Finally hanging out with some Danes

It's hard for me to think that a week ago, I had just gotten to Copenhagen. I was exhausted, jet lagged, overwhelmed and extremely anxious.

In the past week, I've seen so much. Every day is an adventure, every day is something new and completely exciting. Everything is different, everything is cooler because I'm in Denmark.

I'm learning a new language, a new culture, a new appreciation for a way of thinking, backed up of course by actually living here. The DIS program is really about immersion as much as possible - our professors are all Danish, but speak English (with varying degrees of accents). Each class includes in some way a cultural aspect so we learn a subject as we learn about how the Danes might view the subject.

Certainly, I'm not as immersed as I might be in a family, where a student gets an instant bond and an instant way into Danish life - all access. My kollegium block is dull beyond words. There is no sense of community. I've talked to people that live here (other than the Americans) maybe five times, and always in the kitchen, and always briefly. And only one of them has been an actual Dane!! There are students from Pakistan, Romania and Poland here in my block, along with a lot of empty rooms and no sense of community.

Take the kitchen, for example. It's FILTHY. The first night I actually took a good look at the kitchen, I cleaned it. Washed all the dishes, wiped the countertops and, you know, made it a place where I wasn't afraid to eat food, with some help from Abbi. But it's about halfway there again - filthy!

"People just don't give a fuck," my new Danish friend told me. I met him and his friends from home, in Northern Jylland, yesterday and hung out with them all day and pretty much all night. It was the experience I've been looking forward to for what seems like an eternity. I got to quiz real Danes about Danish life, they answered a lot of my questions, they didn't mind me trying to pronounce Danish. At the bars, we drank Danish drinks, not American ones. (I won't pretend to love Fisherman's Friend. It's a shot of liqueur named for a lozenge and it tastes like cough syrup. It's served in a tiny, tiny glass. I believe they're called snaps here, much smaller than an American shot. I do, however, like a Danish vodka called Blå, I believe, which tastes like peppermint.)

Of course, much of what we talked about was over numerous beers and shots, so I don't remember all of it, but I certainly feel like I have some understanding of what Danish guys are like.

This particular group of five reminded me so much of my little group from home. Joking, drinking since noon, making a bet during a game of foosball that the loser had to crawl naked under the table (no one lost...complicated bet). Ummm and can I mention that some of them are SO PRETTY.

Torben, Rico, Lars

Jasper (Yess-per) and Lars

But, before you get all jealous of how tan they are, it's fake. 3/4 of Danish men go fake tanning. Finding this out sort of ruined the whole...tall blonde tan how the hell are they so attractive thing most American girls I know have about the Scandinavian region. Jasper, first of all, was hilariously drunk since like 2 p.m. (Jasper et fuld!!) I was wearing soffe shorts because, well, I'd just woken up before I met them and it was really warm outside, and he is lying on the floor and he looks at my legs and he's like "OH MY GOD YOUR LEGS ARE SO WHITE." He was just in shock at how white they were. My nickname became White Legs, sadly enough. (Rino, not yet pictured, is called Bamse, or teddy bear. How cute is that?) He was like "do you go into the sun ever? but you NEVER get tan?" I was like, thanks for rubbing it in, dude. I'm super pale.

Anyway, American pop culture is everywhere here. Snakes on a Plane opened Friday, they love Friends and know a lot of American bands. But there is a lot of Danish pride, too. A lot. And Danes can think less of Americans because, say, Americans don't even know where Denmark is, much less anything about it. We don't know Danish bands, Danish actors, Danish movies, and sometimes, even when we do read about that, we forget. The drummer of Metallica, for example, is Danish. It's both strange and not to come from the world's superpower to a small country (their population is 5.2 million). As an American, I am instantly recognized and instantly judged, whereas I have virtually no preconceptions about the Danish. They think Americans are really friendly, but also fat and sort of stupid, not very globally aware to say the least, wasteful, slutty, and a boatload of other things. But they're also really able to say that not all Americans are like that, and usually the ones they've met that are visiting or living in Denmark, aren't those kind of people.

Sorry this is such a text-heavy post. I'm having a lot of trouble with Blogger's picture feature, hence some of the enormous pictures yesterday. It's weird, for some reason I can't upload pictures directly and have them all nice and automatically sized and hosted here and all the lovely things Blogger usually does. I have to size them myself and upload them to Photobucket and then go into the html to put them in here, which is way too much work for me to do a lot of.