City girl

Jan 25-
Ok so I am only a few days behind here.. !
I think I figured out the trick to traveling. There's a certain formula and it doesn't make any sense but you have to trust it because, no matter what, it will be like this. Week 1 should be called Schizophrenia Week. You are on an emotional roller coaster of I love it- I hate it- take me home-I'm so lucky, etc etc. To be perfectly honest more then one day of that is just plain annoying. BUT it will happen. Then comes Week 2, the Calm after the Storm. You have little energy to feel things even if you wanted too after week 1 so its the time for simple pleasures. Like when I mastered the delicate walk back to my desk after pouring a double shot of coffee into my one-sip-shy of a double shot coffee mug. Maximum coffee helping in one setting, perfection! Then there is Week 3. Week 3 is when your trip really starts. You kind of realize that without knowing it your life has fallen into place and you somehow have order again. You're just living again without even recognizing it, it's odd but very cool. Any new traveler has to at least make it to week 3:) In this past week I have moved, received a CPR number, signed up for a course at DTU, went to a few meet-ups, went out to a club, bought some furniture, looked into language lessons, applied to a grad program at UW, AND hosted an American Obama Party on Tuesday.
(Ok to comment quickly.. the CPR number is huge because, like a social security number, it entitles me to privileges any other resident would get. I get to take out books from the library, get a phone if I didn't already have one, get assigned a doctor and, the best part, get to take Danish lessons for free! So I received that after registering my address downtown, it was so easy but it is soo huge, I was very very excited to get one! Secondly.. the inauguration was shown here at 6pm so it was the perfect opportunity to host a party. I didn't come up with the idea, my roommate did, but over the weekend we had met another American girl, and she knew an American.. so after that we decided we all had to get together for the big event. It was a great party with incredibly good coverage for abroad and I think Americans and Danes alike all really had a great time!)
But back to the big news.. I moved! Just so you all know why I was so desperate to get out of that guest house, here is a before and after shot of my living arrangements. In the guest house the couch is the bed but it is a fold out style where the cushions all fill out a crevice so it really wasn't that bad.. kinda depressing though huh? Anyhow my new bedroom is still being set up but I like it so much better. The skylight actually is huge and lights up the room so it is way better to be on the top floor then it looks here. Plus the room was vacant when I started so I am getting somewhere with all the little decorations from Ikea. The rest of the house is really cute and I live here with a Danish girl named Sanne, 25, who's been real helpful getting me adjusted and settled into the area. I'm really lucky to have found a nice person my age to live with. Here is a picture of the kitchen. The neighborhood we live in is called Nørrebro. Its the multi-cultural part of town, known to be a little rough around the edges (by copenhagen standards) but is the up and coming trendy place to be. Its right next to downtown Copenhagen, two blocks north of "the lakes" which at one point were part of the fortress around the city. If you look on a map you can pretty clearly see 5 man-made lakes in a line above the city. I live just off of Nørrebrogade and Stengade and this is the lake just by my house. (few tidbits for ya.. Gade in danish means street and Vej means road so you will almost always see them attached to street names in Denmark. Also to run around all 5 of the lakes is 7 Km, that gives a bit of scale). The neighborhood is full of cafes, shops and bars and I pass a few of them on my way to work in the morning.. These are a few pictures from my walk to the bus. (The second picture is Nørrebrogade actually.)




















The photo at the top and this one are some of the Potato Flats downtown that I passed by randomly while trying to find the cathedral downtown. I wound up at some other mass entirely but I went back and snuck a few more photos of these cute little houses. Its hard to tell but the doors are all really short, they are like miniature houses and people still live in them. Also walking around I saw this other building which I think looks like a Gingerbread house.




Ok well there's a few more days to catch up on but its time for me to go to bed. Like normal life, when you are working and commuting everyday you tend to get worn out pretty quick. To answer one last question for you.. which is not what Kelly asked, the question of whether or not Ikea is exactly the same store over there as in the US, it is, or how cool did you feel carrying your big bags of purchases home with you on the bus, to which the answer is of course, super cool, but.. do you think a person could fit in side one of those huge Ikea bags?? Answer is yes.
Goodnight!

Did you know...

Jan. 13th-
Julie KING Richardson just tagged me in a sort of blog competition to see if you could learn the most about your friends, and well, I don't have enough people to tag myself but I thought it sounded fun to play! The objective is to get your friends to reveal 6 things about themselves that you wouldn't otherwise know.

My random six:

1) I have a wonderful friend named Julie K. R. who is my only friend currently with adorable babies. Living out in Seattle I was "just around the corner" from her WA home down near Portland. I've been spoon feeding "Aunt Kelly" to her children ever since I first started going there. Haha. Julie's a great mom who spends so much time coming up with cool crafts to do for and with her kids. She follows a bunch of blogs and I follow hers http://richardsonshine.blogspot.com/ to get updated on Celia and Madsen whenever I am not around, because I usually start missing them before I am even out the door. This is my confession that I am forcing Julie's kids to accept me and love me as their "Auntie".

