Some photos from around Copenhagen

YO it SNOWED early last week!!










This is a pølse-wagon. Yum.
This is Nyhavn, the site you see on pretty much every postcard or touristy advert for Copenhagen. Note the colored buildings. More interesting: the wooden shacks on street level - they're setting up for the Christmas Faire, so you can wander around and buy/sell regardless of the weather. Hot mulled wine!

I found this lying in the front room of my program's building. I thought it meant literal mice - like the animal - but it only has computer accessories inside

Found this pre-election when I was on a bus. It says, if you can make it out, "Obama," graffiti style


Pretty neat railcar at Central Station

I found these people by accident. I was doing work and stepped outside to pick up a falafel for dinner, and saw three OLD, torch-wielding ladies meanderng down the street. Of course I followed them. I found over a hundred such people, although mostly younger than the three who led me there. We marched, or they marched and I followed, to the headquarters of Politiken, the big newspaper in Copenhagen, at which point they went inside and I left. It was, I found out, a Krystalnacht memorial rally that over time has also become a leftist/anarchist (socialist?) march.



More strollers. I visited some friends in the burbs and the next morning, at the bus stop, I found a herd (flock?) of moms with strollers and children.

BWAHAHAHAHAHA I don't even know what schwanger means and I think it's hysterical


Note in one building we have McDonald's, Burger King, and Kentucky Fried Cruelty. Welcome to Copenhagen! Although given Europe's food standards, it's probably a safe bet that it's not actually fried cruelty here.

table set for Christmas Lunch (julefrokost, pronounced vaguely like "yool-uh-frohkuhst" with the 'r' gurgled). Lunch is the wrong word. Event ran 4 pm to circa 5 am. Delicious traditional Danish food, including pickled herring in curry sauce, as well as Danish meatballs (frikadeller, I think), and various other picked, fried, and smoked fish. Also sauces and beets. And lots of Christmas beer and snaps, which is sort of like Danish vodka in strength, but totally unique in taste. And by unique I mean horrifying. In the nicest, most culturally sensitive way possible, though. But in all seriousness, that stuff will fuck you up. Afterwards, when my hallmates asked me if I liked the snaps, I replied that I respect snaps.

Anyway, these hopefully show a little more of Copenhagen and how awesome it is, and how bizarre I find it to see Americana here. Which is, I suppose, a symptom of the ridiculous position of privilege I find myself in as an American (although if I were studying in somewhere like, oh, say, Venezuela, I don't know if I would term it 'privilege').

Finals are fast approaching (as in tomorrow) and I'm definitely weirded out by how quickly this semester has gone. I don't know if it's because everything seems new and so it's sort of difficult to fall into a boring routine that eats up time or if it's because I'm getting older (AAHHHH) and so three months is a smaller portion of my total time spent alive and aware so far.

Jeg skal have en fransk hotdog med ketchup

As you may have guessed, that means "I will have a french hotdog with ketchup"

Which I successfully said! And then I got a french hotdog with ketchup!

Dotting Copenhagen are these things called "pølsevogn" or "sausage wagon." They are, basically, hot dog trailers, but very Danish and traditional. Or at least a trademark of the city. You can get a variety of hot dogs, some wrapped in bacon, either sans bread, in a bun, or fransk-style. This is basically if someone decapitated and then disemboweled a pig-in-a-banket. You have a hotdog-sheath made from bread, which is heated, and then you order your dog and topping. The topping is squirted into the sheath, and then the pølsevogn person (each wagon has a specific person attached to it - they're real businesses!) slides the sausage in and voila! Delicious treat!

Traditionally, I am given to understand that they come with mayonnaise, ketchup, spicy ketchop, remoulade, and fried onions, but I may be missing some or making up some key ingredients.

Bottom line, I'm really happy because I ordered one in Danish and the man responded in Danish without batting an eye!!! Now given that these wagons are plastered throughout guidebooks, I would imagine that he gets all sorts of people butchering Danish and so is probably more used to it than the average Dane. Regardless, it was reassuring to attempt Danish and get a positive response.

