Well, its been a while

And things have dramatically changed since the last time I posted. For one, I’m not in Denmark. I’m not in Spokane or in Fairbanks either! Right now I’m in Reno, NV with Sam, staying at his moms house. I left Fairbanks mid September, and spent a weekend in Seattle before flying to San Francisco, where I met Sam. We spent a week in Point Arena, CA, then went to San Francisco, then came to Reno. We’re getting ready to leave on a west coast-ish road trip this weekend.

This summer I had an internship withand I babysat four girls. The most important thing I got out of the internship was that politics is not really my thing, but babysitting was pretty awesome. I watched 2 of the girls longer than the other two, and I miss them!

Here are some photos for you all:

Alaskan sunsets

two trees fell down in our yard

so we had to stack and split a lot of wood

we went on a bike pub crawl (this picture was taken at like, 11)

I went Berry picking on Murphy Dome!

Cranberries!

Okay, I think that’s enough photos for now. I had a good summer, and now that I’m not in Fairbanks I really miss it. But that is to be expected. I’ve been having a good time traveling, but we’ve been at Sam’s mom’s house for about three weeks now and that has gotten pretty old. It’s been a REALLY long time since I haven’t been around my friends on a regular basis, and it is definitely getting to me. So I’m excited for the road trip. Also, the job situation seems rather bleak and frustrating, but that’s another story.

less than a week to go

So it’s been a while since I posted.  And I head home on Sunday, which is crazy. It’s been quite the semester, and while I’m ready to go home I’m still not ready to leave. I’ve started saying goodbye to people and that sucks.

 

Anyways, once I get home I think I might keep posting because then I can finally post all my pictures. I never got my computer fixed, and then my camera also broke, but my mom brought another one when she visited (oh yeah, she and my aunt visited me!) I was going to visit my friend Tony in Germany, but that didn’t really work out and I decided I wanted to spend the rest of my time with my friends here anyways. My next adventure will be seeing how I can get everything home….

Some Spain Stats

I kept a journal for the whole time I was in Spain, but I´m not sure if I want to type it up or not. Let´s just say that Spain was fun but getting there and back was hard and sucked a lot. But anyways, here are some numbers.

Number of days in Spain, including travel: 8
Number of times I was awake between 5am and 6am: 5
Number of total hours I spent in the Malaga airport: 30
Kebabs eaten: 5, although this number could be higher
Visits to Cafe Futbol: every day in Granada- 5
Numbers of times we had churros y chocolate: 4
Hills we walked up and down: Millions. Literally, all of Granada is on a hill.
Number of times we were given the wrong directions/went the wrong way/read the map wrong: 5
Number of electronics that broke: 1 (my camera)
Number of rooms Mara and I stayed in (in the same hostel): 3

Obviously there are more stories to these numbers, and hopefully I will get around to explaining them all soon, but feel free to ask about them!

And here is a picture of the Albaycin in Granada, which is the arabic neighbourhoods. I stole this picture from Google.

Also I need to share this video because I really love this song!

It´s by a danish band called Alphabeat, and I´m going to see them next week in Aalborg! They have another really popular song called Heatwave that gets played like every two hours in all the clubs and on the radio.

Also, my classes will all be done by next week. This is cool but I don´t know what I will do with all my free time. And I´m scared because I have to write a minimum of 55 pages total. And that is a conservative estimate. EEEE.

random

1. Spanish guys really like foosball, and apparently it´s quite the blow to their manhood when they lose.

2. Spain has french toast, but they eat it with their fingers and without syrup.

3. I can see the stars when I bike back to AIK and it makes me happy.

4. Danish guys are much less…censored? Much more open than Whitworth guys, and I´m still getting used to it.

5. It´s pretty lame when the 2 classes I like get cancelled.

6. I really miss my roadbike.

7. And my little brother.

8. Now I think of reasons to come back to Denmark after I graduate. It´s the first time I´ve considered grad school.

9. I bought yarn to knit a dress!

1o. Teaching danish people bad words/phrases in english is entertaining but generally comes back to bite you in the ass.

11. I think one of the only reasons I might be okay at danish is because I mumble everything, and that´s how danish people talk.

birthday

Okay just another quick post about my birthday, mostly for my friends and my parents.

When I first got to Whitworth I was really worried that I would have a super lame birthday because it´s pretty early in the semester (September 30) and I was afraid that I wouldn´t have any friends by then or something stupid like that. I had a really good birthday, but because I worry about everything, I was afraid the same thing would happen here; I would have a lame birthday by myself.

Obviously, I was wrong. My birthday was on a Thursday, but we started celebrating Wednesday night (something I´ve never really done before, so that was fun in itself). Wednesdays are international nights at the student house (a bar/coffeeshop/concert house/where they have some university offices) and so I went to dinner at a friends and then we all headed over there. Lennie and Tabitha and a couple other danes from AIK (Allan and Anders) came around 11 and at midnight they all sang me happy birthday like 3 times, at the top of their lungs, in the middle of the street, which was so cool. Then we went to a bar and stayed there for a while and danced, and they sang me happy birthday again. The thing about the bars is that they play some good music but they also play a ton of really strange, non dance music, like the Backstreet Boys and Spice Girls and Bloodhound Gang and eventually they start playing things like John Denver techno remixes. So it´s always fun because you´ll never know what you´ll hear. We went to one more bar that was totally empty, and danced there for a while, and then headed home around 3:30 and stayed up til lik 6 because Tabitha had to wake up at 7 and didn´t want to go to sleep.

