Festlavn! or the new adventures of Pippi Longstocking

This past weekend was Festlavn, which is the Danish version of Carnival or Mardi Gras. Overall, it is a Danish Halloween. Little kids go around to house to house dressed in costumes and sing a little song. They carry little boxes that people put money or sometimes candy into. That only occurs one night, but Festlavn lasts the entire weekend. It also includes lots of parades, including this one that we randomly happened onto Sunday afternoon.The Danish were not nearly as excited as we were about the parade. The streets were not even blocked off and cars kept going down the street. The parade also had to stop at red lights, which was kinda funny.
Another major tradition of Festlavn is the cat barrel. They used to stick a black cat in a barrel, and then beat it with sticks to keep bad luck/demons away. Also, they thought it would keep away the plague during the middle ages. Now, they obviously haven't killed a black cat for this tradition in about 100 years. They even sometimes used to just stick a dead black cat in the barrel and knock it down. Now, it is just filled with candy and whoever knocks it down becomes the Cat King/Queen. Sadly, I was one of the first to hit it so it didn't break, but my Pippi strength did let me hit it so hard that the lights went out for a few seconds.
Here are some of my friends from my kollegium. The Keops party committee threw a Festlavn costume party. From the right, JD was a paperback writer, Kelly was Rose Weasley, and Lucy was Princess Leia. I obviously was Pippi Longstocking, which I found for cheap in the toy store. It was a costume for 6-7 year olds, which needed some alterations to make fit,but still looked so good that I was a finalist for the costume competition.
Here is someof my competition in the costume contest, a gangsta fairy, a cop, and a ski bum. Inexplicably, the ski bum won. I was obviously robbed and should have won.

Two week update in one post

So, I will again try to make up for my blog slacking. Spoiler: This post will probably ramble.

So the Friday after the Danish resistance museum, it was a SUNNY DAY! These are to be cherished in the Danish February. So, after walking around enjoying the sun we decided to walk to the Statens Museum for Kunst (translation: State Museum for Art). This is on our bus/bike route to town, so I had been dying to go there. It is also free, so I will probably be going back. Overall, pretty good museum with a slightly confusing layout. In my guidebook it said that you flow naturally from the ancient art to the more mordern stuff, but we somehow completely failed. Instead, we ended up in the area for small children after first finding these lumps of bronze that we supposed to represent the energy of creation. This is our interpretation.

After all also going through the kids area, which included a sweet dancing video, we finally got to the actual museum. They would often put a really modern piece next to more classical pieces, so you can see how they relate, which is something I really liked.

The next day was Valentine's day, which was another sunny day! Kelly, Lindsay, and I decided to go ice skating on the main square right next to Nyhavn. I got to show off my awesome ice skating skills once again (I can skate backwards, everyone hold your applause). Also, since it was so nice out we ended up getting ice cream and ate it while sitting on the edge of the harbor. A big group of us also went out to a great italian dinner that night which overall added up to a pretty good valentine's day.

Other news, we have started to get some regular places, which is really exciting. One of them is Monday burger night at Peder Oxe. This is by far the best deal in Copenhagen. You pay 35 kroner (which is less than $7), and get a delicious burger, salad, potatoes, and free water! The restaurant is a former monastery. The only downsides to this place is that it only serves that, which really isn't a downside b/c it is so delicious, and that it is so busy. You have to hover over other people to get a table.

Other new regular places, Laundrymat Cafe and Pussy Galore's Flying Circus. These are both cafes with amazing hot chocolate where we go to do work. Some may recognize Laundrymat from Passport to Europe, the episode where Samantha Brown visits Copenhagen, she goes to laundrymat cafe and yes, you can actually do laundry there. Pussy Galore's, as I am sure my dad knows, is a character from Goldfinger. This is another cafe near us that used to be one of the favorite haunts of the crown prince. I expected it to be slightly more scandelous than it is.

Other major news, my kollegium has started up a cooking club. A pair cooks every Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and every meal has been DELCIOUS!. I started it off with my neighbor Emily, and we made penne with tomatoes, brie, and basil (I made the salad and garlic bread). Other meals that we have eaten: taco cassarole, macaroni and cheese, asian/hawaiian fusion, southern cookin', and white chocolate strawberry pancakes. I hope we are able to keep this club up because it is much better than my typical pasta or eggs in my room. It is interesting to try to cook for about 14 people when most of our cooking supplies are for one or two people, but the creativity adds to the wonderfullness of it.

This past weekend was Festlavn, but that deserves a whole post of its own that will be coming soon. Preview: it includes me dressed as Pippi Longstocking

I am a blog slacker

Sooooo, I have been a huge slacker on updating my blog. Sorry all to all my fans that I know have been crying every night when they check for a new update. Don't worry, I am still alive and having fun. The other Wednesday I had a field study for Danish class. We went to the Museum of the Danish Resistance. It was a smaller museum that talked about Denmark's behavior in WWII. They were occupied by Germany pretty quickly during the war, and eventually started doing acts of sabotage. Their biggest accomplishment was helping the Jewish population, about 7000 people, escape to Sweden when the Nazi's were going to take them to concentration camps. It was a nice museum and we then got coffee afterward, on DIS which was awesome.