Although, I've noticed (and had this confirmed with other people studying Danish) that we are slowly rewiring our brains to privilege Danish over our other half-assed second languages. Specifically, Spanish. I find myself trying to think in Spanish and inventing a weird Danglish-Spanish hybrid.

Something rotten in my fridge...in Denmark

Some more things I've noticed...

preservatives don't exist here, or at least not as we know them. I still haven't readjusted my food timer for real food, and so I'm still occasionally surprised to find that after a reasonable period of time, my food decays. Not so fun, but you can definitely taste and feel the difference. Products don't make me feel like my insides are turning into plastic.

Bolstered by Obama's win, I felt ok going to McDonald's. Once. It's an entirely new experience - everything is made with real food, so the chicken tastes and feels like actual chicken meat! This trend continues with other American products. M&M's, for instance, are made with not-awful chocolate.

Makes me kind of bitter that as an American, I have to fly over a thousand miles to get quality American products...but. Enough of that! Speaking of Obama, his face was plastered on every major newspaper in the city November 5th. Hardly a surprise, given the importance people everywhere attached to the election. I saw a lot of Obama related facebook statuses written in Danish.

Cell phones are SO different! Not only are the vast majority of phones not flip phones, but I have heard only one ringtone that's a song! And when I heard it, the guy who picked up spoke English with an African-esque accent. So he probably wasn't Danish.

They have thin slabs of chocolate that you can melt over toast. WHY don't we have that in America?

I tried a beer called Beer Geek Breakfast. It's made by a Danish microbrewery, and it's so named because they put coffee in it! It's delicious!!! Dark and heavy and kind of roasty.

I have heard more trashy American pop music here than I ever did in the States. Granted I go out more here, but still. Stop it, America! And never have Katy Perri host an awards show again!

Lastly, there is an International Fair going on until Sunday in the sqaure near my building and it ROCKS. There are tons of free samples, and the following highlights:
-Dutch cheese stand. PESTO cheese, and Garlic and Nettle cheese. OMG.
-French bread stand. All sorts of pastries plus baguettes. Pair well with the Dutch cheese.
-Wurst people with a large circular barbecue, making it sort of like fat German Mongolian Barbecue. Curry Wurst is one of the most satisfying meals I've had.
-Burger people with the following options: Beef, venison, water buffalo, wild board, kangaroo!!!
-Candy stand the size of a small island featuring many fudges and gummi Smurfs
-numerous sausage people
-lots of freshly made cookies and cakes and goodies!

needless to say, I am not buying groceries this week and instead have decided to eat my way through the fair, spending entirely too much money in the process.

Back to the future!

I do realize that I haven't covered London or Dublin, BUT.

Last night was Sensation White, a gigantic rave-thing housed in Parken, Copenhagen's stadium. Literally 25-30,000 people there, and due to the dress code, all wearing white. INSANE! Very exciting, especially since I haven't been to anything like it before.

Basically: take a stadium. put in a wood/plastic temporary floor. Bisect the field with a ten foot tall mirrored wall, the top of which is wide enough to walk or dance on and has fountains and fire shooters and launches fireworks. In the center, build a HUMONGOUS turning circular station that houses the DJ and climbs all the way to the ceiling in a bulbous, lit up extravaganza. Hang 20 foot tall white jellyfish all over. Make the jellyfish light up, rise up and down, and shoot lasers. Install lasers ALL over the place. Now fill it with 30,000 (coked out/rolling on E,) drunk, or just plain crazy people dancing to some wonderful and not so wonderful electro-type musics. SO much fun. Oh, and it runs for eight hours - from 7 PM to 3 AM.

There were dancers up on the wall sometimes, and for those of you into this kind of music, Rune RK played for about an hour and a half. I don't have a link to it, but he did the horn-esque song that you hear mixed into a lot of stuff. Even I recognized it :p.