On my actual birthday we had a girls night in AIK. Some of the danish girls made food (tuna, salad, potatoes au gratin kind of,  danish meatballs and ham) and they made me a danish birthday cake shaped like a girl, and my american friend Christine made a carrot cake. So that was also a lot of fun, and I heard happy birthday in like 3 more languages. So it was quite the international birthday, and it was a lot of fun

AND I finally heard back about my computer, so now it´s at a store hopefully getting fixed! So then I can start posting pictures.

Also, I´m heading to Spain for a week on Monday

welcome to AMERICA!

So I haven´t posted in a while, mostly because I guess I feel like I haven´t done anything that blog-worthy. I´ve been having a lot of fun though!

We had another party at our kollegium 2 weekends ago, which was fun except I ended up with some scrapes and bruises. (I spent the majority of the night running around and at one point I ran into the foosball table near my room.) But everyone had fun and clean up the next day was minimal, so all the AIK-ers were happy about that.

My quest to learn danish still isn´t going very well, although 2 of my friends here have been teaching me more than what I learn in class, generally. Although we had a test last Wednesday and I did pretty good, except for the question part, which involves inversion, which I don´t understand at all. Basically if a sentence is inverted it doesn´t make sense grammatically in English, so generally I just write something that doesn´t make sense in English and hope that it´s correct in Danish. Although that doesn´t seem to be working out well.

 

I´ve been exploring Aalborg a bit more, although mostly just a different part of town. There is a huuuuge sopping center called Bilka that I went to on Friday with my danish friends Lennie and Tabitha. We took the bus, which was a mini adventure in itself because we almost missed it and had to run after it, and as soon as we got there Lennie yells “AMERICA!” I guess Bilka is pretty similar to some shopping centers in America, although really it´s more like a Wal-Mart inside a mall. I had to explain to them that there are hardly any malls in Fairbanks, and definitely none even close to the size of Bilka. Anyways, it was huge and really overwhelming, so we tried not to spend too much time there. It was fun though.

On Sunday there was something like a flea market near Bilka. My italian friend Marco invited me, so I didn´t really know anything about it going in, except that everything was second hand. It was huuuuge, in this big field and horse stalls (or some sort of large animal stall) and while there was a lot of lame stuff (lots of christmas decorations, and baby clothes) I got 2 sets of cool buttons for 10 kr and 2 sets of handmade glass earrings for 50 kr. One day I will start posting pictures, I promise.

 

AIK

AIK stands for Aalborg Internationale Kollegium, where I live, and it’s definitely the best place to live. Although I may be a bit biased. There are about 50 people who live here, although not all of them go to the university. Apparently this building isn’t actually owned by the university, which is why you don’t need to be a student (I think). Anyways, we all have our own apartments. Mine is one of the smaller ones, which is fine with me because I didn’t bring much stuff. I have my own bathroom and a kitchenette sort of thing, but there is also a kitchen in the common area where most people cook and eat dinner. During the day the whole thing is pretty empty, but lots of people hang out in the evenings, so I’ve met a lot more Danish people as well as international people.

Another reason why my dorm is the best (and why I knew I wasn’t at Whitworth anymore) is because we have our own beer cooler in the common area! Annnd we had a dorm party called tour de chambres, and it was pretty awesome. There are parties every weekend, but this one was just for AIK residents. There was a round every half hour or so with dancing in between (and the in between and the rounds got progressively longer as the night went on) and there would be 5 or 6 hosts who would each have 4-7 guests in their room. The only rule was that you had to serve hard alcohol. So I met a lot of people who I’ve never seen before, and I talked to more people, since Danish people tend to talk more in English once they’ve been drinking a little. I think I went to sleep at 5am, and then woke up at 9 the next morning to go to Skagen, which is the VERY tip top of Denmark, where the Baltic sea meets the North Sea. So it was a long weekend but well worth it.

What everyone knows about Denmark:

Copenhagen.

When I first found out I was going to Denmark, I knew I would be in Aalborg, so I looked it up and found out a little about it. But almost every other person I talked had no idea where Aalborg was, or anything about it. All they knew about Denmark was Copenhagen. So the second weekend Sam and I were in Demark we decided we needed to go there. And Sam has a friend who is studying in Copenhagen who said he would show us around and such.

So we bought our tickets and got on the train, and over the course of 4 hours sat in no less than 6 different seats, as well as in between the cars. What we didn´t really realize is that most people reserve a seat when they get on the train, and we were always sitting in someone else´s reserved seat. We saw a lot of other people get kicked out of their seats, and we also saw a lot of people sitting in the doorways and standing in the aisles, so I would say that probably 50% of the people who take the train reserve their tickets.