(Baby stealing photo)

2) I have another wonderful friend named Jacqueline Kipp who also keeps a blog! http://zenacres.blogspot.com/ She has been married now for a year and a half and she and her husband Joe have committed to living an organic, sustainable lifestyle. This blog records their efforts. My confession is that I have tried to be like Jackie and I planted a few feeble tomato plants in my Seattle backyard and I killed them. Or the frost did or the bugs, but I only got two tomatoes out of them the whole season. I think what I'm saying is that I'm a bad gardener!
3) Last year I took the Myers Briggs personality assessment and I found out that I am an ENFP. E is extrovert, N is intuitive, F is feeling, and P is perceiving. These are the exact opposite letters of a typical engineer!!!! No wonder why I feel like I'm in the wrong profession! Also, this exact personality type has THE hardest time making decisions because everything sounds so good they can't commit to one thing. Ahhh, reality phobe... that's me!! I also share this personality type with my Aunt Donna, isn't that cool? I highly suggest taking this test if you're curious what you're personality is described as because from my experience it is dead on accurate;)
4) I once tried out for a casting call in Boston and got rejected first round, ouch!
5) I had braces until my senior year in high school and I always smiled with my mouth shut.
6) I had two sisters growing up.. one sweet, fake one called Theresa and one real, manipulative one named Marybeth;)

Thanks Julie that was fun! Stories from everybody else are welcome in the comments or you can email them to me. What would your six random fun facts be??

Alright now, one last time to speak of Kinger, I went to a modern art museum in Denmark this past weekend and thought of her because I know she'd love it! Its called Louisiana ("Loos-iana") http://www.louisiana.dk/dk
I loved it too. Its in a beautiful setting just north of here and it's right on the coast. The museum makes great use of the park around it and provides a real serene, contemplative environment. You can get away from people and sit out by the ocean and get some peace and quiet. I really liked it up there. I wouldn't say I'm very big on museums but after spending the day there, taking my time and walking around the park, I really had a new appreciation for the modernist art form. The exhibit that I really liked was by Per Kirkeby, a Danish artist. http://www.smk.dk/smk.nsf/docs/Kirkeby
There was also an exhibit on MANGA which is that Japanese cartoon style of drawing. It was actually really informative and covered a broad scale of media from ancient Japanese books to comic strips, tv series and now modern day anime.






I made one other stop that day up to Helsingor. Probably the most well known castle in Denmark, because of its ties to Shakespeare, is there. It's called Kronborg Slot. This castle is supposedly Hamlet's castle. Whether or not it is, its said to be one of the best examples of a Renaissance castle in Northern Europe.





Dad, something about this picture reminded me of Pillers of the Earth.. like what one of the Earl's castles inner courtyards would be like??



MB, doesn't this remind you of Castle Island? Isn't the resemblance uncanny, except that well this one is actually a castle?!

Also in Helsingor you can get your first glimpse at Sweden. Hello neighbor!

Price of Fun

Jan. 11th-
Good news I got a bus pass! Now I can ride to and from the city and all around Copenhagen (on the subway or trains, they are on the same system too) for free! Yup this little puppy cost me a mere $200/month... yikes.. but it's what you have to do. Now this means I can live in Copenhagen! What's best is that the tickets are determined by what zones you ride through.. and I get zone 1 and 2 which are the city center and the surrounding neighborhoods. I also get a couple of zones up the coast before we head inland for my lab. That's a couple of different beaches to visit in the summertime. I can't wait!

Stroll Through Town

Jan. 10th-
Just a quick one today. I went to visit the Rosenborg Slot which is an old castle right in the center of Copenhagen. The weather was kinda blah today but the gray sky seemed to make a nice backdrop for these pictures.. they're some of my favorites.

(Mike & Jay- Took this because it reminded me of "Snakes on a Plane")

I also went to visit Christiania which is a squatters village in the middle of Copenhagen. Its hard to describe and I'd like to go back again once I've gained more insight before I start posting pictures and talking about it like I know anything. Its a very strange little place.. right in the middle of the city, next to the Parliament house even, and yet its ignored by everyone which allows it to be this free establishment. They don't pay for the land, and they don't get any services. Yet they survive. And they are happy to do so on their own. It now thrives as a tourist stop, selling hemp jewelry and clothing, drugs too I imagine, and some food, but its also a place people live. When you walk around, which you are free to do and go wherever, there are groups of people huddled around fire barrels in the streets or in their lawn chairs, there are bikes dropped in the mud as if their owners decided suddenly they were done biking. There were dogs and kids and a playground, like everything else, covered in graffiti. But there is also a lot of art, sculptures, metal work, paintings, everywhere.. It was an eclectic and challenging and intimidating but also oddly comfortable place.. I don't know. That's why I have to go back again and that's why I know I'll touch back on this subject again later.
(You are welcomed when you enter by "Christiania" which is the name of this commune or state, however you look at it, and warned when you leave that you're re-entering the European Union)

