Sprung

Spring is in the air! I just went for a lovely walk around my neighborhood to stretch my sore muscles and stepped in dog shit (they encourage the dogs to poop everywhere here, its fucked!)

There were so many people outside raking their little yards and working on their cars. Its really nice. I even saw two birds having sex on a chimney outside my window last week. It was kind of violent looking...I had never seen bird intercourse before then and was always curious.

London was a blast and I am going to Bob Dylan tonight! I am still rushing to put the final touches on my Norway trip which, as always, ended up being pricey, but hey thats Scandinavia. I leave tomorrow at the buttcrack of dawn. I don't consider myself high maintenance but this is my first time traveling with only a backpack cool person style and I am excited. Before I have always had a backpack and a smaller bag or two so this feels good. When I get back I have so many pages to write about nothing significant or interesting. 35 just for research and a few other 10+ page papers. I am pretty over school right about now. But I still looooovvveee Denmark :)

13

Two Friday the thirteenths in a row! Another one will happen in November I think. This only happens every 11 years or something. Kind of cool.

School is busy. I have so many pages to write that I don't even know where to start, for all different kinds of analytical essays, research papers, etc.

Some fantastic things:

I am going to London in about a week with my school

Then I am going to see Bob Dylan in concert back here in Copenhagen

Then I am going to take a tour around Norway by myself and it should be beautiful

Then Greta comes to visit!!

Then it is Easter at the summerhouse by the coast with the host family

After that there is only a month left. I am trying to live in the present, but my research instructor has broken the semester down for us to make us get our asses in gear. Bitter sweet, bitter sweet.

Pretty cool if you ask me

Viggo Mortensen's son is in my Danish class! You may recognize Viggo from a little film called Lord of the Rings. His kid was giving a presentation in class just we all had to, and yup, there he is talking about his Xmas vacation in Idaho with his Dad, Mr. Aragorn!

Death by Research

So this semester just might kill me.

Instead of playing with children one day a week and talking about it another, I am doing real hard core academic school now and RESEARCH. I am carrying a lot of negative energy around with me these days because of this research project I am doing unwillingly. There is no way of getting out of it and I need to just embrace it at this point, but hellllooo I would never voluntarily sign up to do research in my whole life, let alone abroad in a cold country where most literature is in Danish and people speak…Danish. I am looking into aggressive fantasy play in children under the age of 10 and how it is perceived and dealt with here in Denmark.
On a lighter note, here are some snippets of my portfolio from last semester when I was working at my preschool. The center is huge on documentation, so they take a lot of pictures and had me make these for the classroom so the parents could see what we did that day. Most of the pictures are from an extended art, music, and movement project I did with them over the course of about a month. I might get to go back and see my kiddies when conducting interviews at the center so that is one good thing that could come from the research :)

OH OH and one of my good friends here is an Alpha Gam. We didn’t even know it until yesterday and it was so exciting to meet another one all the way in Denmark. She goes to school in Illinois. The lifeguard at my camp this summer was an AGD and I sat next to one when flying home from Michigan this summer. Its fun.

This weekend is a thing called “Festilavn” and frankly I don’t know much about it but I will report back after its all said and done. It is sort of combination between Mardi Gras, Carnivale, Halloween, and Mexican birthday parties so can you say SHITSHOW?

Desire and Pain

It’s certainly been a while, so story time!

I have had my same cell phone back in the USA since I was 16 years old. Its huge, its beat up, but it works and I love it. I hate change in terms of technology so I am really attached to that phone. For example, using an apple computer or being forced to send a text on someone else’s phone will ruin my day. I am stubborn, but whatever. So in these almost 5 years of sweet mobile phone ownership, my phone and I have been through a lot. And it still works. Everyone has a broken phone story, but I never had one because my phone just rocks so much…

Finally, though, I have a story about (almost) killing a phone!

So the other night we went to a place called Kulør bar and it is a lovely club where you pay 60 DKK to get in and you get unlimited beer from 11-1. There are great lights and music and we had an amazing time. We were making our way home from the metro (it’s a bit of a walk) but we all had to pee really bad from all that beer. So we go on the side of the road and my friends pee closer to the road and I don’t know why I went further away, but I was walking in a field about to go pee and the next thing I know I am up to my chest in water and its all dark! I am somehow fallen into a pond and I couldn’t get out. My scarf had fallen over my eyes and for a second it was kind of nice down in that puddle of water, I almost wanted to just stay there. I eventually pulled myself out though and was freezing and completely soaked. So we walked the rest of the way home, hung up my clothes and went to sleep. I didn’t bring much out with me, thank baby jesus. But I was wearing my Italian leather shoes and my piccell was in my pocket. It was so broken for a while, but after a few days of drying it out and trying it over and over again I think its back to its working state :) It’s a piece of shit phone but I would have had to pay a lot of money for it because I am only renting it…I am gonna have to go back to this pond and see where the hell I was. It was too dark to know…I don’t think it’s always a pond, just built up swamp or something. Quite a good night I must say, in retrospect and now that my phone is working. I just need to stop thinking I can speak Danish really well to everyone I meet once I am drunk, hahahaa (awfully embarrassing!)

Another time a few weeks ago my host mom gets a call from some people saying they need some old people for a music video out at this old military base close to the sea. She runs an old people’s center so she had plenty of active old people who wanted to be in this music video. We had no idea what the hell this would entail, but we round up all the old people and drive out to this place. Its 8pm at night, dark, and absolutely freezing. The wind is blowing, but they had bribed the old people with chili con carne and beer. So we are chilling in the tent and finally, they call us all out for the music video. The band is mostly comprised of Swedes who sing in English. They are called….EVIL MASSACRE!!!! Us youngins (my new roommate Michelle and I) didn’t get to be in the music video but just watched and couldn’t stop laughing. It was the most bizarre thing in the world; especially for my roommate considering this was her second night in the country HAHA. So there was this death metal band of everyone dressed in black, with skulls all around in an old army fort. They have long hair and there is fire going on in the background. The words to the song are about fearing upside down crosses and Lucifer and the old people are just standing on this hill with fire watching this band. They run through the song a few times and Michelle and I run off and go meet this silly band (they are all really nice and not hard asses at all as their music might indicate). It was really cool to see how a music video is made. At the end of it all we go back out of the tent after chatting with the band and the director is having the old people chant something. As we were leaving I asked one of the ladies what they made her say and she said that she didn’t even know because it was something in English. Turns out they made all these old Danish people who don’t speak English chant “desire and pain, desire and pain”! Haaaa. It’s an ongoing joke around here now. So bizarre. And they even want one of the ladies back to do some more shots for the video…

Oh this life.