France vs. Copenhagen

France:

-The Louvre. I can’t even say anything else about that.

-Also the Musee d’Orsay

Why can't this happen at every meal?

-And every other museum

-The wine, oh my god

-It’s so freaking huge!

-CREPES

-80 degrees? Sun? Sunburn? No giant monocloud? Yes please!

-The site of like everything important that every happened in Europe? Win France

-Tap water is free! Unlike in Copenhagen
-The meal experience.

I have never had a sit down 2 hour three course meal with red and white wine and coffee(well tea for me) for LUNCH! Much less had 3 of these incredible experiences in one week!

-Pickpockets? Not cool.

Copenhagen:

-Copenhagen is literally the safest city on the planet

-They speak English…without a sense of disdain

I was so surprised people in the mostly public institutions, ticket sellers at the Louvre and Eiffel Tower for example, spoke far less and less perfect English than the Danes. Perhaps they just prefer the superiority of their own language and don’t want to stain their tongues with English, but every single person in Denmark speaks amazingly fluent English, and they are happy to do it!

-The Copenhagen Metro is nine hundred times cleaner and easier to access. I mean would some above ground signs kill you Paris?

-Granola and wheat/rye/multigrain bread is so so not a thing in Paris. Score 10 Copenhagen

-The French disdain tea, and make faces at you if you ask for it instead of coffee, but the Danes love their tea : )
-HYGGE! (The danish value of "coziness")

Winner:

How about I just take both?

I'm a Rock Star

Gorgeous Swedish Coast

Somehow the experience of sheer panic makes your ultimate victory so much more fulfilling. Just like those moments on the Bornholm biking trip (where we did 70+km of biking in 1 day!), where I was so overwhelmed with this growing fear that there was literally no way we could make it home and would have to sleep by the side of the road.  But we did make it home, and damn we were on top of the world.

So when you are hanging by mere fingertips and can see literally no place to wedge in a finger or a toe on the sheer rock face, and can feel your entire body trembling as you cling to the tiniest centimeter of a ledge, you feel utter panic because you know you are about to lose your grip and can sense you are about to fall away from the only secure thing around you into the dangerous open air.  So many times I was ready to just call it quits and end the pain in my scraped up hands and sore arm muscles because I just couldn’t find a single way to pull myself up one inch farther.

The most difficult climb he opened for us, of which only maybe 4 of us made it to the top of, was the most difficult puzzle I have ever had to solve. You study how the people before you do it, but once you get up there you have no sense of orientation, and you have to try climbing from all angles, especially when you are in a sort of crevasse with two walls angled in, and also angled towards you. You feel like you are climbing upside down and putting your legs in positions you had no idea you were capable of. And of course I lost my grip so many times and had to just hang in the air in my harness for a moment to regroup and regain my determination.

But after 10 minutes of struggling to advance that 1-inch, receding territory, moving side to side, trying every angle imaginable, and then you finally find some way of pulling yourself up, and you push with all your might (so many grunting noises and being in labor jokes) and you feel like your legs, which seemed so useless and incompetent slipping and sliding 2 minutes ago, have such enormous power, and they push you up and you get a breath of fresh air as you feel the tautness of the belay telling you your moving upwards, and maybe you can do this after all. And then of course you do it all over again, inch by inch. Being stuck in a panic and then feeling the rush of power when you finally find a foothold.

And then there’s touching that metal carribeaner at the top and having a look out at the ocean almost directly below you. And belaying down :) And then being a trembling mess of adrenaline and excitement and cold (did I mention that of course it was raining for most of the day) and knowing you just kicked that mountain’s ass like a spider monkey.

At my lowest point on the hardest one, where I just felt too tired to carry on, one of the girls tried to toss me a peanut M&M from the ground! I almost caught it but failed. And then the instructor joked about how he was going to let go and go pick it up because it fell right in front of him and was tempting him. But that actually gave me this magical boost (even without actually eating any chocolate) and then I just did it and made it to the top! And I didn't do it too too painfully slowly :)

This is an unnecessarily large number of pictures of the hardest climb, but it's really fun when you slip through them all really fast

I look helpless

Danes are Super-humans

How in the hell, in a country with constant rain and cold and grey skies and such rapidly changing weather, do the Danes not get colds?

Not only do they not get them (ever) – they don’t even understand what they are. As I stand unable to keep my eyes open because they are streaming with tears and completely puffed up, a Dane asked me if I have really bad allergies, and I said I did but right now I actually have a cold. 

