Getting ready to leave for Brussels!

Hey Sorry I know its been a while since I posted. Someone at DIS thinks that there should be a work aspect to this whole study abroad experience. Fools. No but seriously this past week has actually been a fairly busy work week which led me to become VERY envious of the Danes I'm living with who have no homework, papers, or grades and just take the classes at the hojskole for fun. You can definitely notice a bit of a culture difference in how we approach school, Danish University classes usually only have one assignment, and tests are primarily reserved for Math, Language, and high school. So they're kind of suprised to see us doing the magnitude of work that is expected, especially around midterm time. The idea of spending a long time sitting and just studying is kind of lost on them, and every evening you can see at least a few of them looking at us with a mixture of pity and confusion. I think we've scared them about what it means to be in University, even though its never like that in Denmark.

In the midst of our bust week tho we went out for my friend Kassandra's 21st! We went out to a fantastic restaurant but we realized that Copenhagen is pretty dead on Tuesday nights, but we had fun anyway.

Now I'm in the middle of packing for BRUSSELS! I'm going there for a week with my Poli-Sci class, and then I'm flying to Rome with my friends Jillian and Ethan. Planning Rome had been kind of intense but now that its all said and done I'm really really excited.

Carnival Party!

This weekend was another theme weekend at Grundtvigs! In Denmark, Valentine's Day is celebrated more like halloween, so in honor of that we had a carnival party at my Hojskole on Saturday night. Actually it was originally supposed to be a Mexican Party, but nobody really knew what that meant, so our carnival had some tex-mex spice thrown into it randomly but it worked out well. Lots of fun and rediculous games :)



The only real costume requirement was colors and a mask, that's me with the bow in case you can't tell



Then, as always there was some fun and games in the gym, this time we had about 15 pinatas set up. This is just a goofing around shot though...



They played the macarena about 5 times on repeat. As you can see from the look of confusion on my face it's been a while since I've had to recall that particular dance... I think I did ok though




Then these are all the DIS kids living at Grundtvigs! I live with an amazing group of people, I really lucked out housing wise.

My First Run-In with Universal Healthcare

So my visit to the hospital in HIllerod definitely provided some food for thought. Especially since I had 26 hours to do nothing but sleep, think, and watch the news in Danish. The whole experience kind of brought to light a lot of the differences between our cultures that are fairly understated but mean a lot in the long run. The whole healthcare system relies on the Danes almost unwavering group mentality. At the hospital there was only one real que for surgery, and so because my operation was not life threatening I kept getting bumped by other patients who were coming in. Which is of course reasonable except that there was no real time schedule for me or anyone to go by. After 11 hours of waiting in a hospital bed with an IV in my arm I was told to get some rest and that maybe the doctor would have time to see me tomorrow. From the Danish persepective this is completely reasonable, more serious cases come first end of story. From the American perspective that is all well and good, but we want some kind of time frame, if you can't treat me today then fine but make me an appointment for 7:30 tomorrow or whatever.

Which gets me to another difference, how we value time and prioritize health. When it was still unclear whether or not I was going to have to miss a 3rd day of classes I said to the nurse something along the lines of, "I need to know if this is going to happen, I can't just miss another day of classes" to which she responded, "why not?" which is kind of a funny question that we don't really ask ourselves very much. How could I be thinking about missing school at such a time?

Alright that's enough drugged up rambling for me, in a day or so I might actually write something coherent. No promises.

Hamburg!

country count!

Trip: 3

Life: 14

My trip to Hamburg was not my first trip to Germany, but it was VERY different from what I had seen of the country before. When my family and I did our grand alps tour in 2006 we stopped in Bovaria briefly. It was all mountains and Leiderhosen, which is not Hamburg at all. This city is an economic powerhouse, and has been basically since it was founded by Charlemagne in the 800s. We did a lot of things while we were there and I have a TON of pictures but I'm just going to pick out the things that struck me while I was there.

We started out our time in Hamburg by going on a walking tour of the city, which was cool but freezing. Northern Europe has been pummelled by absurd amounts of snow (kinda like home). These pictures are all from St. Nicholas' church which used to be one of Hamburgs jewels but was destroyed during the bombing of the city during WWII. Today it stands as an eerie reminder of that period of the cities history. Its also in the dead center of the city, Like St. Patricks in NYC.

We then took a boat tour of the Harbor which was slightly terrifying given the absurd amount of ice we were driving through. You could hear it scraping along the hull the whole time, and people kept nervously making titanic references. I didnt include pictures but the harbor tour was mostly an intro to how obscenely productive Hamburg is, and gave us our first glance at how rich the city really is.



If we didn't get the message then our tour of "townhall" the next day drove the message home. Their town hall has more rooms than buckingham palace and was built in the mid 1800s after a fire destroyed the old one.

Its also connected through this courtyard to the stock exchange. Thats the building you see behind the fountain, slightly less impressive. The fountain is a dedicated to the people who died in the Cholera Epedimic. Its quite breathtaking.

This picture is also from the city hall, from the enterence to the Senate Chamber. If you look above the door, you can see the slogan "gott mit uns" which our German tour guide explained meant "god with us" in German. She said it showed the importance that Christianity in the workings of the Hamburg government at the time the town hall was built. When we got back on the bus, our professor who was Danish told us that that saying had a very different connotation in Denmark, because it had been imprinted on the belt buckles of all the Nazi soldiers and was now permenantly associated with them.

That leads me to the final thing we did in Germany, which was a visit to the Neuengamme concentration camp which is like 30 minutes out side Hamburg. It was not at all what I expected, although I dont know what I expected to be honest. It was a labor camp, not an extermination camp, and it was where teh majority of Danish political prisoners were held. The camp had 106,000 prisoners around 55,000 who last their lives. After the war it was immediately changed into a regular prison and the Cremetorium and the barricks were taken down. The tour guide was extremely good, and set on telling us the whole story, which made it extremely different than other tellings of the holocaust that I had heard previously.