The End

Well, now that I'm home, it seems this blog must naturally come to an end. I had so many adventures that I never shared here, and so many ups and downs that never made it to my "create a new entry" screen. But overall, I had an absolute blast, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat (well, except for a few things...).

Thanks for reading; I hope you enjoyed.

Farvel.

Home

I'm home again, back in Texas after a long journey that could have been much longer.

The travel saga: Get to airport in Copenhagen on the 21st after wrestling with suitcases on trains, wait in long line, find out our flight has been delayed 7 hours. Upside of this? 150 kroner in vouchers for food and I wasn't alone, otherwise I would have been out-of-my-mind bored. Downside? Well, ain't that obvious? Besides being stuck in an airport for that long, it meant I missed my flight back to DFW.

After landing in Chicago at 1 a.m. CST, we went through Customs and proceeded to wait in line, all 300 or so of us, with one, then two people working the counter trying to rebook flights. While I was in Copenhagen, SAS told me they wouldn't be able to rebook my flight to Dallas because it was a separate ticket, so the parents booked me a $750 first class ticket for Friday evening, but I tried to save them some money so I waited in line until 4 a.m., when the SAS people told me they would give me a comped flight on Christmas Eve, and I could be on standby every day until then, and they would give me a free hotel room for those nights at the Wyndham, with $30 a day for food. As tempting as that sounded, plus I would have gotten to run around Chicago, I really just wanted to get home, plus my sister left today (christmas eve) to go back to Georgia, so I wouldn't have seen her.

So, it's 4 a.m., I'm in Chicago, and the next flight to Dallas that I could get on standby is at 6 a.m., meaning if I went to the hotel at all, even if it was just to shower, I'd miss a bunch of flight chances, so I proceeded immediately to the domestic terminal and waited in line, at the same time getting to see the horrible awful sides of Americans that I hadn't missed (stressed, fat, fat, obese and fat, ugly, complaining, impatient and rude). Talk about culture shock. Long story short, I got myself a seat on a 9:00 flight to Cincinnatti, then from there to Dallas and I got in around 3 or so. Stopped at Whata-B on the way home. And it was delicious.

The new house has been fun to explore, it was great to see Cristen (she got me a Magic Bullet for Christmas! [And so did Joey!!!!]), and I'm relearning how to ride a bicycle. Yes, relearning, because it was hard the first time and it's still hard.

Have a Merry Christmas, y'all!

Ungdomhuset Riots

For one of the first times all semester, Denmark made international news because of the rioting that happened here Saturday night. I didn't actually see it; I wasn't in that part of Nørrebro, but some of my friends did, and they said it was craziness.

The Copenhagen Post's article is better than those I read on BBC and Reuters, but some background makes the rioting easier to understand.That Danish graffiti reads "We are them that others won't play with"

Ungdomshuset is a youth collective, started in the early '80s, and it's become, somewhat like Christiania, a place for people to go that don't fit in with the homogenous Danish society. People live there, people eat together there, there are concerts, there is a community that's sprung up around this house and it's very close. The city sold the house to a group back in 2000, who then sold it to Christian group Faderhuset, who are now trying to evict the current residents, and have been for years. The video below (see it also on YouTube) shows things from the perspective of the youth that live there.






But courts have ruled in favor of the Christian sect. I haven't been able to find English articles that explain why they so very much want to evict the house's residents

Saturday's riots were the culmination of several days' activities, to which people from across Europe were invited. Indymedia has some good pictures and a better article that also tells the youth side of the story.

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.

I really am boring.

Since Thursday, I've been in a fantastic mood...finished my last paper, aced a final, landed a sweet spring internship... Classes are very nearly over (ONE MORE DAY), Julefrokoster are happening all the time, the trains run all night on Fridays, Christmas decorations are everywhere in Copenhagen, I get to sleep a lot...

Whereas with school, once I'm done with most of my work, I just want to stay, I'm still ready to go home, back to my life. It's been an awesome four months, but also a long four months!

I guess I don't really have too much to say...tonight my CAC class is throwing a Chanukah party - we actually have a bunch of Jewish girls in the class and my friends Emily and Kendra got their moms to mail over huge boxes of Chanukah-decorated things, menorahs and dreidels. I'm actually about to go help peel potatoes for latkes right now...

Oh. Saturday night, we painted a wall in the common room of the block Abbie and I share. It was pretty sweet then, but in the daylight, it looks pretty bad...bad enough that I'm considering buying some black paint and painting over it all...maybe except for the unicorn. I'll post a picture eventually.

And, in a Slate article about the proposed moon base, Gregg Easterbrook gives us what might be the best Bush slogan ever: "No Price Too High To Accomplish Nothing." I thought some of you might enjoy that as much as I did.

Julefrokost

Last night, my Communications Across Cultures class had a julefrokost (Christmas lunch, usually served at dinnertime)! It was so much fun. First of all, we ate a lot of food.