Other major things from that day, I have officially found out contact solution is one of the hardest things to find in Denmark. You can only buy it in eyeglass stores, and then in really tiny and expensive bottles. This was after I bought two bottles of the wrong types of solution and almost burnt my eyes out.

Other cultural observations:

Doors in Denmark open the opposite way than in the U.S. This is something someone else pointed out to me, and it explained why I spend 30 seconds trying to open every door.

7-11 is everywhere, and one of the only places open all the time. It is amazing. It also has some great food, especially these chocolate muffins that I want to eat constantly but don't because I would come back 50 pounds heavier. They are literally dipped in chocolate, it is awesome.

Milk comes in way too small of packaging, I have to buy it almost every other day.

The Danes do not say excuse me, which is something I have to keep myself from doing all the time when I bump into someone on the bus. They also have no word for please, but don't think this means they are rude. They just feel like all this politeness is fake.

Danes do not jaywalk. This sometimes feels stupid, but makes some sense since you have to watch out for all those bikers. There is also a $200 fine, which is a pretty big reason not to jaywalk.

Pictures from Arhus

The interior of ARoS.

This is one of their most famous pieces, The Horse Sacrifice by Bjorn Norgaard. It was pretty grotesque, it was an event piece where they sacrificed a horse as protest against the Vietnam War.
Here is the piece that now is the symbol for ARoS. Its called Boy and is by the Australian artist Ron Mueck. He is in the traditional hunting crouch of Aborigines. It was so cool, because it was super-realistic, but huge!
This was the start of their temporary exhibit, Enter Active. You had to physically interact with each piece to make things happen. This room had fans so all of these blow-up punching bags were spinning and floating around, but if no one got in the way and interacted with them they would eventually all settle along the wall not moving.
This was a piece where the glass of the glasses would show whatever the glasses would be looking at.
This is a room where only two people would be allowed to enter at a time. One of the robotic wheelchairs was shy and one was extroverted, and they would move around and print you out messages. The emo robot I guess had a crush on me, because the message it printed out said I would die with you tonight. We had a very fast and intense relationship.
Here I'm running on a giant treadmill, where you controlled the picture. The faster you ran the better the resolution, and it changed how fast you were going. Also, the picture would eventually split, and you could choose which way you wanted to run. The only problem I had was figuring out how to gradually slow down to stop, while the treadmill continued at a full sprint.
This is the little canal running through Arhus. We ate most of our meals in this area and the little bar where we listened to music was right around the corner.
I ate a Holly bar at the rest stop in honor of Holly! It was pretty good, similar to a milky way with some almonds in it.

Arhus and Kalundborg

This Thursday through Saturday I had my short study tour for my core business class. On Wednesday we also had a field study that was related to it to Genzyme, a pharmaceutical company that produces medicines for rare disease. If you want a company to invest in its a smart one to choose, because they are the only ones who produce any medicines for many of these diseases. We also watched one of their surgeries, since they produce a mesh that grows replacement cartilage cells for people that have torn their patella. We toured the plant where they grow the cells. The people were kind of at a loss once they found out we weren't biology majors.

On Thursday we had to leave really early to travel to Kalundborg in the freezing slush. Our bus was late and I ended up standing there for a really long time. When I opened up my suitcase at the hostel all my clothes from the bottom of the suitcase were still wet. We visited several companies that were involved with Industrial Symbiosis, a group of company that uses each other's waste to conserve energy and be more efficient. We saw how the make insulin where we got to dress in these giant michelin man suits with hoods and booties. Everyone looked rediculous. Unfortunately, we also had to tour the waste water cleansing plant. As you can guess, it was full of some interesting smells.

After our semi-boring business stuff, we went into the town of Kalundborg where we met with students at the local Gymnasium. Gymnasium is a mix between high school and college, so the students ranged in age between 18 and 26. It was really cool, they gave us apple cake and coffee and took us on a little walking tour of Kalundborg. We also had a performance by their drama group that was performing Rent. They sang us a couple of the songs from Rent for us in Danish, which was something I never thought I would hear. After eating dinner at our hostel, the students took us out to one of the two bars in Kalundborg. This was one of my favorite nights so far, it was nice to hang out with a lot of Danes. I even learned some Danish drinking games, which are pretty similar to American ones. The only bad part was how addicted to smoking they all were, after about half an hour they would need to smoke! All of the Americans were not happy with how smoky all our clothes were the next day.

On Friday we took the ferry to Arhus and had a sweet lunch buffet on the ferry. My most terrifying moment of the trip was when our bus driver had to back onto the ferry. He seriously got within two inches of the wall. In Arhus we visited Pressilit, a toilet seat manufactuer. I know this sounds crazy, but they were by far the best company we visited! They manufacture higher end toilet seats, and even design some super fancy ones. They even made a disco ball one for Madonna. They had a great sense of humor, which I guess you have to have to be in the toilet industry. They also gave us a couple hard cover books, one with the history of the company and another with their designs. I think I have my new book to put next to the toilet for some reading material!

