Legal, Pt. 2

I feel too young to be 21. And really, it doesn't mean anything to be 21 in Europe, so I think I'll continue to be 20 until December 18 when acknowledging being a year older will be relevant.

Despite my denial, my family and friends on both sides of the Atlantic made yesterday a wonderful day for me. Birthday celebration started with a night out on Thursday, culture night in Copenhagen on Friday, dinner and drinks out on Saturday, a 12-person 3-course birthday dinner Sunday night, and an intimate "family" birthday dinner last night.

Friday's culture night is an annual event in CPH. For $18 you get public transportation around the city and admission to 100 attractions, including parliament, dance lessons, historical reenactments, a haunted house, an afterparty thrown by Carlsberg brewery, and many more. I wish that I could tell you I had a culturally rich experience but lines were long and the night wasn't long enough. However, Chelsea and I had reindeer soup.

On Saturday I had Mexican food for the first time since arriving and it was fabulous. Thanks Duyen for the treat! (picture to come)

And Lisbeth was so generous to have us all over Sunday night. To prepare, we made 72 frikadellas (large Danish meatballs), 2 pans of scalloped potatoes, green bean and pepper salad, two cheesecakes, and a big bowl of "apple cake." And the leftovers are so worth it. I couldn't thank her enough!


Chelsea, Alicia, Jessie, Liz, Cara, Lindsay, Sam, Hannah, and Alexis on Sunday night

My gift from Lisbeth - a book of Hans Christian Andersen's fairytales



My gift from my "second" host mom, Lone - a pandora bracelet

Last weekend, when we returned from our long study tours, Lisbeth and Lone took Chelsea and I to the south of Zealand and we stayed with their friend Helle in her employer's "summer cottage." It was a nice little girls weekend to shop, talk, relax, eat (alot), look at pictures, watch a movie, and take a walk at the beach.

On the way back we hiked at Møns Klint, a cliff made of chalk on the eastern coast, a popular tourist attraction and the only cliff in Denmark. Though little in the way of natural beauty could astound me after being in Scotland, it is a remarkable place that was worth seeing.


The weeks are increasingly busy as my weekends are spent gallavanting around Europe or having birthdays. Cramming volunteering, class, group meetings, commuting time, field trips and now homework into 5 days is getting harder but I haven't been very stressed out here and I hope it stays that way. I took a bike ride today and saw how the leaves are changing color and falling, and saw a rainbow, and it epitomized my experience here. It's like a movie. And I have time to stop and appreciate the beauty of nature. I hope some of these "lessons" that I've learned will transfer back home. Speaking of, I'm exactly halfway through my time here.

Again I'd like to thank all of my family and friends for birthday wishes and gifts - it made my non-conventional 21st really enjoyable.

Off to Norway this weekend, will update when I get back!

Slàinte to Scotland

I almost don't want to write about my week in Scotland because there's no way I could remember everything or begin to describe it, with words or pictures. The country was beautiful, and the greenness and hills was so nice to see compared to Denmark.

 

We started our week in Glasgow on Sunday. We went to Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum, Scotland's most visited attraction, with 22 themed galleries. Afterward I meditated for the first time at the Vajrayana Buddhist Centre. It was hard to stay awake, but it was a positive experience. We concentrated on turning our feelings outward and focusing on compassion during the meditation. Also, no one tried to convert us.

On Monday, we traveled out to the countryside to Fife to visit the Playfield Institute, located on the grounds of an old asylum. It's a resource for first-line professionals working with children and adolescents, including social workers, teachers, foster parents, etc. The institute provides free training classes and support to for these local adults to promote mental health and well-being of children. They focus on developing self-worth rather than self-esteem and separating problems from solutions.

 

That night we went to Glengoyne Distillery in the southern Highlands, close to Loch Lomond. We toured the distillery and sampled 10, 12, 17, and 21 year old whiskeys. Some of us enjoyed this more than others, - I had no problem with it. Needless to say, our bus ride to dinner was a bit rowdy, with multiple rounds singing and a lot of snuggling. Our class is very close.