Response: “Wait what, your cold?”

I mean I could deal with them lording their immune-system superiority over me, but the problem is, since they are so resilient, their country doesn’t see the need to sell cold medicine. Anywhere.

I went to the pharmacy and they told me to go home and drink tea. Others have told me to throw back a shot and go to bed. The Danes don’t even keep tissues in their houses, or sell them in boxes in any grocery store except one, which I thankfully found today.  You also can't get an appointment with a doctor over a cold.  And it’s illegal to mail medicine the country. I would do illegal things to get a bottle of NyQuil right now.

So while Copenhagen has been horrendus for my allergies, on top of that I am now, in my 3^rd week, already on my 2^nd cold.  I’ve literally not been healthily functional since I got of the plane.

So what am I to do when it isn’t even winter yet and I can’t even get over these colds?? Besides chugging “Appelsin” (orange juice, confusing no?)  and drinking tea (7 cups and counting so far today) I guess I will just suffer through until the moment I take a trip outside the country, when I will come back with an entire suitcase filled with cold medicine as my souvenirs.

I mean there is always the “eat a pastry” solution. Which of course I did.

Unfortunately, I think pastries are better for solving life problems, rather than physical ones, because I am waay to sugar-jacked now to take the nap I really need.

But at least I am much happier :)

Pusher Street, Christiania

Christiania, which is set across from the inner city on the man-made island of Christianshavn, was founded in the 1970’s as a “social experiment.”

So basically it’s home to 900 weed-smoking hippies.  

Today our Danish class was given a tour by a local – the most wonderfully blunt guy, dressed in a cowboy hat, moto-jacket, and with long hair and crazy side-burns. And if the clothes didn't give away his free spirit, the moment he mentioned her starting to smoke hash when he was 12, I think we all got the picture this guys has pretty much done every drug out there.

Apparently the town started with a bunch of homeless Copenhagen students moving into these empty old army barracks, and from that sprang this whole lawless society (which included an alcoholic bear who became very violent if he was too sober). Nowadays its still pretty much lawless, though hard drugs have been banned, (of course only after some clever people realized their children where dying from overdoses). 

Hash on the other hand, is everywhere. While it’s not technically legal, next to Amsterdam, this is the place to go to buy and sell, though it's now confined to one street (aptly named Pusher Ave.) And it's literally everywhere – there are even booths set up selling it, and every single person walking around is smoking a joint.

Outdoor Toilet..So you can grin at passerby's as you take a piss

And there are only 3 rules in the "Greenlight District"

• Have fun
• No running (it causes panic) 
• Absolutely NO photography

With all the smoking and drinking they do, and its all day everyday, I seriously wonder what the brain function is of this town, but it seems their social experiment is working.

Example A:

            Parents were getting concerned that their children were becoming little helpers to the weed sellers (not of course for the fact that they are selling weed at 12 years old but because they would make too much money and then drop out of school cause they were rich). But because they couldn’t tell their kids not to do something (against the hippie philosophy I guess) they built them a skate-ramp park. Which apparently worked – skateboarding was apparently more important for the kids’ street rep than selling drugs.  I think this is actually pretty brilliant, but I get concerned when our guide tells us  he knows his son won’t ask before his first smoke but he hopes he will be responsible before he takes that second bottle of vodka or snorts that second line of coke…..

But they have something really cool going on over there – and it kind of proves that society can function without insanely complex systems of government and even laws.  My favorite is how no one owns the house they live in, so you can’t buy or sell a house over there.  When one guy was trying to sell his house the town took it away from him (and the buyer’s money that had been put down for it) and said too bad for you! 

 After the tour we killed some time and then met up for our Danish Café Night, (in which of course we spoke no Danish). But it was a free hot (and quite delicious) meal, which is every kid who lives in a Kollegium’s dream over here. Oh how jealous we are of the kids with host families who set down a hot meal for them every night, as we eat yet another dinner of granola or nutella on rye bread.



Our teacher tells us the next day that when our guide's wife called in the middle of the tour, the conversation (in danish) was about how he had left her a joint on the table.

