Roman Holiday

Trip: 6


Life:16


Even th. ough I've been to Rome before it still floors you when you see the Collusium at the end of a street or walk into St. Peter's Basillica. There really is no place like it in the world as far as sights go and then on top of that you have the food and the weather. I'm not entirely sure why my ancestors ever left italy to be quite honest. Here are some pictures!

Me in front of the Forum, enjoying the most vitamin D I've gotten since I left Charleston ;)

With my amigo's right in front of the Collusium.

Stolen goods beeing displayed in Piazza Del Popollo. sorry Egypt, but at least they're taking care of it? It makes a good picture no matter how questionable crusader booty is. Plus about half the cool things in Rome come from ye olde thefts.

My travel buddies Megan, Ethan, and Jillian in front of the Trevi Fountain. Its cool enough during the day time but at night its wayyy less crouded and looks almost cooler.

I thought this was a really cool shot of the light coming into St. Peters, we went there for Mass on Sunday which is a really worthwhile thing to do if you have time when you visit Rome and shockingly uncrowded. In Italian of course, but you get the idea. Actually while it was going on I realized that this is what church was like for so many Catholics for so many centuries, mass in a language you can't understand. The feelings are still conveys of course but its difficult to get the message of the surmon. Interesting thing to do anyway.

The Pope. Nuff said.

Love it. This statue always reminds me of my Grandmother's house because she has a mini one somewhere in the piles of stuff upstairs. It gets the message across in minature but in real life its just so moving.

Belgian Adventures :)

Trip: 5

Life: 16

Let me start by saying I really really loved Brussels. Like I could see myself living there. It wasnt the most beautiful city I've ever seen but it was extremely diverse and just vibrant and alive every night of the week. Plus I think coming from Copenhagen, I couldn't get over the 60 degree weather. Its the little things in life ;)


European Parliment, one of the academic stops on our trip. As dorky as this is the academic stuff was pretty impressive they did a really good job setting things up for us. We met with the Danish leader of the Social Dems, a pretty major party in the EU, met with the Danish member of the Council, the US mission to the EU, the head of the US mission to NATO and our political actors. Not bad for 4 days.


Mussels in Brussels! No joke this is actually THE THING to get here, its like their national dish or something. My program took us all out ot this great seafood restaurant and hooked us up. Also you have to eat them with french fries, don't ask me why. They were really fantastic though, worth going back for.

My political interview group, Jesse looks like he's going to a wedding.

They took us to a CHOCOLATE factory. yet another reason to love belgium. It was actually really cool, I love how my program takes us on cultural excursions on all of our trips we really get to do some rediculous but awesome stuff.

Mannekin Pis. Belgian art at its finest. They LOVE this small peeing man, its like a national icon. Very odd.

The Catherdral

Grand place at night, right by our hotel. Its in the center of town and around on all the side streets are great restuarants clubs and pubs. Its def the place to start if you visit Brussels.

The Netherlands!!!

Trip: 4

Life: 15

Sorry its been so long I just got back from my long study tour last night, first stop THE NETHERLANDS!! Very exciting. We started in the Hague, which was unlike any city I'd ever been to before. It was VERY clean and it went from really new buildings/ cool modern archetecture to old row houses to peace palaces? I dunno its a bit strange, it seemed like a city that had been entirely intentionally structured, so everything seemed to work seemlessly but i wasn't really able to get a feel for the culture at all. It was an interesting time to be in the Netherlands as many of you may know because their coalition government just resigned over inreconcilable differences over the War in Afghanistan. The collapse has kind of made the Dutch people loose some faith in the Christian Democrats and Labor who were behind the dissolvement so an extremely right wing party who's entire platform is based on Anti- Muslim policies may gain power after the next election. Very interesting, and in my opinion REALLY irresponsible on the part of the current government. Alright enough politics here are the pictures!

the metro outside our hotel, like I said very chic new age architecture dominated half of the city.

The "peace palace" our second visit in the Hague, where the International Court of Arbitration and the ICJ are housed, created in 1899 to end conflicts between states. It was the brain child of Czar Nicholas II in an attempt to prevent small disputes between states from turning into wars... not very effective but still a pertty building.

Second stop in the Netherlands was at a Trappist monestary. Only 6 Trappist breweries still exist in the world today so it was very cool. Basically the idea behind it is that benedictine monks believe that hard work and prayer are the way to go in life, so they like to be 100% self sufficent. And a while back it occured to some genious monk that the easiest way to make enough money to keep a monestary running was to brew great beer. And the Trappist tradition was born.

(Jesus and the beer kettle)

Me and some new friends at the beer tasting! Very good is I may say so myself, and a fun time. That was it for the Netherlands, next stop Belgium!

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.