Tuesday we had some academic visits, unbelievable tea and treats, and went to a weird cult-like meditation place. But that night we went to the oldest bar in Glasgow, Scotia Bar, established 1792. My classmate Andrew took his guitar, and we hung out with a group of locals, including the owner of the bar, who had their own guitars. There was a round of Hey Jude, All along the Watchtower, and we heard some traditional Scottish music, too. This was one of my favorite parts of the week.

 

Wednesday we went over to Glasgow's prettier sister, Edinburgh, and our minds were blown. There's no wonder Will and Kate met there, it's a town made for romance. We had a walking tour to begin the day, and that afternoon we hiked up to Arthur's Seat, the peak of a clump of high hills in the middle of the city, 823 ft above ground. The feeling at the top was the feeling of conquering the world. The wind was so strong it was dangerous to stand at some points. I felt that incredible natural high that carried me through the rest of the night. We had a casual pub dinner at the Fiddler's elbow that night, enjoyed some live music, and went to be early (i.e. 12:30p).

 
 

Thursday we toured Edinburgh castle, which sits atop volcanic Castle Rock and was built in the 1100s. Our tour started in the rain so the pictures weren't great but the view was nice and castles are generally impressive. Follow the link if you're interested. For our last night, nearly all of us went to The Conan Doyle, chaparones included, a pub named for the author of Sherlock Holmes. We also visited The World's End pub, which I heard might have been on the edge of the city in a former age, signifying, of course, the only relevant border in the world. It's nice to be in places where even the pubs are full of history.

Scotland's weather was similar enough to Danish weather but it seemed even more unpredictable, and when it rained, it poured and blew. I think I could live with Danish weather but maybe not Scottish.

I wish I could be more detailed in my descriptions of our visits and the history behind each of them, but in that case I could go on forever. There's a lot I didn't cover here, but be assured the trip went far beyond my expectations and I'm so glad I chose Scotland. And Positive Psych A is full of great people that I'm so glad I've gotten to meet.

 

And many thanks to my classmates from whom I graciously stole some of these beautiful shots.

Holger Dansk and Neuengamme

I apologize that it's been so long since I've updated. Every night I write in my planner that I'm going to update and it just doesn't happen, but I'm glad to be so busy. I'll give some highlights.

Last week, Lone and Lisbeth took me and Chelsea to Kronborg castle in Helsingor, the fictional home of Shakespeare's Hamlet. THIS was a real castle. It was built in the middle ages, and sits at the northern tip of Zealand. Across the sound is Sweden - we were so close to the border that we were roaming. It was a cloudy day but the land was still beautiful. We took a tour through the casements, which were underground and sealed in the dark, where soldiers stayed and sometimes prisoners. If soldiers were found asleep on guard they'd be shot immediately, and some actually pretended to be asleep in an act of indirect suicide because life in the casements was so terrible (physical abuse, bad food, etc.). Also down in the casemates sits Holger Dansk ("Holger the Dane"), a legendary character who sits "sleeping," in wait for the Kingdom of Denmark to enter war, at which he will arise and slay Denmark's enemies with his giant sword. Interestingly, a Danish resistance group during WWII named itself "Holger Dansk" in his honor.

Within the castle we saw the courtyard, royal apartments (home of the king and queen), ballroom, and little hall. The little hall holds 14 handwoven tapestries commissioned in 1580 by King Frederick the II for a competition between he and the Swedish king, in which each boasted they had more royal ancestry. Frederick won, but he cheated, and had tapestries done of cousins or men who existed only in legends. In the picture to the left you can see cannons, which are shot annually when the queen passes through the sound, or on her birthday, anniversary, etc. I believe they are the oldest cannons still in use.


I'm sorry that the pictures are so unorganized, blogger doesn't make it easy.

