off well, with a visit from some other Mac kids - Anna Frye and Ella Bandes. I actually had never met Ella, but she and Anna are on the same program in France and had a week off, so they were in Copenhagen. Ella's friend from elementary school is Danish and lives in Copenhagen, and she showed us around. It was a really cozy time - we got hot cocoa at a really sweet cafe, ate at a shwarma place in Nørrebro, and then went to a bar/cafe in Free Town Christiania, where there were free crepes and ice cream, as well as interesting people-watching - awesome. I'm hoping I'll get to see Christiania in the daylight before too long - it's a really interesting place, and when I know a little more and visit again I'll probably do a whole post about it.

Tuesday was also really lovely, with the first beer-tasting session of the semester. One of my (non-academic) goals for the semester is to learn a lot about beer so that when I get back home I can impress everyone with my expertise. Or just know what to look for for beer-lucks. The beer-tasting was at Nørrebro Bryghus, a microbrewery in Copenhagen. The owner/master craftsman of the brewery is actually our guide for all three sessions, and is super knowledgeable. He also makes super great beer!

The rest of the week was a little calmer and a little less fun. I found out that I didn't get a Lilly fellowship, and apparently a lot of people want to work at the Mac library, so I might not even get to work there over the summer - I'll find out the first week in March. I'm hopeful about that though, since I worked there last summer and know what the summer routine is like.

But this weekend was really great - I went skiing in Sweden with DIS! There were only 17 of us on the trip, and most of them all knew each other, so it was a bit awkward at first, but I shared a cabin with three really sweet girls from Hamilton and got to know them and their friends from St. Lawrence University. It was hilarious to watch them all make connections - apparently everyone on the East Coast is connected, especially if they go to smaller colleges, so a lot of their parents and relatives knew each other in college!

The skiing was excellent and really fun. On Saturday I did downhill skiing, then I lost my lift ticket so I decided to switch to cross-country. It was quite an adventure trying to find the trail head, but I found it and skied for a little while. Then I got super lost coming back, walked down a really steep and difficult downhill slope and ended up taking a t-lift up to the top of the mountain after I struggled to explain the situation to two confused Swedish lift operators. They were really nice once they understood what I was trying to say, though. That night we had a really fun dinner and mild party in our cabin with the kids from the cabin next to us. Today I did cross-country all day. It had snowed so much I had to blaze a trail myself. I skied about 5 kilometers - it was a 2.5 k trail, but I did it twice, once to make tracks and then again just for fun! The trail was just gorgeous - the trees were so heavy with snow, it was unbelievable. Oh - and I (finally) got my camera back right before I left, so I was able to take this picture. I only took like one other picture this weekend, but I'm going to try to edit the Jylland post and add pictures from the trip there.

Some Things I've Noticed

My camera has been found! Unfortunately it hasn't been returned to me yet, but when it is, I'll be sure to let you know and edit the Jylland post to include pictures!

This week has been a pretty standard one. I'm starting to settle into a routine, which is nice. I've also been here for nearly a month now, and I've made some interesting observations about what is different and what is the same here. A lot of the differences are small things, but they're just different enough to notice: baby carriages, for example, or the toilets. Nearly every baby carriage I've seen looks roughly like this. Some of them are double-wide, to carry twins. There are also A LOT of babies here (Denmark has one of the highest fertility rates in Europe), and people generally just leave the carriages outside of stores while they're inside shopping, sometimes with the baby in it, which is really startling to see! Our Danish teacher says people usually lock them or have an alarm system, but she also says it's just a sign of the tremendous social trust people have here. I just can't imagine anyone leaving a stroller outside in the US, much less one with a baby in it! Although in the US people also seem to stay home with their babies, whereas here the babies are brought along everywhere.

Babies aside, there is a definite difference in the attitude of society here. Everyone, and every social system, seems more focused on the community or family. A full time job is 37 hours a week, and though some people work more than that, it seems pretty rare. Compare that to the US, where most people work at least 50 hours a week, generally more. Another difference is in the costumer-business relationship. Whereas in the US, most of our economic system is really focused on the consumer, here it's focused on the worker. I was speaking with one of the DIS interns the other night and she made the comment that costumer service is very lax here, because companies want their workers to be happy more than they want the costumers to be happy.

Obviously, the "welfare state" also indicates the importance of community. It's based on the idea that "the broadest shoulders carry the heaviest burden." Thus, my host parents, who are pretty well-off, pay 60% of their income towards taxes. Most folks pay around 50%. But minimum wage also is roughly $22, and even though they only get $11 after taxes, that's still around 50% more than most similar workers in the US get. Plus, those taxes provide for a lot of the basic needs of the society, such as health care and education, and I assume some basic housing and food for those who are unable to work or afford it otherwise. My host mom was baffled when I told her how much we pay to go to Mac, and I get a large amount of financial aid, too.

