Things I will definitely not miss...

"Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected, how one decision leads you another, how one twist of fate, good or bad, brings you to a door that later takes you to another door, which aided by several detours--long hallways and unforeseen stairwells-- eventually puts you in the place you are now."

-Ann Patchett, What now?

        I know have about 3 and 1/2 weeks left here in Copenhagen and everyone keeps asking me how I feel about that.  Here is how I feel: I am super excited to go home.  This semester I really only have three friends and one of them is from Wisconsin, so not as big of a deal as last semester when I had 20 friends who were leaving.  Also as much as I have loved living in Copenhagen, once those three friends leave there really isn't anything left for me here.  I have noticed in about the last week, that since I know that I am going home the little things are really starting to bug me.  The things that I have just accepted for the past 10 months are no longer acceptable.  So here is a list of the things that I will definitely not miss, when I leave Denmark.



- Wind: The average wind speed is 14 mph, add that I live in a wind tunnel that is on an island surrounded by the Baltic Sea, and you have a crazy windy place.  Its no wonder that wind power makes up 18.9% of electricity produced.

-A shower that is not separated from the rest of the bathroom:

You can't really tell from this picture but the shower is just open to the rest of the bathroom.  So when you take a shower, you get water throughout the whole bathroom.















-Academic Quarter:  Apparently in Denmark everything begins a quarter after the hour.  Even when the start time is listed on the hour.  So I was told my classes begin at 3:00 and 9:00, but apparently the professor and most students actually turn up around 3:15 and 9:15.

- holidays every weekend: In the past 3 weeks there has been four holidays: Prayer Day, Ascension Day, Pentecost, and Whit Monday.  These can honestly not be real holidays! And these are not just bank holidays, no, these are everything including grocery stores are closed, children even get off of school.

-A fridge bigger than a dorm fridge: I share a fridge with four other people that is not really any bigger than a dorm fridge.  I am so looking forward to having a full sized fridge that I only need to share with two other people next semester.
 
- Grocery store set-ups that make sense: The grocery stores here make absolutely no sense in the way that they are laid out.  Why is the cocoa next to the coffee? Or the paper products such as toilet paper and feminine products on the other side of the store from the beauty products? I cannot wait to go to a grocery store and know where I can find the things I need.

- Easy to use university website:  Again I cannot wait until I have a university website where there is no way that I can accidentally un-enroll myself.

- 20 page paper finals: I never realized how much I love multiple choice, short answer, and short essay finals.  I am currently writing my 20 page final on Danish Cinema.

- Character count: See above for my hatred of 20 page papers, then add the fact that in Denmark they do not actually count pages by the number of pages, they count pages by character count 2400 characters or letters equals 1 page.

- Construction workers working at 6:30 AM: I am pretty sure there are laws in the U.S. about noise restrictions in residential areas before 7:00 AM.  If there isn't, there should be.  The construction workers have once again been working on the park outside of my building starting at 6:30 AM.  I don't know what they are using that could possibly make so much noise.  

- 50,000 shades of gray: I just want the sun.  In Wisconsin, we have real winter, but we also get sun throughout the winter.  Here we have just had gray, and more gray.  I never get sunburned, yet because my skin has not seen the sun in about 6 months I can go outside for two hours and end up burned.  I even bought sunscreen today for fear of being burned alive when I go on my trip to Croatia.
 
- The largest size of milk being a liter: I really do not understand how families here can survive on buying milk by the liter.  At home my mother will buy two gallons at a time, that is roughly the equivalent of 7.5 liters.

- Metric and Celsius: I cannot wait for the day when I do not need to convert temperatures or recipes.

- Netflix not having English subtitles: I am currently working on my final paper for my Danish Cinema class, which means I actually need to watch Danish movies.  Unfortunately English subtitles are not an option on the Danish Netflix, so I cannot watch Danish movies online.  This is proving to be extremely annoying.

-Danes who look like gazelles: All of the Danes are super fit and they like to run and they all look beautiful when they are doing it.  There is no sweating, or red faces, or heavy breathing.  They sometimes even smile while running, it is disgusting.  

- Gummies/gum that always have liquorice flavored things in them: It is impossible to buy any sort of gummy candy that does not have some sort of liquorice flavored something in it.  Anytime you see some black in anything here, stay away, it is probably liquorice.

-Coffee/hot drinks served in glasses with straws: Why oh why would you serve a hot beverage in a glass, without a handle, with a straw? A mug is just so much more practical, and prevents burned fingers.

-Cobblestones/tiles: I used to love cobblestone, now I abhor(SAT vocab word, 10 points for me) them.  I constantly trip and when it rains the stone is extremely slippery.

