So I am finally taking the time to write! This is going to be very long because I have so much to say and I haven’t yet had time to sit down and collect myself to write about my first two weeks and actually do them justice. I come home every day, exhausted, and so full. Full of new thoughts, feelings, observations, lessons, challenges, etc. and I wish I always took the time to jot down everything, but time would never permit.
First of all, I have the most perfect living situation. I live with a host family that consists of my host mom, her son, and another American student studying abroad. My host mom, Bodil, is 50 years old and a vegetarian. She is the cutest and most energetic woman I have ever met, especially at age 50. I mean, 50 isn’t that old, but compared to some 50 year olds I know, this woman is off the heezy. The very first day that we get here, she picks us up from the University of Copenhagen in her mother’s car that she prays doesn’t break down along the way (she doesn’t own a car and had to borrow her mothers old beater). We rush to her house, dump our luggage and she takes us swimming right away in the place where the Baltic and North Seas meet. The day before, when I landed in Copenhagen, it was freezing, pouring down raining, and even though the weather was decent the day she picked us up, I honestly thought the woman was crazy! But we went swimming and it was fantastic. She took us out on the town exploring that night, cooked us dinner, and bought us an ice cream. The last two weeks have essentially been made up of similar things every night. She is so spunky and hilarious! She works at a center for retired people and almost runs the place herself with only one employee. She has a 57 year old boyfriend named Hans (I almost shat my pants when I met him, he looks like he could be 40!), and we keep discovering random wonderful things about this well seasoned woman. She makes arts and crafts to sell at the Christmas fair in Christiana, never actually was married to the father of her two children, plays accordion, she went to clown/mime school, she put legs on the famous Little Mermaid, trying to “normalize” her, in protest to the normalization of Christiana (hippie commune nearby of 850 people), and she never has eaten meat in her life (she was born, raised, and is a vegetarian). And she has had something like 7 host students before us.
Her son, Rasmus, is 18 and very shy. Most Danes speak English very well but he doesn’t. Bodil says that it is because he is shy and just doesn’t like learning it. I would think that with all of the Americans in an out of his house over the last few years he might be a little more motivated, but I can’t blame him. He is pretty funny but we don’t see too much of him. He has a little garden house in the back where he lives and comes and goes as he pleases. Children and teenagers have a lot more freedom and independence here. He has a girl friend that is always in the back house, but none of us, not even Bodil, have met her.
Taylor, the other American girl living here, is from San Francisco but goes to school at Oberlin University in Ohio. Taylor is truly amazing. We are just similar enough and different in all the right ways so we click really well. On the second day we were here, it felt as if we had known each other for years. Its great having a roommate in a host family because I get the best of both worlds, an instant friend, and someone to ride the bus with, etc. She is a medical student which is freaking intense, is a vegetarian, and loves singing and theatre stuff just like me. There is a ton more I could say about her, and I love analyzing her because she is really interesting, but I will not bore the world with that.
Bodil also has one other daughter named Sif who is incredible as well. At 14 she went away to boarding school, didn’t like it so she left, but she never came back home. She has been moved out of the house since, doing all sorts of advocacy things around Copenhagen and living what sounds like a splendid life. She also has spent a lot of time in Africa working with various groups, teaching and nursing. She just moved out of Copenhagen to go to a different school and I am sad because she knows where the good sushi is and where the good clubs are. At the school she is at now she is learning how to be a “Chaos Pilot” which is a person who is trained to essentially do anything in any context (social, political, medical, psychological, environmental, etc) in crises and the chaos of the world.
In Denmark it is really uncommon for family members to move away from one another. Even a few hours away is considered a big deal. Because the entire family lives so close I have been fortunate enough to meet them on two occasions. Tons of brothers and sisters, and children, and I can’t even keep them straight. The grandmas are the best and so funny. At Sif’s going away party we all got a little swishy and they busted out the guitar and started to sing us every song you could think of about California since that’s where Tay and I are from. “California Dreamin”, “Hotel California”, “If you’re going to San Francisco”. It was so amazing. And at these family gatherings there is always tea, tons of food, coffee, beer, wine, more tea, and more food (especially sweets, bread, and cheese!)
My school is a pretty important part of my experience so far, as I am actually supposed to be studying here. Sometimes I feel like I am on a vacation and have to remind myself that I live here now and that I do have classes, hehe. DIS, the Danish Institute for Study Abroad, is a great school. I can’t imagine studying abroad any other way. I feel like I get enough cultural immersion and still get to be taught in English. DIS is a program of about 500 international students. There are mostly just American students in the program though. I have met some kids from Poland, Egypt, and China, but yes it is mostly Americans. And most of these kids are from private east coast colleges. I feel out of my league sometimes because there often is a sea of polo shirts charging massive amounts of alcoholic beverages to their MasterCard, talking about all of these fancy private school things. My roommate who is at a private school is paying 48,000 dollars a year for college. I don’t understand how that is even an option. I pay about 16,000 a year at SSU (and thats a lot to me!), and I’m paying a little over 20,000 to be in Denmark. Oh this world. I also get a little intimidated in the classroom because I am not a psychology major and hardly have taken any classes and also these kids are from elite schools blah blah blah.