Although the system should provide for everyone, you still do see people begging sometimes (I mean, I've seen like one). My Danish teacher said that some people don't want to get money from the government, and others are mentally ill (which made me wonder how much the health care system covers mental health, though I'd heard they were quite good at that.) Another group that one sees begging, according to my teacher, are illegal immigrants, because it's basically impossible to get a job or assistance from the government (obviously).

The difference between the US and Denmark is really in the national history, though. If you think about it, Denmark and the US have followed kind of opposite trajectories up to this point. Denmark just keeps getting smaller and the US has gotten larger. We also don't have a past that includes Grundtvig, who started the Folk High School movement in the 1800s under the premise that education should be accessible to everyone, including farm workers. Nor do we have a past that includes losing a large part of our area due to humiliating losses which led to a much more peaceful foreign policy until the mid-20th century. The US also industrialized earlier than Denmark (most places did), so there's this image of Denmark being built on the shoulders of farmers, since it was largely rural until quite recently. While the Danish system would never work in the US, given the differences in history, as well as the fact that Denmark is much smaller and much more homogeneous (with an immigration process even more difficult to navigate than that of the US), I can't help but feel we can learn a lot from it. Like, socialized medicine isn't the devil, for example. And that everyone deserves a good education. But our national narrative is so wrapped up in "The American Dream" of pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps that there isn't room for the narrative of community members supporting each other. (Narrative is basically the theme of my semester, I've discovered. I think we talked about it in all of my classes except one this week!)

Jylland!

Edit: Photos have been added!

This past weekend I took a trip to Jylland (Western Denmark) with my core course. Every program spent Thursday through Saturday in various places around Jylland. It was a really enjoyable trip, though I apparently lost my camera somehow on the way back. I'm hoping it will be found in the tour bus so that I can share the awesome pictures that I took.

The trip started early on Thursday morning. We took a bus from Copenhagen to Jelling, which is where the "birth certificate of Denmark" is found: a runic stone inscribed by Harald Bluetooth which reads that he put this stone there to commemorate his mother and father, and that he united Denmark and made Denmark Christian. Harald Bluetooth also had a gigantic mound built to bury his father in, but then instead of the mound (which took slaves four years to build) he decided he wanted to bury his father in a church instead, so he made slaves build a church. Then another mound was built, seemingly for no purpose other than to make the church more central. The visit to the museum in Jelling was great: the tour guide was really excellent.

After Jelling, we went to Vejen, a small town with very little significance other than that it is the home of Hansen-Jacobsen, a wonderful Danish symbolist sculptor. There's a quite excellent museum there with Hansen-Jacobsen's work as well as the work of his friends and fellow symbolists. The sculptures are really quite stunning and awe-inspiring. They are generally not pleasant, per se, but are very well crafted and really make you think about what they mean.

Then we continued on to Sønderborg, where we stayed for the night. The evening included a concert of Beata Bilinska (a young Polish pianist) performing Chopin with the Sønderborg orchestra. It was really great music, and the concert hall itself was quite beautiful. Chopin is such a storyteller, I think, and there's this incredible air of longing to his music that Beata Bilinska captured really well. After the concert, our leaders took us out to a cafe/bar place, which was also really fun.

The next morning, after a great breakfast provided by the hostel, we went to the Dybbøl Banke, a museum which commemorates the war of 1864, in which most of Southern Jutland (Schleswig-Holstein) was taken by the Prussians (Otto von Bismark). This place is the site of the final battle. I think it's a really interesting historical moment, but the museum was a little bit dull and involved a lot of sitting in darkened rooms while either a huge, lit-up diorama was explained or a documentary was shown. The final stage was probably the best, in which letters from soldiers were read. I thought that did a really good job of portraying the challenge and humanity of wars and battles.

The entire region has a really interesting history. In Southern Jutland/Northern Germany, there's always been some overlapping of Danes and Germans, obviously, especially before Germany was united. And, due to this overlap, there's also been a lot of tension about the border. This is one of the issues we are really exploring with the course, since our course focuses on memory and identity in the Czech Republic, which has a much more violent and contentious history around the borders than there is in Denmark. In Denmark, the borders have been drawn and re-drawn a number of times (notably after 1864, when something like 1/3 of Denmark became German), but finally, after World War I, the border was put to a referendum, asking the people if they felt they were Danish or German. Now, the border is where there was the most definite split. There is still a German minority in Southern Jutland, and a Danish minority in Northern Germany. This is what we were exploring in depth on Friday.