That night we dropped our stuff in the hostel, (six girls in a tiny room that basically only had 3 sets of bunk beds was super-fun) and then went off to downtown Arhus. We went ice skating on the town hall square where I showed off my sweet ice skating skills. My backwards skating was a big hit, thanks Homestead ice skating instructor. After skating our leaders bought us a drink and then we went out to dinner. I got Danish style pizza at Mackies, which basically meant slices of ham and crumbly bacon on cheese pizza. It was delicious. We then wandered and found a tiny bar that had an Irish singer playing. He was really good and played a huge range of songs, from Coldplay to Steve Miller Band to AC/DC.

Saturday was my favorite day of the trip, since we finally got to do some cultural stuff. We had a tour of ARoS, their amazing art museum. I'm going to post some of the pictures in my next post, but I wish I could have spent the whole day there. Our tour guide was really cute and nervous because it was her first tour in English. She did an excellent job. After ARoS we had a great lunch of chicken curry soup and delicious chicken pasta. We then had a scavenger hunt of Arhus, where we had to find pictures of things, like a Dane biking or a Danish pram and ask Danes their opinions about things. It was fun to go around and find all the stuff, but I think I would have rather just done a tour or spent more time in ARoS.

Temptation

I wish I could say I did lots of cultural stuff this weekend but I did not. Instead, this weekend was full of shopping. DIS is already really tempting shoppingwise, because we are literally right next to Stroget, the main shopping street that is surrounded by tons of other shopping streets. So far I have been very good and have not bought too much.

This Saturday was the shopping tour led by Anders, one of the DIS workers who is much more fashionable than I will ever be. Everything was fabulous and so interesting and it was so important to dress with irony. Only 6 people showed up to the tour when there was supposed to be 25. It was nice for the group to be smaller but sad because all the people I knew that were going to come had been kicked off the list because too many had signed up. I think the main reason there were so few people was because it was from 9 to 4, quite an early marathon of shopping for a Saturday. We went to 24 stores and only covered 3 side streets right near DIS.

Sunday was the long-awaited trip to Ikea! We decided to take the bus rather than go on the coordinated DIS trip because we could then sleep later. Ikea, basically the same as in the U.S., only cheaper and therefore more awesome. I mostly just got towels and some organizational stuff. Of course we also had to eat there and I got the swedish meatballs. Delicious!

Also on Sunday was the Superbowl. We had plans to have a party for it in our Kollegium, but after I realized it wouldn't be the U.S. commercials I kinda pooped out. The game didn't start until about 12:30 our time and I gave up after the first quarter. Yes, I was lame and don't really care about football.

Also, I want to wish a happy birthday to Amanda Olton and Emily Feldman!

Post for the Parents

Friends, feel free to ignore this. This is a post for my parents going over all my classes.

First class: International Business

This is my first class and also my core class. Since its my core class this is the group I am going to travel around with on my short and long study tours. This wee we are going to Arhus and Kalundborg in Western Denmark. Arhus is the 2nd largest city in Denmark and Kalundborg is a tiny town. My class has a pharmaceutical and green business focus, so we're going to visit a drug plant and a manufactuer of toilet seats. Later this semester we're going to Prague and Berlin for a week. I'm excited for the study tours because this class has been a little boring so far.

Second class: Hans Christian Anderson and the Golden Age

This is by far my favorite class. Its so much fun to read all the fairy tales and to see another side of the stories that I learned when I was little. Also, my teacher, Lisa Lotte is adorable. Kelly, a girl in my Kollegium, and I volunteered to be class reps just because we want to hang out with her. Class reps meet with the teachers a couple times a semester to offer student feedback. Eventually we're going to Odense, H.C. Anderson's hometown, which is supposed to be really cute.

Third class: Danish

Danish is both good and bad at the same time. German has been helping me out a lot, because I can hear the connection to the German words when they are pronounced. This is sometimes a hinderence though because I just want to say the German word! Also, Danish is really hard because how things are spelled are completely different than how they sound. For example, My name is Michelle is spelled Jeg hedder Michelle, but pronounced Yai helle Michelle. There are usually a bunch of silent letters and dropped word ending too. I like learning about the cultural stuff though. For example, the Danish say tre (3), syv (7), tretten (13) and knock underneath the table when they want to knock on wood.

Fourth class: International Advertising

This is my only class on Tuesday and Friday. We have mostly just watched Danish ads so far. Our semester long project is to compare the European and American ads of a certain category of goods, like potato chips. We are also going to do some group projects. Tomorrow will be exciting because a person from the marketing department of Diesel is going to come in and talk to us. Diesal is one of my biggest memories of Copenhagen, as we walked up and down Stroget, the big pedestrian shopping street about five times looking for a pair of pink Diesel sneakers. Thanks for that Amanda.