Frikadeller

whhhhere do I begin.

Well for starters, tonight at about 9:30 pm a fellow Miker will be taking on the city of Copenhagen for the weekend with Catherine and me. Alli Roberts, who is currently studying abroad in London for the semester, is heading north! Neither Catherine nor I are anywhere near sufficiently acquainted with the city yet so she's going to join us for weekend #2 of exploring Danish life. Here goes nothing!

So big jump #3 is underway now as well. I have a roommate! I was just starting to accept the whole single room thing, because it is pretty lonely, but then on Monday (or Mandag -Danish) morning I got an email that I'd be getting a roommate. So a couple of days later, Jenna from Texas moved in! She goes to Vanderbilt and alreadyknows a lot of people on my floor from meeting them over the past week here, so she fits right in. It's a pretty good deal.

I forgot to include a part of my Christiania trip in my last entry. After we got our crepes (can't emphasize enough how delishhhh they were), we were trying to warm oursevles up and maybe even meet some Danes. There were fires in garbage cans scattered around the premisis so we figured we'd just post up next to one of those with the Danes standing there and see how it goes. Well it acutally didn't go so well. We tried one of the fires by a stand, kind of exclusive, so kind of risky, but we didn't think anything of it. We walked up all smiley and innocent, stood there for about 10 seconds until someone with a very straight face muttered, "You can't stand here." Oh...okay...so we moved on to the next fire. This one was less crowded and in a more open spot so we walked over to them hoping for the best. Then again, "You can't stand here," one man said. So now this is just awkward. I could not even stop laughing but it was painfully awkward as we turned around and walked away, rejected from fire #2. So we just kind of loitered in a corner freezing our tails off for a while until we decided just to leave. On the way out, there was one garbage can fire that was right smack in the middle of the whole area and we assumed this one must be okay so let's just try and see. So we stopped, and the people there let us stay maybe 20 seconds this time before they once again told us "You can't stand here." I burst out laughing and just walked away because seriously? rejected from three fires, we look completely idiotic and it's just more and more awkward every time but for some reason we wouldn't give up. Learned our lesson though, don't even try the fires.

Last weekend I went on a DIS organized event to Roskilde, the original capital of Denmark. We learned a lot about the Cathedral, its architecture, and the town itself. Denmark's biggest industry used to be Herring back in the day, interesting. The Cathedral was beautiful, so many intricate designs and so much history based on each part of the building. Apparently Denmark has hundreds of churches, several in each town, but overall they are not a very religious group of people. Maybe just have them for estheic pleasure? After Roskilde, we went to the Viking Ship museum and looked at some enormous ships and learned a lot about the viking adventures during their time.


Just a side note - I haven't talked too much about the whole Biking culture here, which is odd because it's insanely huge. Bikes everywhere, people on bikes at all times of the day. In the dark when I wait for the bus to go to my first class (yeah it's dark until about 8:30 am), all the way into the wee hours of the evening (or morning i guess- 2/3 am ish). It's really cool, they have a specific bike lane with street lights for the bikers to follow, they're just like cars. Except their slightly different than cars because cars tend to stop for pedestrians...bikers don't. The bike lane is more dangerous than the 2 lane main streets with cars on them. It's kind of like frogger - cross at your own risk.


My friend Zoe has a visiting family, it's through the DIS program, they match you up with a Danish family to spend some time with throughout the semester. So on Tuesday night, they invited her and a friend to dinner, so I was the friend. They have a daughter who is our age and she is just hilarious - she played soccer and studied in Florida for a few months last semester and she had a lot of funny things to say about America. She warned us about her house before we got there "It's not like houses in America," she said. We weren't sure what she meant by that but then she followed up with "I've seen the houses in LA, Orange County, Florida....we don't have a pool." Zoe and I reassured her that those houses are actually NOT what most of America looks like...and in fact, neither one of us have pools either.

So for dinner we had this Danish food called Frikadeller (hence the title of this blog). Very very very tasty - it's just kind of like meatballs, but in a different shape. Nina, the daughter, was all about ketchup and was utterly shocked when I politely declined her offer for ketchup with my meal. We discussed European traveling, which places are best to visit, and also talked about the "Happy Pills," Danes must be perscribed to that make them so content. Personally, I have not noticed any sort of outstanding happiness. Danes seem very reserved, and not really as friendly as I expected - I guess I had a specific idea and expectation of the "happiest people in the world," to be overly friendly and jolly - not exactly how it is from my perspective but hey, i'm new here, only 1 week in.

It was so great to sit down in a little Danish home and see what it's like. It wasn't drastically different, just interesting. After dinner the whole family crowded around the tv with a bowl of gummies (that I nearly single handedly got rid of...yum) to watch the Denmark Vs. Sweden semi-finals handball game. It's all the rage. My professors told me about it too, Denmark is undefeated! And they remain undefeated, winning the game we watched over Sweden 26-22 I believe. Nina was very funny when she talked about her friends from the US -"I thought on halloween everyone would dress up as something scaaaary, but no, they were all slutty! Everyone was SNOOKI!" (or "shnewki"-as she pronounced it). Yeah, I guess you're right, Nina, some aspects of halloween are a little different in the US.

So today I have two more classes - International Reporting, for which i've started an article on Danish fashion. I interviewed a woman in a very trendy store to use as a source, she was so cute and very helpful. The articles I write for this International Reporting class are going to be put on the DIS website as a tool for potential study abroad students to hear what it's like in CPH from an American perspective...how sweeeet. Then my final class of the day is International Marketing - it's a cool class. The professor is the best part. Tonight he invited us all over for dinner at his house! So at 6:30 i'll be heading over there for dinner, and getting back just in time to meet Miss Alli for some Thursday night Danish FUN!

I just uploaded the first round of pictures to facebook so check em out! I should include a few here but I have to get going. Until next time,

cheers.