Our next stop after the Dybbøl Banke was Frøslevlejren, a prison camp from World War II. When the Germans invaded Denmark in 1940, the government adopted a position of collaboration, which meant that they maintained sovereignty, at least in name. Because of this, they were able to persuade the Germans to allow them to maintain their own prison camp for political prisoners in Denmark, and insisted that all Danish prisoners be kept in this camp, which was considerably less terrible than the German camps. These prisoners, it should be noted, were mostly not Jewish. Most of the Danish Jews escaped to Sweden shortly after Denmark was invaded, and the ones who didn't or couldn't (mostly very old people) were sent to the concentration camps in Germany. What is also interesting is that after the war was over, the prison camp was used for people who worked closely with the Germans during the war. Of course, many of these people were from the German minority, who felt like they were German and it only made sense for them to collaborate closely with the Germans in Denmark. The person who gave us a lecture at the beginning of our tour of the prison camp was very interesting, and seemed to feel a need to be defensive about the camp, especially about its use after the war.

After the prison camp, we went across the border to Flensburg, a German harbor town that's maybe one or two kilometers from the Danish border. We had a walking tour and then had some time on our own to explore the town. I felt a little bit like our tour guide, while giving us interesting, amusing snippets of town history (especially about merchants and how the trade system used to work and does work now) didn't necessarily give us information pertinent to our course's aims, namely what it means to be a border town with a Danish minority, although she pointed out some signs that have both Danish and German on them. What was interesting was that it felt quite different, even just a kilometer or two from Denmark. Not least because I was utterly unable to communicate with most of the shopkeepers and because they use the Euro and not the krone. It was a lovely town, though, with lots of really neat old ships and buildings.

Next on the agenda was Ribe, the oldest town in Denmark (1300 years old!!) where we stayed for the night and spent most of Saturday. We had a "birthday dinner" for Ribe with the ECH group that is traveling to Germany. The birthday dinner was apparently traditional Danish celebratory food, and was super yummy. After the dinner, some new friends and I decided to stop by a pub for a drink and then head back to our hostel. The pub we went to was very small, and it was obvious that everyone there was a "regular." One of the other students, Scott, and I chatted with the bartender for a little while when we got our beer. She was really nice, and she was curious as to what a bunch of American students studying in Copenhagen were doing in Ribe on a Friday night. Americans apparently don't really come to Ribe, and when they do it's usually in the summertime. We also met an Englishman who has lived in Ribe for a while, and it was fun to hear what he thought about it. Shortly after we sat back down with the other three students we came in with, a stocky old man with white hair sat down right next to Kyle, who has been studying here for a year now. We were a little unsettled by the sudden appearance of a friendly, incredibly drunk Danish man, but the bartender explained that he was the owner of the pub. The old man kept giving us free drinks and trying to speak in four different languages at once: Danish, German, Spanish and English. Although he was very hard to follow, he was also very friendly, so we didn't mind, even though it was a rather strange cultural experience. After he gave us each two free drinks, we decided it might be time to head back. We had a lot of fun laughing about it on the way back to the hostel, and the other two girls and I stayed up late talking (mostly because Kelley doesn't drink alcohol and had gotten two free Cokes instead, and was thus quite caffeinated).

The next day we spent in Ribe, wandering around the town on our own in the morning, visiting the Viking museum, and then seeing the cathedral. The Viking museum was really interesting, and I had a lot of fun after we were given a small tour of the museum (our tour guide was a bit difficult to follow) talking with Kyle and our trip leaders about language and history and how future historians will have a much rougher time of it than we do now, considering that nearly all of our information is preserved electronically now, and when the technology becomes obsolete, it will be impossible to salvage. This is of a lot of interest to me as I intend to be a librarian or archivist, so the question was fun to consider. After the museum we had a group lunch, and then had a tour of the Ribe cathedral. The cathedral is incredibly old, dating from the 1100s (which is about 200 years after the Danes were Christianized, to put that into perspective). It's an interesting mixture of architectural styles, with its Romanesque base and Gothic and historicist additions. Ribe's cathedral has been being modified and changed and used for years, and that continues to this day. For example, there is artwork painted behind the altar and stained glass windows which were added in the 1980s. The cathedral is also HUGE. It dominates the landscape, and really shows something about what was important to the people who built it. We also got a chance to go up into one of the towers (that was quite the workout, by the way, climbing all these flights of stairs) and look around. You can see for miles from the tower, since Western Denmark is incredibly flat. It was really a neat place to visit, though Scott and I were discussing, once we got down from the tower, how strange it is that people now appreciate the cathedral in a very different way than it was initially used. It felt a little bit like we were profaning a space that was meant to be holy.