Two dudes, at seperate points, got up on the wall and started dancing around, and were quickly taken down. One tried to jump down and was caught in the air, and then bodily carried all the way off. Security was pretty good at responding quickly to that shit.

Basically, amazing.

More Eburgh photos

I reallly want to know what business is like.

cool reflection

fish and chips.

Edinburgh is a layered city. Fun!

LOOK IT'S A GIANT BIONIC HAND WITH A SCALPEL!

ALSO some observations:

a) In Denmark, I have seen very few flip phones - most everyone uses the candy bar style ones made famous by Nokia, although they are much more evolved and far sexier than the ones I remember.

b) iPod use differs from country to country! In Copenhagen, lots of people listen to iPods, and you'll always tuck the wires and iPod itself deep in some hidden pocket. In other places, such as London, I noticed fewer iPods (per capita, not total), and they're less discreet about it. I don't know if it's a security thing or a modesty issue, but it was a little weird at first to see people with their wires hanging out.

BUTTER and currency exchange

So the first thing I learned about traveling on my own is that it is not enough to have booked all the travel steps and sleeping arrangements ahead of time. It is wise to research where you will be. Next time :p.

Jacob's Crazy UK (and Dublin!) Adventure, Phase one: Edinburgh!

Got my passport stamped! WHEE!

I arrived in Scotland, having recently learned that it is in fact part of the UK. I had always wondered why England thought that it was a united kingdom - wasn't that redundant? Not so! Got my pounds from the friendly Scottish ATM, hopped on the bus, and went to meet J., my lovely friend from Brandeis who had been gracious enough to let me crash at her flat. She is studying in Edinburgh, and living with four other lovely ladies who were extremely gracious and inclusive. One at least I hope to see again, as she studies relatively close to Brandeis. Hooray!

So J. got me, we went to her flat to drop of luggage, and she introduced me to tea. I've had tea before, but when I was growing up it was always something you had when you were sick. I've never associated it with leisure or fun or really, anything except for runny noses and sore throats. We had some tea, and decided to go climb Arthur's Seat, this beautiful gorgeous cliff/hill thing that's perhaps a ten minute walk from her flat. It was SO windy! On the way up we were blown sideways, at the top we were literally almost blown over, and at points you could jump and the force of the wind would move me at least six inches. Danger is now my middle name.





After we reached safety at the bottom, we decided to walk to the grocery store and pick up provisions, but got sidetracked by The Museum of Childhood! It's basically a toy store with context, but it had some really neat antique toys and examples of fun stuff. There was a piggy bank that was actually a human head. In blackface. And it ate your money. There were also some great larger, hands on displays:


And we went grocery shopping where J. bought something that would be the highlight of my experience in the UK: Scottish shortbread. Basically a brick of butter and cake that you dip in tea and eat. I need to learn how to make it.

By this time is was approaching the dinner hour, so we trekked back, J. pointing out landmarks and trying her best to give me a sense of how the city was laid out. I have all the directional savvy of a frying pan, so for the most part, it was in one ear and out the other, although I really appreciated both her attempt and the nuggets about the city she was feeding me. Edinburgh is a really cool place. And pretty.

We cooked some delicious meat for dinner, and given that it was Sunday, hung out. OH and saw a movie - Sweet Bird of Youth, from 1967 and starring Paul Newman, was playing at the local cinema, and it was wonderful! I am SO glad to have seen it, and it just drives home both how much we've changed since then, but also how much we like to think we've changed. Gorgeous.

I conked out on her couch in a sleeping back donated to the cause by the lovely F., and slept entirely too long. Although I did get to shock some flatmates whom I had barely met (or not at all) and who had the experience of coming into the common room for breakfast and finding a strange man on the couch.