The first courses were herring - marinated, curried and ...well, some other way. To my credit, I did try the herring, but as per my suspicions, fish is still disgusting. Next up was egg and prawns and salmon. I didn't try the salmon, thinking it would just be a waste, but I did like the prawns. Or shrimp or whatever. In Denmark, they're really tiny, so you don't have to bite in to a disgusting giant pink finger-looking thing with a head and fins and stuff. So don't think this means I'll love shrimp at home. While we were eating the herring and the other seafood, we had snaps. Snaps is like schnapps, and you take shots of it. Our teachers only brought three small bottles for 30 people, so we didn't do it the real Danish way.Daryl gets adventurous with food

Anyway, next was a roast beef course, with pickles and roasted onions and stuff, the Danish way. We put all of these courses on bread, by the way. Rye bread, although it's acceptable to use white bread for the salmon and shrimps. This is what smørrebrød is - stuff on bread. After the roast beef, it was time for another tradition, nu det jul igen. This is a song you sing, and you all get in a chain and follow the leader around all the rooms and you sing and you run. So we did this in a lot of the classrooms in one of our buildings. Up stairs, down stairs, singing "nu det jul igen, nu det jul igen, og julen være li'g til påske, nu det jul igen, nu det jul igen, og julen være li'g til påske. Nej - det ikke sandt, nej - det ikke sandt, for ind imellem kommer faste..."and, well, you repeat that a lot. It means, "Now it's Christmas again and Christmas will last until Easter. No it isn't true, because in between comes the fast (Lent)." A little odd, but hey, it's the Danish way.Geoff and Jamie translate and prepare us for Nu Det Jul Igen

They served a dish that was basically mushed up apples and potatoes with ham mixed in, then ham with spinach and pork roast with a yummy prune and apple(?) sauce thing. Also, they tried to serve us liverpostej. Seriously? I mean, look at it. Would YOU eat this?Liver paste. MMMMM.

You shouldn't. It tastes like regurgitated cat food. Or in a nicer way, creamy meat. I shudder just thinking about it.

Finally, we had dessert - a rice pudding with a cherry sauce. It doesn't look good, but it's really yummy. And there's a game involved - in each bowl of the pudding is one whole almond. When you get the almond you're not supposed to eat it, but you can hide it in your mouth and be sneaky so other people keep eating and then you let everyone know and you get a special gift. Sadly, I was not so lucky.Rice puddin'

After dessert, we played a Danish game. We each brought two small gifts and the game went you roll a dice and if you get a 6, you get to steal a gift. You can steal as many as you want, and people can steal from you, if they get sixes. In theory, one person can have all the gifts and everyone else can have none. I actually ended up with five, but I gave two of them away because I'm just so darn nice. I got some really awesome stuff, though! Su Yi, from China, brought a silk scarf embroidered with blue flowers - he says that Hunan embroidery is really famous in China. And I got also some Chinese paper cuttings - you have to see them to believe them, they are gorgeous! I don't know what I'm going to do with them, though. I also got a Denmark shot glass and a little viking magnet.

Anyway, I just took my Danish oral final - 15 minutes of speaking only in Danish - and I got an A!

I aftens, havde min kommunikation time en julefrokost. Det var meget spændende og meget hyggeligt. Vi spiste meget - roastbøf, sild, laks, svinekam, skinke med spinat og risbudding (?sp). Vi spillede og snakkede. Jeg vil savner mine lærer. Det er tynd og sød.

As you can see, an A in intro Danish doesn't really translate to proficiency.

Vi ses i to uger!

Time goes by....so quickly

Unlike in my newest favorite Madonna song, time is going by so fast here. Do I really have just two more weekends here? Jeg savner hjem mejet men jeg tror jeg vil savner Danmark når jeg er hjem. Jeg tror min sidst dag i Danmark vil være ulykkelig. Jeg vil savner mine nu venner. But, I'll get over missing Denmark soon enough, although it will be really hard to adjust to being "underage" again. It's funny, some bars in Copenhagen have arbitrary age limits - for some, it's 18, some it's 20, a few are 21 and a couple are even 23! And I'll really miss being able to buy a bottle of wine at the grocery store because I feel like it or picking up a 6-pack of Tuborg for the weekend. I'm going to try and bring home a Julebryg or two so y'all can say you've tried it. And Fisherman's...I won't necessarily miss Fisherman's, but I'll miss it's ubiquity.

Of course, I'll miss much more than drinking! I'm going to miss all the great museums here, being able to take trains and buses and walk everywhere, jeg er ikke glædelig mig til the Bible Belt, I'll miss hyggelig and the neverending pursuit of it, I'll miss our great parks, I'll miss the Danish sense of humor, I'll probably miss trying to learn Danish (I might even keep up trying to learn it with CDs or something...how weird is that?), I'll miss people named Søren and Mette and Rikke and Lune and I'll miss extra vowels... æ å and ø...you've been so much fun! I'll miss being so close to the ocean and I'll miss being able to travel any time I want, all over Europe. Not that I took full advantage of traveling (not enough $$$), but while I did, I had a hell of a time. It will be weird to be back in the land of only cars and new buildings and churches built for max capacity instead of great beauty. Oddly enough, I've noticed I've gotten in the habit of saying "you guys." I can't remember a time in my life when I didn't automatically say y'all! I need some more Southernness in my life! I'm looking forward to a more diverse population as well...while I've seen more Turks and Iraqis and Middle Easterners here than I have in the States, the vast majority of people are white. I think I've seen less than 30 black people the entire time I've been in Denmark. Of course, going back to South Carolina will also mean dealing with daily racism again. Although...Danes are, to generalize, pretty racist toward immigrants. The immigrant "problem" here is a real one, not because they are here, but because they can't assimilate in to the culture and the culture isn't happy about the thought of having to change to reflect the country's new inhabitants. The isolation immigrants can go through is showing itself to be a real problem, as terrorist cells are springing up in the country that everyone thinks is such a fairy tale land.

Really, though, Denmark can be a fairy tale land a lot of the time. I say this often, but I don't think I've felt unsafe once in Denmark other than at my kollegium. Life just seems to be less troublesome here. As globalization's influence creeps up, things are starting to change, but old Denmark is charming and warm and wonderful.

I'm rambling a bit, so I think I should wrap things up with a shoutout to the Parental Unit:

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!!!