Overall, though, the trip was wonderful! I think one of the nicest things was getting to know some fellow students better, and having some great stories to share with them.

What a Weekend!

I really enjoyed this past weekend. It was just the right mix of excitement and relaxation (though maybe not quite enough homework-getting-done).

On Saturday, there was supposed to be a rugby practice, but the field was covered in snow and ice, so that was canceled. Tomorrow, I think I will actually be able to make it to a practice for the first time. I'm hoping I will anyway, since I've been anxious to play since finding out that there is a rugby club here.

I did get to spend some time outside, though. Erling is part of a running club, and he took me with him to a municipal park, where he and his friends ran around a skiing loop and I walked. It was really fun - there were a lot of skiers out and about, some of whom were very young, which was fun to see. The weather was beautiful! The woods reminded me quite a bit of Wildcat Mountain, except they're right in the middle of a suburb rather than a rural setting.

Saturday night, Bronwen, Owen and I met up in Copenhagen and went to The Dubliner, an Irish pub on Strøget, one of the main "walking streets." It was really fun to just sit around and chat and have a couple of beers. It's so funny that what they consider cheap beer is so much better than cheap American beer (also, not that cheap, at least not at The Dubliner). But we had a lot of fun talking about differences between Macalester and DIS and other such things. Owen and I also got hot dogs at one of the stands (they're open until 6 am!!) The hot dogs were basically like the foot long hot dogs that I sell at the Minnesota State Fair. In other words, the best, longest hot dog you'll ever have! The ketchup was weird, though, so I think in the future I'll avoid that.

On Sunday, I went on a trip to Esrum Abbey, which was incredibly fun! We took a tour of the Abbey, and then we made teams to participate in medieval games and challenges. My team, which consisted of three boys, another girl, and me, was called Bad Romance. Our battle cry, as you might guess, was "Rah-rah-ah-ah-ah, Roma, Ro-ma-ma, Ga-ga ooh-la-la, Want your Bad Romance!" Here's a picture of my team:

We did a lot of fun things, including swordfighting with an ex-Danish-Army-Recon-man who fought in Bosnia and in Afghanistan and is the master swordfighter in Denmark. Our swordfighting game was an imitation of the games that would be played at a medieval tournament. We "won" by hitting him in the head five times. I found the best strategy was to avoid thinking, let the rage take over, and aim for his head. It was quite fun. We also launched a trebuchet (using cabbage as ammunition), climbed a siege ladder, did some weightlifting, jousted, threw javelins, and shot a medieval-style bow and arrow.

Then, we retired to the abbey to taste the famous Abbey Ale, which is brewed using an interesting combination of spices (including lavender) that are grown in the abbey's garden. When monks actually lived there, water was of course unsafe to drink, so they brewed beer. It was quite good, and rather unusual tasting. I also, strangely enough, was sitting by two other folks with pumps: Sarah-Anne, who I met on the first day here but hadn't seen until Sunday, and Phillip. We talked about diabetes for a while, and marveled at how many people with pumps are doing DIS. Sarah-Anne has met 7 so far, which is more than 1% of DIS students.

Overall, though, it was a great weekend, at probably the most fun I've had so far, when it's all added up.

Danish school system

Today, after my classes were done and I'd been home for a little while, I hopped on the bus and met up with Sabina to eat at a pizza place near her school and then attend a presentation in which her choir was performing.

The presentation was for students who are in their final year of what Sabina calls "ground school" and are trying to figure out which Gymnasium to attend. Sabina goes to a really cool gymnasium. It was built quite recently and is quite probably one of the coolest buildings I've ever been inside of. The website is here.

It was fun to have a tour of her school building and learn about what the Danish school system is like. They basically have to choose, at the age of 16 or so, what they want to study in the gymnasium. I guess it makes some sense, and there are tracks available that cover a lot of different material (one at Sabina's school, for example, included Social Studies, math, and English), but it seems like a lot of pressure for a teenager! Maybe I just can't imagine doing it myself when I was that age, and besides, I'm used to the liberal-arts college model. Even though I have a major declared, I could have a semester which included Economics, Environmental Studies, Dance, and an HMCS class if I wanted to, and no one would think it terribly strange. Maybe that's what startles me. They do have some electives, but it seems so different to have to choose the path you want to go down at that age. Sabina said they are allowed to change tracks in their first half year (she actually switched from a music-focused track to an English/Social Studies track), but then they have to follow their track. I mean, what if you did the Math-Physics-Chemistry track and then in your second year took Drama as an elective and found out you loved it and wanted to do that with your life? I'm sure there are ways of getting around these things, but it's still such a foreign concept to me. It was really fun to learn about it though. One really cool thing was that a number of their tracks include media studies or philosophy or other topics we usually don't get to explore academically until we're in college!