Once we got to Copenhagen we had a hard time finding a hostel. The first one we went to didn´t have any rooms, and the next 3 that we called either didn´t have any room or didn´t answer. So we ended up walking around a lot looking for a place to eat where we could meet Casper. Luckily, Casper 1. has a computer and 2. knows Danish, so he was able to find us a hostel. We ended up eating at a very nice restaurant with delicious food, although it didn´t really agree with my stomach later on that night.

After dinner we spent a long time walking around looking for our hostel and deciding what we were going to do the next day.  By this point I was getting a little cranky because the whole week had been very long and frustrating, and that day had been especially frustrating, and I didn´t feel good. So we were asleep by midnight. I think that was the first time that I slept all the way through the night since I got to Denmark, so Sam and I both felt a lot better in the morning (the bed in my dorm is very very small).

The next day we met Casper at his dorm. Sam and Casper went for a run while I used his computer to do some damage control (with my computer). Then we went to another hostel (the first one only had room the first night) and dropped off our stuff. Then we walked around and ended up in Nyhavn (I think) where there are lots of little shops and where Hans Christian Andersen lived. We took a canal tour and saw most of the major sights in Denmark (except for the little mermaid statue, which is in China this year for the World Expo). Then we walked around more and to be honest I don´t remember what else we did. I think we got sushi for dinner, and then we just hung out at the hostel. We aren´t very exciting people, especially when it comes to the weekend.

The next day we went to the parliament area, where they had been hosting some sort of peace rally or something like that. We saw TONS of guys walking around in army fatigues and there was a stage set up and some ropes were crossed off. We met Casper again and walked to this round church/tower. It´s one of the taller buildings in Copehagen I think, and it´s very different. The king who had it built decided that he wanted to be able to go up to the top in his carriage, so there are no stairs until you get to the very top, just spiraling floor.

After that we went to Kings garden and walked around, and then Casper had to work on homework so Sam and I took the bus to the open air museum, which Sam LOVED and I thought was okay. We got there kind of late so the buildings were starting to close, but Sam just ran around and took pictures of rooves and ceilings and thatched rooves and all sorts of things that most people wouldn´t find very exciting. Then we went back to the train station, reserved some seats (we got smart this time) and took the 4 hour train ride back. It wasn´t very fun biking back to the dorm around midnight, but it was definitely worth the trip.

We thought about not going, because it had been really stressful with my computer breaking and me never knowing what was going on and classes starting the day after we got back, but it was an extremely nice change, and the city itself was very pleasant. Sam took a lot of pictures, so maybe I´ll be able to post some one day.

København

This is how you spelling Copenhagen in Danish. You pronounce it something along the lines of Ku-ben-hown.

I quickly realized when I got to Denmark that how things were spelled is not at all how things were pronounced. And I also realized how similar Danish and English are in some ways. Most of the streets here end in either ´vej,´ which is pronounced like way with a v, or ´gade,´which sounds like ´gale.´ When I asked the Danish people in my dorm how you say it, they were really surprised when I said it sounded like an ´L´sound and not like a ´d.´

I´m taking a basic danish course which started on Saturday with 6 one hour workshops (not the most fun thing to do when you went to a party the night before and biked home 5 k at 2am). In the workshops we quickly learned that there are multiple vowel sounds that sound exactly like other vowel sounds to us, but mean entirely different things to Danish people. And really, Danish is one of the most confusing languages, in terms of pronunciation, EVER.

For example, there are two words òg så´ (sounds like oh sow) and then there is one word ògså´which means something completely different. `Jeg hedder Caitlin´means ´my name is Caitlin,´ but you say it `yi (long I) hella.´ There is no way I ever would have figured that out if they hadn´t told me. So it´s things like that first off that make Danish really hard to learn.

The next thing that make it extremely hard to learn is that Danish people (especially around København) tend to slur all their words together. So instead of saying ´jeg er du,´they would say ´yaaaa du.´ Our teacher (who is almost 70) said that if he watches a movie filmed in København he needs subtitles to understand what they are saying. So really, there is no hope for me. I pronounced everything pretty phonetically. I think the little bit of Southern in me is by biggest problem. That and I´ve always had a terrible time learning another language.

The final thing that makes Danish hard to learn is the teaching style. I never thought I would say this, but I really miss spanish class with Senora Chase, because she made everything so easy to understand. So far what we have been doing is the teacher will read something in Danish, we will repeat it together as a class, and then we partner up and read things outloud together. So really there is hardly any way of knowing if I´m saying something right.

Luckily, there are lots of Danes in my dorm who can help me out.

(Also, I think my next post will actually be about my trip to Copenhagen!)

Some logistics

People will probably ask, so here´s some basic information that is somewhat pertinant.

My computer broke the week I got to Denmark, so my blog posts will probably not be as regular as I would like until I get it fixed. I have pictures, but I can´t really post them because the computers in the libary are about ten years old and they are also in Danish.

Also, I´m having fun, but the Danish system is the most confusing and frustrating large organization I have ever been in. EVER. So I will probably complain about that, so get used to it. Right now it is just about the center of my life, because the majority of the information I need here I don´t have.

Other than that, I live in Aalborg, which is in northern Jutland, and I´ll be here til December. I should be back at Whitworth in January.