Day two, J. got out of class in the morning, and we hit up the Surgeon's College Museum (or something like that). I had no idea that Edinburgh was such a center for medical innovation and research, and it was really neat. What I thought was coolest, though, was the corner dedicated to Burke and Hare. There was also a room full of pathological samples - gun wounds, diseased tissue, tumors, etc. Really fascinating to look at and freak out about - there was a skull from a baby suffering from hydrocephalus that looked literally like those giant freaky alien heads at Hot Topic or Spencer's. I cannot imagine the experience of passing it out of a vagina, even dilated. Wow. We also visited the Parliament, which is a modern building that people either love or hate, and was much more expensive than initially projected. Kind of like the Shapiro Campus Center. It's pretty nifty. There was a great exhibit inside - students who went to art high schools and had taken, essentially, their Regent's exams in art and placed extremely well had their work on display inside Parliament. Lots of paintings and drawing, but also concept and process pieces as well as sculpture and fashion design.



Given that is cost 10 pounds, or roughly 17 dollars, to get a tour of Edinburgh Castle, we peeked through the bars. It's impressive, but I didn't feel bad about not going in.



We ate a lot of hummus over the course of my visit, which was wonderful because for all of its effort, Copenhagen does not have really good hummus. It has chickpea paste, and it's labeled as hummus, but it's not quite the same.

We, along with some of J.'s flatmates and friends, went to get a delicious and cheap Indian dinner where I had wonderful curry and was warmed and got to walk around Edinburgh at night. We hung out for a while and got hygge.

Guesstimate on tea consumed: 2 litres.

Last day, J. was in class until lunch, and so I rose and took myself to the City Art Center, which is lovely because it contains four diverse and small exhibits. It is also free. Space exhibits, drawing exhibits, and a neat exhibit on treasured places in Scotland, done by Scottish artists or artists who spent a lot of their lives in Scotland. Met J. and we walked around the Royal Mile looking at touristy shops, and had delicious fish and chips. Then we split, and I went to the airport to go to London!

Card reader, check!

YO I found out that the computers in the computer lab here have card readers so I can share more pictures and stories! WIN.

OK. SO.

Phase two of my travel break gave me two nights in Copenhagen to recharge and do laundry and sleep. A lot. I also treated myself to a day in the city where I left for lunch and decided that I wasn't allowed to go back until dinner time. I walked from the metro stop west, just kind of meandering, until I found a really neat coffee shop, where I VOTED (fuck yeah!) and filled out some other paperwork for a few hours while enjoying hot chocolate and feeling happy. Then I meandered around, although thanks to the fact that I had meandered there without paying attention to where I was going, and to the fact that the sun was obscured by the clouds, I mistook north for east, and went essentially perpendicular to where I thought I was going. On the plus side I accidentally went to Nørrebro, one of Copenhagen's more ethnic neighborhoods and the site of the recent spate of gun related crimes that has put the city somewhat on edge. You can see a linear approximation of my route here, although bear in mind that since I walked and this is for driving, I was not nearly as efficient as Google would have me be. Total trip? closing in on 20 km, or about 12 miles. Hot damn!

Laundry followed, as well as frantic cleaning efforts. My last night before shipping out again happened to be the birthday of a girl in my building who is on the Party Committee with me, and we went out to dinner at a restaurant across the street from my kollegium. I ordered what was described to me as a kind of smørrebrod, or open faced sandwich, featuring fish and shrimp. It sounded sort of like a Danish fish and chips. I received absolute mounds of fried fish with an aeoli esque sauce, topped with those teeny shrimp and a spoonful of caviar. The bread portion of the sandwich was a lone piece of toast buried under this vast amount of seafood. All the meals were, I was informed by my table mates, far larger than is customary. It was delicious! I couldn't finish, and I couldn't get it to go because I was flying out early the next morning, but I was almost there. I have been avoiding eating out due to the expense, and in fact this was my second sit down experience in Copenhagen, and I am very glad I did it. So much fun, and I love spending time with the people in my building. One brave soul ordered dessert, and it too was gigantic - an ice cream dish the size of my head. Next plan: don't eat starting Thursday, come here Saturday for dinner.