Also, we ran into one of her teachers (I think?) and I introduced myself in Danish and the teacher complimented me! It was very nice. I also saw a sign that said "at spise og drikke" which some may recognize as part of the Norwegian table prayer. I didn't actually know what it meant, but I asked Sabina and she said it means to eat and drink, which makes sense and I think I knew that at one point. But it was fun to see how closely the languages are related, especially since just today in Danish, my teacher was talking about how when the Norwegian, Swedish and Danish royalty all get together, they are all able to speak in their own language and understand each other. She did mention that people from Jutland would probably have a hard time understanding Swedes since Jutlanders are used to German accents, and that she herself has a hard time understanding Ny Norsk, but the way the royals speak, the languages are mutually intelligible. It's pretty awesome!

A Trip to the Danish Nationalmuseet

One of the really neat things about the DIS program is that we don't have any classes on Wednesdays. It's not so we can goof off, it's so we can have awesome field trips, and today was my first one (also, the first Wednesday we've been in regular class mode).

So, today I went to the Nationalmuseet in Copenhagen with my Nordic Mythology class. First off, I love my Nordic Mythology teacher. He LOOKS LIKE A VIKING. But he's actually incredibly nice and intelligent. Not saying that Vikings weren't intelligent. But they were definitely not nice.

Our trip to the Nationalmuseet was in order to look at artifacts from Danish prehistory. There were some really awesome things, some of which I took pictures of, and added to my photo album on Facebook, which can be found here. If you don't have facebook I'm not sure you'll be able to look at it, so here's the most awesome picture, which is of
a cauldron from the Iron Age or maybe a bit later. It was found in Denmark but it has depictions of very Celtic-looking gods, as well as what appear to be elements of Roman and Tercian mythology. It was likely made by Tercians. So overall, a pretty awesome thing, and a sign of the great amount of cross-cultural exchange (sometimes brutal and rather unpleasant - aka, the cauldron was either a gift or some Danish king totally stole it) going on. This cauldron is gigantic, also. A small person could fit inside it, and there's a scene on the inside that seems to indicate that this perhaps had some ritual significance.

Other awesome things included really sweet Bronze Age stuff, like the "Chariot of the Sun" which is kind of a misnomer, because the horse is not pulling a wheeled thing, but is on "wheels"/solar crosses itself. There were also gigantic musical horns which still play (our teacher said they were probably a bit like bagpipes, and they were actually designed to be taken apart, like a modern clarinet, only gigantic and metal), plus helmets with horns on them. Hint: it was Bronze Age Nordic peoples, not Vikings, who wore those things. In other words, the helmets with horns that Vikings are always depicted wearing were from thousands of years earlier. People just assumed they were made by the Vikings because they were incredibly intricate. The Bronze Age Northern Europeans had a thing with mixing and matching different animals/people, which was likely a significant part of their religion, though we really have no idea. Also, in the Iron Age they developed a way of burying their dead that has left us with lots of awesome stuff, including perfectly preserved clothing and hair!

So it was a great trip overall. In other news, today was super snowy in Copenhagen. I'm pretty sure it snowed all day! Sabina said it's very unusual for this to happen, and I could kind of tell, because hardly anybody shovels their sidewalks.

Yelling in Danish

This past weekend was quite fun and interesting. It was also very calm, which was nice. Sabina was away for most of the weekend on a "Christmas trip" with her sailing club, so it was just me and the host parents.

Dorte and Erling had friends over on Saturday night, as I mentioned in the previous post. There were two couples, one of which had two teenage kids - a boy and a girl. It was pretty fun. We had a lot of really good food, and I got to see handball for the first time. Iceland beat Denmark, so the kids and the two visiting men (with whom I was watching the game) were pretty sad, but it was really cool to see an entirely different sport. The best way I can think to describe it is as a cross between basketball and hockey, but that doesn't fully explain it. I didn't understand all the rules, but it was really fun to watch. At one point in the evening the girl, who was maybe 13, was talking about Twilight to her mom. I was a little sad to learn that that is just as popular here as it is at home. That's globalization for you, I guess - haha! The people stayed until 1 in the morning or so. I think it would have been a bit more fun if I spoke more Danish than what I've got. As it was, the evening dragged on a little bit for me, since I didn't understand any of the conversation that wasn't specially directed at me.