Exploring Copenhagen

Jan 4th-
Happy Birthday Mom!
I woke up Sunday with a mission: explore Copenhagen. To make sure I didn't stand out like a dorky tourist, I loaded up my backpack, grabbed some bottled water, collected all my maps, put on a ski jacket and made sure my camera was easily accessible dangling from my wrist. Pure local. The first surprise of the day happened right away. A one way bus ticket from my lab to downtown is 70DKK.. excuse me, what?! The exchange rate is ~100DKK=$20 so we're talking a RT ticket that costs $28/day. I was blown away. I can't live in Copenhagen if it costs me that much to commute! The whole time I was assuming Id live in the city and commute up to work everyday (I am in a small town, residential area right now) and here I was faced with a huge dilemma. I bought the ticket and stewed over it for my whole ride down... but for the time being there was nothing I could do. Since money was flowing freely I went and bought a guiltless $5 cup of coffee. (Its just Denmark, it IS expensive.)

But back to Copenhagen.. it's a great city! I loved it immediately. The central part of the city is considered old town and right through the middle of it is a pedestrian mall called Strøget . I read that it was the first promanade ever tried (1962) and since then it's been copied all over Europe. (Rick Steves is my source of knowledge for pretty much this whole section.. I did not do that much research).






City hall is at one end of it and its just a big wide open square in the middle of some big streets. Tivoli is right next to it. Aside from being a really cool village in Red Hook, Tivoli is a big amusement park (really- rides, cotten candy, everything) right in the middle of the city. It is closed during the winter but I hear during the summer its actually quite popular. From the square you can also see the old "Weather Girls" (called the only girls in Copenhagen you can trust - thanks R.S.) These statues of women were on a track so that only one was out of the tower at a time.. and they were two ladies on bikes. One had an umbrella, the other did not. And that is how people could tell what the weather was going to be for the day! Its since broken so now you only see the umbrella girl just starting to come out, but you can still use the thermometer on the side of the building for a temp update. As you can see it was about -5C out!


I saw a great "billboard" on one of the neighboring buildings. I thought it showed the Danish optimism pretty well..

Hey, when you don't shoot too high you can't be disappointed- there's a reason the Dane's are the happiest people in the world!!

The Strøget is connected by a bunch of squares. In this particular one you have the Fountain of Charity. Its not all that overbearing or anything but I read in my not-so-touristy-to-pull-out-in-the-middle-of-a-square guide book that this statue, when first received, upset some people. It is the fountain of fertility and so it has a pregnant woman squirting water from her breasts and a little boy next to her peeing. Seems wholesome enough. But the people that got it didn't like it so they plugged the holes and put it high up so other people wouldn't notice. How funny is that? I was sure to get a zoomed in photo.





I came across a skating rink in the Kongens Nytorv ("Kings New Square").. seemed pretty impromptu, slap on your skates and go, but however its done, there were loads of people out and it just seemed like a great way to spend a winter afternoon.

When I was standing there taking pictures, there was all this commotion behind me. I looked and there were police officers escorting a parade of royal horsemen down the street. There was a horse drawn carriage with who knows inside and another pack of horses behind it. I decided it must be someone or something important so I chased down the street behind it. Trumpets were blasting and there were like 40 horses! It couldn't just be the daily changing of the guard ceremony could it? Oh probably.. wasted breath for nothing! (That's right I was literally chasing them, oh to be a solo traveler) The royal family lives together in the Amalienborg Palace. It's a big square with 4 identical mansions all around it. Cars can randomly drive though here too, I don't get it. So the barrage of horses did a little dance in the square and then marched away, I still have no idea what happened, but then I was front row for the changing of the guards. I'll include a little video I took although I have to warn you it is pretty darn boring. Somebody should write a script for what the guardsmen are saying to each other undertheir breath, because they are indeed, not talking to one another (sound is on).. quite strange. Anyhow the typical toy soldier picture is up at the start.

The harbor is right next to the palace so I took a look around. Here is the Opera House which was a $400 million dollar gift. I think it was just recently completed. Next to it is my token tourist shot.


And finally the colorful gem of the city. This harbor actually is as pretty as the pictures. This area is called Nyhavn and its an old sailors quarter. I now know why everyone has the same shots of it too. There is a picture taking platform on the bridge! Its actually just a bump out but it pretty much ensures no originality will go into this picture perfect shot. I complied.