The classes I am taking are: Children in a Multicultural Setting: Theory and Practicum. The practicum is very cool. I get to go to a pre school 5 hours a week for 10 weeks and interact, play, and observe Danish children 0-6. It’s hard with the language barrier, but I had my first day this week and it was really fun. The theory is where we talk about our experiences and give our practicum some context within multicultural pedagogy. I am also taking Danish Language and Culture. It is so fast paced and Danish is a really difficult language to get. A word might have 10 letters, but only 4 of them are pronounced. There are also three new vowels and all of these other instances where there aren’t rules for anything, you just have to guess. Developmental Disorders is what it says; westudy the different developmental pathways psychopathologies take in children and adolescents. And last but not least, the Welfare of Children which takes kind of a social work perspective at looking at children and their rights and welfare. I was enrolled in this amazing Holocaust and Genocide course instead of Welfare of Children, but I had to drop it because it is on the same day as my practicum. We were going to take a trip to Hamburg and see a real work camp and everything. Bummer.
My schedule is really nice; I am almost always done by 2 on Monday and Friday. Wednesday there are no classes because the day is reserved for various field studies that vary by class, and Thursday I only have to go to my practicum site in the morning and then I am finished. Time seems to go by so much quicker here, and taking the bus takes a while. I am so used to rolling out of bed 15 minutes before class and riding my bike over to Stevenson. Now I my commute can sometimes take an hour if the traffic is bad. I like taking the bus though. It lets me relax and reorganize or study each day before school. At night or during less busy times of the day it only takes about 20 minutes to get into town. Commuting is just the Danish way of life.
DIS is so great to me because I am really getting a good bargain for my money. They arranged my housing for me. My meals are included in my housing. Transportation is included in my overall program costs, so they calculated how much money I would need based on my housing location and gave me the kroner to go get my train pass. Greta said, “They hold your hand in your program don’t they?” and HELL YES they do! I like it this way :) I am still getting the same great experiences with a lot less stress. I am getting credit at my home university while being in Europe and getting taught in English. There are social events that they organize for us and we get good discounts at a lot of places. For example, they had a welcome party at this club called LUUX where we got free admission and two free drinks for being with DIS. This place was nice and let me tell you I will never get to go there again. Too expensive and ritzy.
Through our survival Danish class they gave us an address of a café and we had to be able to find the place in order to get a free meal and drink and hang out there. Just really fun stuff like that. I got some free tours around the city by bike and by bus, and they took us to a grocery store so we could understand money and food. There is always something going on around here and I get to explore on my own too. If nothing else, I am meeting a lot of people from all over the United States :)
Also with my program we get study tours that are included in our program costs! We get a short tour to Western Denmark with our core class this next weekend and then we get a week long tour as well. My class is going to Sweden and Estonia! I am so excited because I will get to see two countries and all I am expected to pay for is one meal a day. These trips are related to our classes and we do a lot of academic shtuff, but it should be amazing and its way better than sitting in a classroom all day long. After that we get two weeks free to travel and I have no idea where I am going. Shit. When you break the semester down logistically with breaks and trips, it seems very short and it will be over in no time.
These past two weeks here, within DIS, have reminded me a little bit of the first two weeks of freshman year. Everyone is so excited to be in a new place so everyone is trying to make their friends and groups, and is trying to go and see everything all at once. I have to remind myself that is week 2 of 9 months. Maybe it’s different because I am staying for two semesters while most of my peers are staying for only one semester, but I am not in any rush.
And as far as the group dynamics go, I suck. I am being perfectly social, I go out and do stuff most nights and have a fantastic time, but I haven’t latched tightly on to any one group or person. I mean, Taylor is probably my closest compadre, and some SSU ladies, and kids from my programs, but other than that I am a loner. Loner sounds so negative, I wish there was another word for it! It doesn’t really faze me because it’s been this way forever. I don’t really notice it either, I just sometimes prefer to be alone with my own thoughts and there is something so nice about exploring the city on my own. I don’t feel lonely or anything, but I do get reminded that I am alone a lot when I see others who already have these creepy American cliques walking around together all the time. I think I am having a hard time articulating what I mean. It isn’t as negative as I write it, I swear. Hehe. I just like being friends with awide variety of people and I think I find that latching on to one group or person is severely limiting. I don’t know if I resist latching on to people on purpose or if it is a subconscious thing, but I am just so weird sometimes. I like making my own decisions and living for myself, not for a group, or another person who I am attached at the hip with.
Well, on another note, aside from me being a “loner”, I have been having a great time. Things don’t really pick up around here until 1am, so even if you go out early and try to come home early, it never works. Both of my big nights out have resulted with my not coming home until the sun was up because the nights are just so crazy. And what’s great about it is that you can get a bus or a metro home at almost any time. You don’t have to worry about drinking and driving, finding a designated driver, coming home too late, finding parking, etc.
We (Taylor, Laura, and I) met some Danes who live right by my school and we have hung out with them a bit. It’s kind of special to meet locals since we have school with Americans. They are so fun to hang out with and the kind of music that these boys like is all our really bad late 90’s/early 2000 wannabe baddass music like LimpBizkit, Linkin Park, Aqua, and Bloodhound Gang. I never sang so much drunken Linkin Park before in my life! It’s really strange that I can just go into a store or a bar (more often a store because bars are too expensive!) and get drinks! There is a bar right near the school called the Australian bar, but they really should rename it the American bar because that’s where half of DIS starts their night off. It has pool tables, relatively cheap beer, and tequila Tuesdays yeee! The other night we even went to a Danish karaoke bar. So much fun. Danish music is the best.
Tonight we are having a bon fire by my house in this really pretty nature area. The weather is pretty nice for Denmark in September and it isn’t expected to last too long, but we are making the most of it!
(I could talk about so many more things, but if you made it this far, congratulations! This entry is effing long. I just had to get the basics out there, never again I swear!)