I didn't set an alarm for Sunday morning, but I woke up at 8:40 on my own, proving that my internal clock is skewed way earlier here! We had a leisurely brunch while watching a bit of tennis, then we went for a drive to see the coast. It was really cool - both in terms of temperature and otherwise. I saw the "whiskey belt" which is where the richest people in Denmark live, according to my host family, as well as some adorable houses with thatched roofs! We looked across the sea and saw Sweden, which was also quite exciting. Then we stopped by to visit some friends of theirs from the adoption group they worked with when they were adopting Sabina and Andres (my host brother who I haven't met because he's in Afghanistan with the Danish military) from Colombia. I think the family we visited adopted their children from Asia. The daughter in this family is in her first year at CBS - Copenhagen Business School. She said she was enjoying it quite a bit. I think the son must be around Sabina's age. He and Dorte seemed to be talking about 18th birthday parties.

After we got back, it was just a leisurely afternoon and evening. I got my reading done for the next day, and also discovered that Sabina likes Lady Gaga! It was quite exciting, and we talked about music for quite some time, which was really fun. I also got to talk to my parents and brother yesterday, which was my mom's birthday! That was also really exciting.

Today I had school. When I was coming back into the train station, I noticed some police (or maybe just transit authorities, I wasn't sure and didn't want to stare too much) standing by a guy who had a lot of blood on his face, especially his nose. Then, on my way down the stairs, I saw someone cleaning up a huge amount of blood. I don't know if the guy got in a fight or got mugged or if he just faceplanted on the stairs, but it was pretty nasty. So that was exciting, and a reminder that I do live in a city.

Then, when I was safely in the train, a ticket-checker got on. This was the second time I've encountered them. They come around sometimes to make sure everyone on the S-tog has paid to be where they are. The first time I saw one, she was speaking quite loudly to me, and I thought she was a crazy person because I didn't recognize that she was wearing a uniform, so I ignored her. She must have understood that I wasn't Danish, though, because she switched to English. It was pretty embarrassing, but not as embarrassing as a few nights after that, when a real crazy person got on and was speaking loudly. This person was wearing a snowsuit that looked similar to the ticket-checker uniform, so I started to get out my ticket until I realized that everyone around me was staring at the crazy person! But today I took note of signs that the person yelling at you is a ticket-checker and not a crazy person. They have name tags that are yellow and have something about the train on them. So, if you're ever in Copenhagen and someone begins speaking loudly to you on the train, you'll know.

The beginning of a weekend

Today I was supposed to go to a rugby practice in Svanemøllen, but I ended up getting lost. I got directions online, but I couldn't find the street I was supposed to turn onto. I also started off in the wrong direction. Maybe next time I'll make it to a practice. I was bummed that I didn't get to play rugby, but I enjoyed wandering around Svanemøllen. It was a really pleasant day here, there was a lot of interesting people-watching to do, and I successfully bought some shampoo and body wash, so it wasn't a total waste of time. :)

Yesterday I went to the Kommune to register that I'm going to be here for four months. It was very easy, and the woman who helped me was really nice and spoke excellent English - I suppose you would have to, if your job was registering foreign residents. Then, I went to DIS for my first Nordic Mythology class. There are two sections, but for the first class, we were together - there were a lot of people! My European Storytelling teacher, Bettina, is the instructor for the other section, but she did the introduction for both classes. Apparently my professor is a very important person at the University and had some sort of important meeting. It was exciting, though, because I recognized and sat next to a boy from two of my other classes - it's nice to have someone to sit by! He's a year-long student. Apparently there are about 50 of them altogether, but all but 7 of those 50 are architecture students, so he was talking about how strange it is to have to meet new people all over again. He was a nice guy, though, and I'm glad he's in a number of my classes.

Yesterday night was also the welcome party. It was fun - not least because there was free beer and free coat checks (at that club, coat checks normally cost 30 kr, which is something like 7 USD, so it was nice not to have to pay)! I ended up hanging out with the three girls I met one of the first days (Christy, Becky and Ashley) and with Owen and Bronwen, as well as a guy from my Danish class, Dave, who apparently knew Owen too. For not knowing many people, it's a surprisingly small world! One of the highlights of the evening was the excellent DJ. The transitions between songs were seamless - you didn't even notice when songs switched. Bronwen and I went back on the train together, and then I ended up walking back to the house because I didn't particularly feel like waiting 45 minutes for a bus in the dark, deserted train station. It was a pleasant walk, though, so I didn't mind.

