DENMARK – LAND OF VIKINGS AND DANISH PASTRIES

Before I got here, when I thought about Denmark I thought about Danish ice-creams, Danish pastries and Danish butter cookies. Now that I’m here, I’ve added sausages and beer to the list.
But more seriously, I’ve been in Copenhagen (or København, as it’s written here) for a month now and I just love it. The city is amazing! There is so much to see and I keep asking what this building or that building is (if it were in NZ it would be important if it were that nice) but no, that’s just someone’s house or an office or something. There’s so much more to it than just good food (although you should check out smørrebrød, (huge open face sandwiches)). I already have a list a page long of things I have to do just in and around Copenhagen, not to mention the rest of Denmark, or the rest of Europe for that matter.

There’s no way I can give a minute-by-minute account of what I’m up to here. If I did you’d probably be bored because I’m at uni and most of the time I have a very quiet life. Sometimes I do interesting things though so I’ll just post photos and brief ‘blurbs’ from time to time. But for now, I’ll give you a brief overview of what’s going on.

So I’m studying at the University of Copenhagen, in the Political Science Department (Statskundskab, which is really a very ugly word). I’m looking at the Danish Political System (which I’m sure will be of no use to me but I might as well do something Danish) and Social Movements and Political Development in the Third World. Basically I turn up for class 2 hours per week per course and I’ve got massive amount of reading to do and then for my ‘exam’ I write an essay, topic of my choosing. And you can work in up to groups of three. And that’s your entire grade. It is however slightly harder than my course on Danish culture. All I have to do is turn up to 80% of the classes (or get a friend to mark me off). But it’s an interesting course. We do some Danish history, some mythology, some cinema and we get to go on excursions.

I’m living in a very Copenhagen apartment. That means that it’s small and in a really tall building and the entire street is full of such buildings. But I like it. It’s cute. Ridiculously small (as in, when you have a shower you have to put the toilet paper outside otherwise it will get wet) and expensive by NZ standards but as I keep being told, that’s Copenhagen for you. Some international students don’t have anywhere at all to live yet so I’m not going to complain. It’s a rather strange set-up though. The people we’re renting from have gone on exchange to England for a semester so they’ve left everything pretty much as it was but have put my bed into the living room. So I’m still trying to decide whether my I’m sleeping in the living room or there’s a dining room in my bedroom. I share the apartment with another exchange student. She’s from America and goes to Dartmouth. We get on well and have the same ideas about living stuff like cooking (ie neither of us know how). It’s strange living in a house with only one other person. It’s very quiet and we end up watching a lot of TV for lack of anything else to do. I’m not used to having evenings free. I always wish I did so I could read or play my guitar or use my sewing machine. And now I have all this free time but oh, no books or guitar or sewing machine. I’m thinking of taking up knitting.

You meet some interesting people when you’re on exchange. I’ve met people from just about everywhere and so I end up doing things like going to ‘Friday bar’ with some Austrians, spending Saturday afternoon with some Czech’s, Saturday evenings with Americans and going to a Ugandan church on Sundays. ‘Friday bar’ is probably something I should mention. Most departments have a bar, on campus, where students can go to get a drink at any time but there’s a huge party there every Friday night. Drinking is a very Danish thing. People do it all the time. A guy in front of my on the bus was quite happily drinking a Smirnoff at 3 in the afternoon. In all of the plads (like little squares dotted throughout the city centre) they have set up all of these outdoor bars for summer. You can buy alcohol in any café, any supermarket, any 7-11. It’s just the culture. You can drink anywhere at any time. And because it’s just the culture of it, people do it sensibly. It would be just like how we (or at least I) drink coffee. I guess that’s what happens when you live in the city with most breweries per capita. It’s also the city with the highest cost of living in Europe (as in, $20 for cheese, $7 for ice-cream). We’ll see how that works out.

the queen of denmarks house

Bill Gates' boat parked outside the queen of denmark's house