I Actually Live Here

My very messy room - bathroom is behind me to the left

Shower, Sink, Me standing kinda in the Toilet

Despite the fact that I have to squat awkwardly behind my door to use the Internet because my Ethernet plug is much too short to reach anywhere useful (a problem now finally solved), and the fact that my shower head is just chilling in the corner of my bathroom (shower curtain and rod not included apparently – problem still not solved) and I have to hide my toilet paper and close the toilet lid to shower every morning (as the bathroom gets entirely drenched) my Kollegium, Raebeck Søpark , is pretty sweet. And some of the Danish students actually talk to me! The shared kitchen is a good place to meet them, and most of them are like “oh so are you the American student?” Yes, clearly as I didn’t understand the Danish you first said to me, I am.


There is of course a giant poster of Time Square above my desk, and a print of San Francisco above my bed. But then I find some sign containing an O with a slash through it or an A attached to an E and I remember that I am, in fact, quite far from home.


And don’t worry, in case SADS starts to get to me, there’s a sketchy tanning bed right next to the laundry room in the basement. At least this is one of the first things we were told on our tour of the building. So it’s okay guys. I’ll just penetrate my skin with powerful UV rays and then I’ll be all better…


Well sort of, I am severely allergic to my room, and, well, to Copenhagen. I’ve been downing Benadryl, my regular allergy pills and nasal spray and still no bloody relief. http://www.icenews.is/index.php/2011/05/09/copenhagen-worst-place-in-denmark-for-allergy-sufferers/


On a positive note, the trains here are soundless, from the inside anyway, and makes the trip from Rødouvre (my town – basically it sounds like someone drunkenly slurring “roll over,” while bypassing all the constantans) into the city, quite peaceful. It’s quite a miracle actually, after the hell of a summer with the SEPTA underground trolley, that a transportation system can make you not want to throw yourself onto the tracks.


And of course I do actually go to class too.

Besides being that kid constantly blowing their nose in the silence of the classroom on the first day, all my classes seem really hands on and interesting. They are:

• Gardens of the Gods: The history of paradise and religion
• Ancient Art and Archaeology: The Copenhagen Collections
• Danish Language and Culture
• European Culture and History: Memory and Identity in France
• Copenhagen: History and Contemporary Urban Issues

My two favorites are probably the Garden of the Gods, and the Urban History of Copenhagen. The Garden of the Gods looks at the history of religion and paradise through the gardens of basically every major civilization. From Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Mesopotamian to Native American, Islamic, Christian and Buddhism and everything in between. We learn about theology, the symbolism of each plant and the gods to which they were sacred, how to read a garden and what that says about a society's religion and culture.

In the Urban Studies class we basically use Copenhagen as our classroom. Our first assignment is literally a 15 stop tour of Copenhagen, in which we are armed with a giant packet of information, medieval maps and questions we have to answer at each stop... Of course we also have to memorize and be able to draw out on a blind map the different districts of Copenhagen (down to the exact streets!) and where all these monuments and old, (no longer standing) medieval ramparts and gates are. But our teacher promised us by the end of the class we would know Copenhagen better than the Danes, and I am so excited to explore every nook and cranny of the city!

And the Ancient Art and Archaeology class is great because basically all of our classes are held in the National Gallery, looking at Copenhagen’s collection of artifacts from Antiquity.

And then each class has a few field study trips on various Wednesdays (when we actually don’t have class!)


---------

In hindsight posting this, I guess I should add that my classes are not, in fact, all really great. The readings for some are so horrendously pointless that I, Anne Silk, hearby do declare that I haven’t done all of them! Skipped them on purpose even! And yeah, no consequences.

I mean here’s an example:

“Okay class, now can you guess what the word Neoclassical means? What do you think this style of architecture looks back to?”

dead silence. I pray quietly that the silence comes from our astonishment that we are actually going over this, but you never know…

“I’ll give you a hint, Neo is Greek for New.”

Silence.

Brave soul ventures: “The classical era.”

Exuberant praise from the teacher.

So besides a bit of a dumbed down curriculum and an extreme repetition in going over information (hey, I guess I’m not complaining) the classes can be stimulating, and definitely do give a lot of work, lots of papers and tests and readings.

But they are, on the whole, quite interesting, and I am learning a lot about Copenhagen and Scandinavia because apparently AP Euro never thought anything worthwhile ever happened up here.

But now that I actually live here I'd like to learn. Plus Vikings are cool.