Today, once I got back from my wandering around Svanemøllen, Dorte's nephew Peter and his girlfriend (?) Annika stopped by. They were fun and chatty - they have really cool jobs, working on ships! Peter is "like a captain" (Erling's words) of a boat that goes between northern Jutland and Norway, and Annika is a waitress on a boat that goes from Germany to Norway. She's originally from Lapland, so it was interesting to hear a little bit about her family and what it's like there. They were nice enough to mostly speak in English so that I could understand the conversation.

Well, I guess the guests will be arriving soon, so I'll close for now.

A lesson in Danish royalty & my first day of classes

I should probably start with yesterday, since I didn't get a chance to write about it last evening.

Yesterday was the final day of orientation. It began with a "scavenger hunt" which sounds pretty lame, but was actually really nice. It took us around the area of Copenhagen that DIS is in, from site to site. Although it was incredibly cold and my group decided to skip the last three stops because we were freezing, the sites we did make it to were awesome! We saw the Round Tower/Trinity church, a church and royal observatory built by Christian IV. I thought it was really neat that he built a place that so clearly demonstrates an interest in both science and religion. Next, we saw the King's Gardens and Rosenborg Castle. After that was the Royal Palace, which actually used to be four mansions of lesser nobles, but when the palace where the royal family lived burned down, the mansions were connected and became the home of the royal family. The place where the family used to live now houses parliament. That was one of the stops which we skipped. At the Royal Palace, we had a really interesting professor explain some things about Danish royalty and politics. I wish it had been warmer, because he lectured for a good 10 minutes before we were allowed to go and get free hot beverages. He told us some really interesting stuff, though, my version of which follows.

Feel free to ignore this paragraph if the Danish royal family doesn't interest you. In Denmark, all the kings are named either Frederik or Christian - it alternates, so that the first born son of the king is named after the previous king. Queen Margrethe II, the current monarch, messed up the system royally by being a woman, but she is apparently taking the place of a Christian - her father was Frederik IX and her son (Crown Prince Frederik) will be Frederik X when he becomes king. She also should either be called Queen Margrethe I or Queen Margrethe III, depending on your definition of Queen. She's the first to inherit the title from her father and be ruler (they had to have an amendment made to the Constitution in 1953 stating that in the absence of a son, the first born daughter of the King would reign, which I think is kind of funny: the Danish people voted on whether or not the Queen's power would be legitimate). However, there were two other queens before her who ruled because they had very young sons when their husbands died, and they were in charge until their sons reached majority. They apparently asked the wrong historian right before Margrethe's coronation, though, and he forgot one of the dowager Queens, so she's Queen Margrethe II. Then, in the 90s sometime, the Danish people voted again, and now the first born child, male or female, of the monarch becomes the new monarch, although it looks like that won't come into effect for a while, since Crown Prince Frederik and his wife have two small sons. The Danish monarch also actually has some real power and is more than a figurehead: nothing can become law without the Queen's signature. Anyway, that's some of the cool stuff I learned about the Danish royalty yesterday.

Yesterday I also got an email from the rugby club - the first practice is on Saturday! I'm super glad that there's a rugby team here to play with - hopefully this will become a source of Danish friends!

Today was the first day of classes! Thursdays are my earliest and busiest days, but today was fine, so hopefully that continues throughout the semester. My day started at 6:15 so that I could shower and eat breakfast before catching a 7:19 bus to the train station. My first class was at 8:30: Memory & Identity: Czech Republic. This is my "core course" which will include two study tours, one 4-day one to southern Jutland (the Danish peninsula, on the border with Germany) and one week-long trip to Prague, Budejovice, and Cesky Krumlov. The course will also only meet 7 times, so it will be over in March, which is quite nice. My next class was European Storytelling from Homer to Harry Potter. The professor for this one is adorable: she started the class by saying, "I'm Bettina, and I'm a certified geek. I'm sure many of you are also geeks." She's also really smart - I learned a lot about the theory surrounding the study of oral traditions, even in the first class. She said the first few classes will be theory-heavy so that we can apply these theories more thoroughly once we actually begin reading the myths, legends, and fairy tales with which we will be working. My third class of the day was Danish. It's basically the third time we've met, so I just learned some new things to say and a few new words.

Then, I came back to Holte. It was the first time I've seen the sun since coming here, and the first time I've seen Holte in the daylight - it's lovely, and was really exciting to see blue skies. Even though it's only been four days since the last time I saw blue skies, it was great to be reassured that the weather won't always be grey. Sabina and I spent some time talking about world events and where we'd like to go in the world, and she showed me pictures from her confirmation - it's a really big deal here! I also explained rugby to Sabina and talked about what things are like back home. We made burgers for dinner, which was really fun - the Ipsens have a super-intense, high-tech kitchen, but it's really fun to cook in.