Last weekend, 9/24-9/25, my Holocaust and Genocide class went to Hamburg, Germany, to see the city and Neuengamme concentration camp. We couldn't have asked for better weather (high of 73), but I could not ignore the irony in the beauty of the day contrasted with the ghastliness of where we were.

Hamburg itself is a nice city. Half of it is old, including the ornate Town Hall, churches, and the old seaport. But since the 1943 Allied air raids, the other half has been rebuilt into a modern city with wide boulevards and shiny new buildings.

St. Nikolai Church

St. Michael's Cathedral

View from St. Michael's

Town Hall

(Random building)

The most interesting of these pictures is St. Nikolai, because half of it is missing, and the blackness of the steeple is a result of the firestorm of bombs, known as "Operation Gommorah" (i.e. Biblical reference to Sodom and Gommorah). A single night of air raids leveled most of the city and caused the deaths of 46,000 Germans. Torben, our professor, is an amazing storyteller and he really made this incident come to life for us. For example, to escape the fire people were jumping into the large pond in the middle of the city, but the air was so hot the water started to boil.

We also visited Bullenhuser Damm School, the site at which 20 Jewish children who had been used in medical experiments and 10 adults were killed on April 20, 1945. Although the basement where the murders took place is now a memorial, the rest of the building is now a kindergarten.

A kindergarten. This is one of those things that Europeans may not regard as strange, but I'm sure your jaw dropped when you read that.

Rose garden memorial to those murdered there.

On to Neuengamme, which was used as a forced labor camp from December 1938 to May 1945, built on the grounds of an abandoned brickworks factory. It was converted to a prison in the 1950s (?) in an attempt to cover up its sordid past, so many of the camp buildings, including the barracks, kitchen and jail, were torn down. This made it hard to "see" what the camp actually looked like, but in the pictures you can see the white poles that identify where walls stood at that time.

Possessions of a Danish Jew - from the town I live in!

Camp prison. Sometimes they'd put people in here and throw grenades in the windows.

 

Prisoners at this camp had a variety of jobs, including but not limited to: 1) digging a canal, sometimes in bare feet and with their hands, 2) making bricks, 3) digging clay out of the bog for brickmaking (in heel-less wooden clogs that would often get caught and slip off, leaving one's numb foot exposed and making it likely that he would chop his own foot off with his shovel), or 4) in the firearms factory. Approximately 50,000 people died there, including Jews of various nationalities and some political prisoners. The horror of such a systematic murder machine in unfathomable, not to mention the fact that townspeople were well aware of the happenings within the camp - they were permitted to look in through the gate. My studies in Holocaust and Genocide as well as the Anatomy of Hatred are giving me a new perspective on this and other atrocities. Perhaps I'll be able to explain this more fully by the end of the semester.

On a significantly lighter note, I met my DIS buddy network last night for the first time. It's a group of 30 students, about equal number Danes and Americans, that can get together to hang out and DIS will pay for it. Maria, the Danish group leader, had us over to her apartment for socializing and then we headed over to Christiania for its 40th birthday celebration. There were a bunch of DJs and the energy was great - it's one of those "only in Copenhagen" experiences.

This morning, Alicia, Chelsea and I met in the city for some flea marketing, botanical garden enjoying, and harbor swimming. The harbor here is clean enough to swim in, and you can see to the bottom. We were 2 of 4 people swimming so we got some priceless looks, but it was worth it. This week was the last of the (surprisingly) beautiful weather that we'll get so I rode my bike or went touristing every night to ensure that I made the most of it. I've neglected taking pictures until now, so below are some that I took during the extended sunshine this week.

Town Hall Square in Copenhagen.

Kongen's Nytorv (King's new square)

Cara, Chelsea, Alicia at Nyhavn

View from the water taxi, across from where we jumped in

I'm off to Scotland tomorrow at 8am until Friday afternoon with my Positive Psychology class. Meditation, hiking, and whiskey tastings await. I'll talk to you when I get back!