The buildings are mostly all restaurants and bars and its a really nice place to stroll around. I really liked all of the boarded up food stands. The line of colorful little shacks is great.. and I can just picture what it must be like in the summertime!

Well, with that I headed home. It was long, bitter day to be standing out in the cold. As I made my way back to the bus stop I noticed one thing. If you're ever lost in Copenhagen just look for the H&Ms... they are the trail markers and no matter where you live they will take you home.

Life as an employee

Jan 7th-
I started work on Monday this week. The lab is really nice and the people all knew I was coming.. I got a lot of "So you're the American." Come to think of it, I don't know what that means exactly... I'm seated next to these 3 young-ish girls. One is from Denmark, one Norway and the other from Poland. They are pretty much all permanently here now, with jobs, babies or boyfriends that keep them here. As a group they are real friendly and I'm glad I'm sitting by some younger people.

The lab itself if really nice. Its not an experimental lab like the one I worked in in Taiwan so its really just an office building, but they do study building properties there like optimal lighting and indoor environment and air quality, so you know it has to be a good place to work. I'm in a big open room with desks along the sides separated out by large bookshelves and tables in the middle for collaborating. The room is about 2-3 stories tall, like school gym size, and there are skylights all over. No one is behind a cubicle but we all have our own space and its just really open and comfortable. Anyhow that's probably too much detail, but I find it to be such a nice work space I thought I'd describe it a bit. Being energy efficient in Denmark the overhead lights go off when it senses an adequate level of natural light. On days like today, when the sun was going in and out behind clouds, it was like a rave it there.. haha pretty funny.

For my research assignment I am going to be looking at non-destructive testing techniques that can be used to determine the strength of existing masonry buildings like those built in Copenhagen.. AND. that's all I'm going to say about anything technical!

Hmm I can't think of what else would be interesting about my job. (I'm writing this because blogger won't let me upload any pictures today for some reason) It really sucks to work in Europe when they have 7.5 hour days which includes lunches that I should mention are catered meals everyday.. OH and on Friday there are brunches too.. and lunch.. so yes that is a show up, eat, work for an hour, and then eat again.. all paid for. Why don't we all work in Europe again? I mean there are just 4 weeks paid-and-mandatory vacation.. wait why am I even joking about this?!!!

Flying ?East?

Jan 2nd
New years day I did something I have never before done in my life. I flew east out of Boston! After the shortest overnight international flight of my life (a mere 7 hours.. hardly time for the snack, dinner, lights out time, breakfast, beer and wine!) I landed in Frankfurt, Germany. In Europe for the first time it was awesome to hear dual language announcements that were not entirely of a foreign nature. I would have loved to wonder around the airport and gawk at all the "oddities" and funny words but it was actually about 1am EST and I was exhausted. Our flight was delayed and I was worried about staying awake or when I did doze off if I was making too much of a scene snoring over my protectively craddled luggage (there are pickpockets in Europe you know!) But somehow I managed to catch my flight.

We left from the tar mat and I have to say this was one of the most bizarre boarding experiences I have ever have. We gave our tickets at the desk, like normal, walked down the ramp, again, totally expected, and then went down some steps, out some back door and boarded a bus waiting for us. We took the bus on seriously a 20 minute ride around the airport, past the cargo planes and airline hangers and then there was our plane. Sitting out alone in the middle of the tar mat. The bus half followed some painted red line to what I hope was a safe unloading zone and then we boarded the plane like celebrities.

I arrived in København (Copenhagen) at about 11am local time (Boston's 5am) and was picked up at the airport by the director of my lab. In Denmark I am working at the Danish Building Research Institute which is Statens Byggeforskningsinstitut in danish and refered to as SBi. (www.sbi.dk) The lab is located about 25km north of København in a town called Hørsholm. When the lab director dropped me off at the guest house on the research campus (there are many other lab facilities up there as well) I decided to go for a walk into the town to check it out.

Hørsholm has it's own Slot which means Castle!
Right near by is an old windmill that has been turned into a museum/performance center.

Few pictures of the town itself. It was a nice walk, only about 15 minutes to the outdoor mall shown in the first photograph..















My jet lag was wearing me out, plus it was freezing, so I didn't stay long but I did manage to find one snack bar I definitely had to try out. Its the danish hotdog.. an obsession the danes themselves can't even explain. They asked me, "You call it a hotdog too?!" because I think they thought it was such a weird name. And yet they have taken our American hotdog and gone over the top. The standard fixings are relish, onions, mustard, ketchup and a secret sauce. But I went with the "fransk dog" style instead. It comes baked in a bun (most come bun in one hand, dog in the other) and the hotdog is at least 4" too long for the thing anyway. They squirt a little sauce in before they add the dog... I have to say, it was quite delicious.