Tomorrow I register with the Kommune. I think a Kommune is like a village office or county seat - basically I'm telling them that I live here, and then I'll get a card that will serve as my ID, my library card, and my health insurance card. Very exciting. Tomorrow also will be the "welcome party" for DIS - they've apparently rented a club from 8-11, so that will be really fun. Hopefully I'll get to meet a few more fellow students. That's been the hardest thing about living with a host family - I haven't met that many Americans. I guess that's kind of the point of study abroad, but it would be nice to have a few compatriots to socialize with.

Also, it should be possible to leave comments now! The settings were strangely set, but now I think anyone who desires may post!

Getting oriented

Today was the first real day of orientation. It started early - I woke up at 7 and ate breakfast with my host sister Sabina, and then at 7:45 Dorte (host mom) drove me to the train station because Sabina had to take her bike so that she could get to school later in the day. Sabina and I got on the train, and I was happy to see that Bronwen was on the same one. There were a lot of DIS students on this train, since the town where it starts (two stops before Holte, where I live) is where the Folkeskjole (I don't know if that's even close to correct) is located. The Folkeskjole is one of the numerous living options there are with DIS, although admittedly it's the one I understand the least. I think it's a little bit like living in student housing, but with the option of shared meals every day. Something like that.

The DIS day started with a welcoming ceremony, which was very nice and included some lovely music. The ceremony took place at the University of Copenhagen's Ceremony Room - a beautiful old room designed for ceremonies like the welcoming one. A highlight was the paintings of Copenhagen University history. Then, I headed out to find my way to the DIS buildings and pretty quickly got lost. I wandered across a large square and was thoroughly confused, but luckily I saw a gaggle of similarly confused- and American-looking girls. We figured out that we'd wandered about a block and a half too far, so we turned around and made our way to the DIS area, where we did a little exploring of the administrative building. We found the library (it's rather smaller than the Mac one - but no surprise there, really!) and then we got our books for our classes - I have a TON for my Nordic Mythology class. The other classes didn't have so many books, which was nice. Most of them have a "compendium" which is a collection of all the articles or book chapters we'll need to read in a nicely bound book. The one for European Storytelling is HUGE, but that shouldn't really surprise me.

Four of the girls I was lost with are also living with host families. We chatted after getting our books sorted out, and we ate lunch together. All but one of us had a lunch from our host family - some made it themselves and others (like me) had had a lunch packed for us. It was fun getting to hear about what their college experiences are like. Hopefully I'll get to see them again. We walked to the train station (Nørreport) together after our first Survival Danish lesson. Two of the girls live in host families that are neighbors and friends. It sounded like they were having a fun time with that - we all seem to be enjoying our host families so far, which is nice to hear. Also, Becky, one of these girls, is going to be doing the Iceland study tour as well! Yay!

At 1:30, we started Survival Danish with our orientation groups. I later learned that these are organized by our Danish classes for the semester, those of us who are taking Danish. So most of the kids in my group are also in my Danish class - except for the ones who aren't taking a language class at all. This class consisted of a trip to the supermarket where we learned how grocery stores work in Denmark (not so different - the one we went to was very like the Whole Foods near Macalester, if a little smaller) and then the words for many basic foods, and then some basic phrases: What's your name? My name is..., Where are you from?, I come from..., What do you study? I study..., Hi! and Bye-bye! (These are very fun to say in Danish - it's Hej! and Hej hej! - which are pronounced Hi! and Hi hi!) I found it much easier to learn these phrases when our teacher just said them to us and had us repeat than it was to read them - I'm sure I'll get used to letters making entirely different sounds, but for now, speaking and hearing are much easier.

After this, the day was over at DIS, so we wandered back to the train station to head home. I had no trouble getting on the correct train, and made it back to Holte without too much trouble. However, once I left the train station, I took a wrong turn and walked for half an hour, carrying my big bag of books, before realizing that I was lost. After a quick call to Erling (host dad), who sent Dorte to pick me up, all was sorted out. Dorte told me I was supposed to take a bus from the station to the house, which I hadn't known until that moment. Oops. I'll have to figure out which bus to take and when it comes for tomorrow.

This evening, Sabina showed me pictures of her sailing trips that she's done - they look like so much fun! I also took my first shower at the Ipsen house. Last night, I asked about time restrictions, and Erling and Dorte said "Oh, three, four minutes is good. Five minutes sometimes is okay." I'm really glad I asked! Water is very expensive in Denmark, I guess, so they prefer to limit the shower times. If you've ever lived with me, or near me, for that matter, you'll know I take absurdly long showers, but my first very short shower wasn't too bad, once Sabina showed me how the shower fixture works.

Peace!