First of All

Here are some of my firsts in Denmark:

First purchase in Denmark: 
 Toilet paper and one of the Dane's famous beers, a poor choice though as I was left carrying the toilet paper the rest of the night (since they don’t give you plastic grocery bags for free)

First dinner in Denmark: 
(sketchy) “China” food...a bit of a let down for the first meal

 

First actual Danish food experience: 
a DANISH!! Except they’re not actually called that here, and they'll probably laugh at you if you call it that. Of course they'll also laugh at me trying to call it it's danish name, so I'll stick to pointing.  But it was seriously to die for, chocolate and cinnamon, and it was free, thank you DIS!

First (and only) Herring:  
the famous Smoked Herring on Bornholm island. It wasn't as horrible as I thought it would be, its very fishy tasting, but they serve you the whole fish with head and eyes and everything! You have to rip off the head and tail and pull out the spine, and you end up eating a ton of the hair-like bones...but at least I can say I had herring

First of many culture shocks:

20 dollars for a cup of tea?!?

           --> roughly 5 DKK = 1 dollar

But then of course there is the “My peanut butter cost 50 dollars?? Oh no wait that’s just 10...Wait WTF? 10 dollars for a half size jar of creamy skippy?!?”

(Apparently many of the Danes find PB a tad repulsive. PB&J is so not a thing over here)

            Lesson Learned = everything costs about 3 times as much over here.

But at least I am finally getting very good at dividing by 5, thanks for prepping me on the math skills Vassar.

Culture Shock #2: 
 Sadly this doesn’t concern Danish culture. It comes from the DIS Bros. Muscles? Football and frats? Fist-pumping? What?? Where is the flannel and the skin-tight jeans! Where are the hipster glasses and the talk of esoteric indie bands?! How do I communicate with guys I can’t obsess over the latest fleet foxes CD with? (seriously though it's amazing).  It's really funny how many kids are actually overwhelmed by the bro culture though, if you meet anyone from a school like Oberlin, Skidmore or Wesleyan, the first thing you start talking about is your hipster withdrawl.

But now about the Danes:

I was worried there wasn't going to be a really definable 'culture' here, but the Danes are really amazing, and both very similar and different from us. They are a much more private people, so they won't usually approach you and start up a conversation, but once you get to know them they can be really friendly. They are also all blond, blue eyed skinny and gorgeous. I don't understand how they stay so skinny with all those pastries (their diet is literally mostly carbs) but I guess all that biking pays off. And the biking is intense, the Danes bike everywhere, there are bike lanes on every street (which I always forget about when I step off the curb, as I've nearly gotten hit a few times) and they bring them on the metros and trains.

Also yogurt comes in a milk carton.

And of course they are very socialist. 

And they don't jay walk. ever. They don't even anticipate the light! 

Oh and they don't have a word for "I'm sorry," as in I'm sorry I just whacked you in the face, they just keep walking.

Oh god and the vowel sounds. They have about 13 identical sounding vowels that no one but the Danes can seem to pronounce; my mouth just literally can't move that way. Basically a good rule when attempting to read any word is to ignore every single one of the constants, speak fast and mumble.

okay a real post about what I'm actually up to next time!

  

Rain and Pastries

I think there are two constants here in Copenhagen, which will hopefully give me something to hang on to in the chaos that is a semester at DIS. Between study trips, field studies, adventure trips, day trips, short study tours, long study tours, my own free travels, cooking classes, wandering the city, readings, tests, essays, attempting to cook meals and sleep and run, my ical is an insane mess and one can only hold on and hope nothing is missed.

So I shall remain quasi grounded by these two things: It rains basically everyday. Even if it’s sunny when you wake up, even if there is a 0% chance of rain – you better bring your umbrella.  Clouds roll in and out so fast it’s insane! One moment the heavens open up and it’s the next flood-ocolypse, and 10 minutes later there’s the sun. And then in about 30 seconds here comes the rain again. You can just never predict. Somehow that is a constant.

And secondly, there will always be pastries. Warm, golden, flaky pastries that always seem to be fresh from the oven. No matter which street you find yourself on there is guaranteed to be a bakery or a 7-11 (more on these insanely fancified, estranged cousin's of the American version later - no slurpies here). The best one is Lagkagehuset, with baked goods lined up in the windows that you cannot help but stop and drool over every time you pass. And of course they have the most outrageously delicious chocolate cinnamon buns, chocolate croissants, fresh breads, traditional pastries (the kind we call Danishes), and then a whole bunch of stuff that I don’t even know what it is but its delicious confectionery goodness that melts in your mouth and makes you forget about the shit weather and the fact that you are so busy you haven't actually slept in forever :)