- European sizes:  I am so tired of going into a store and having the largest size that they have being a size 12.

-H&M: I cannot describe how much I hate this store.  It is the only store here that is slightly reasonable.  This store is crazy with the sizes, there is no standard.  Last week a friend and I went shopping, one dress I tried on that was a US size 12 was huge and then I tried on another dress that was a US size 16 and it was too small.  This store is just depressing.

- Clothes made for sticks:  Again see the two above comments.  A couple of times I have been able to find pants in my size, but even though they are the correct size, they still do not fit.  The clothes here are made for stick people; people without hips, thighs, boobs, butt or anything else that is not perfectly flat.

-Men peeing in public: I don't know how many times I have walked down the sidewalk past a man who is relieving himself.  Apparently there are not public indecent exposure laws in Denmark.

-Weather forecast: I do not even know why they hire meteorologists here, because they are never right.  There is no point to even check the weather in the morning because the chance of it being correct is about 5% and that is only when it involves rain, because there is about a 60% chance of rain every single day.

-Smoking: I completely forgot how horrible it was to be inside a place where people can smoke.  The smoking ban in Wisconsin is quite possibly the best thing that ever happened.


This is by no means an exhausted list, believe me there are a lost more things that annoy me.  The funny thing about this list is that I can imagine that when I get home I will have the opposite reaction, and these things will seem normal.

Now some random photos from this past week:

Ashley, Kate, and I had a dinner of hot dogs and macaroni and cheese.  Can you tell we cannot wait for summer and to go home? Also the hot dog buns here just have a whole at the top to put the hot dog in.

This young man is Yoonho.  I have been tutoring him since English since January.  He has also been a pain in my butt since then.  But his parents have basically bankrolled all of my trips this semester so I put up with him.  You can just see his charming personality in these photos.  This kid knows exactly how to push my buttons, and does so frequently.  However he is a 13 year old boy so that is what they do right?  As much I like to complain about him I will miss this kid.  I took him to see Iron Man 3 on Friday as a good bye present.  

  So by the 29th I need to finish my Danish Cinema paper, then on the 30th my friends Niklas and Krys are coming back to Copenhagen to visit, they leave on the 3rd.  Then I have my literature of the Harlem Renaissance final on June 4th.  This is when the stress is over and the fun begins.  I leave on the 5th to fly to Split, Croatia.  I will be there for three days, and then embark on a 7 day tour of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which will end in the walled city of Dubrovnik, Croatia.  I will then arrive back in Copenhagen on June 16th, where I will have 4 days to pack and clean and see Copenhagen one last time.  Wow, written out like that it actually shows how little time I have left.
So countdown:

25 Days

Bushy Eyebrows, flags, and being patriotic to Denmark...

"Winning is not enough, we must crush them!"

-Kate Allen

Last night was the Eurovision Song Contest Final.  For those of you who do not know what Eurovision is an annual singing competition between the countries of Europe.  Each member country submits one song that is performed live and then people can call in to vote.  The contest was started in 1956 and has been broadcast every year since.  39 countries participated this year.  There were two semi-finals, and then 26 countries performed in the final.   Eurovision has some very weird rules.  I found out that performers do not have to have citizenship of the country they are performing for, which just seems kind of weird.  Canadian, Celine Dion, competed and won for Switzerland in 1988.  From 1966 to 1972 and again from 1978 until 1998 songs were required to be performed in the national language.  Since 1998 songs can be sung in any language and I mean any language, again weird.  You would think this would mean that most songs would be sung in English and a lot of the time they are but there are also some very weird language choices.  For example: 1990 and 2012 Finland sang in Swedish; 2003, 2006, and 2008 Belgium and the Netherlands entered songs sung in made-up languages; 2006 Monaco sang in Tahitian; 2010 Norway sang in Swahili.    

But of course before spending the night cheering on Denmark, we had to eat.  This Chinese Buffet is right across the street from where two of my friends from last semester, Alex and Lucy, lived.  Every time we went to their place we talked about eating at this restaurant and we finally did.  I think it is a good thing that I did not go here previously in the year, I probably would have spent a ton of money coming here and getting take-out.  This restaurant is almost up to the greasy standards of American Chinese Buffets, almost but not quite.

 And then after I was happy and full, Ashley and Kate informed me that we were going to look at cars before Eurovision.  Now I can look at a car and say it's pretty but other than that I don't know anything about cars and I really could care less.  However Kate and Ashley were in heaven and would squeal at every car we saw.  I of course just rolled my eyes and kept walking.

The cars were here for the Gumball 3000 which is an annual British 3,000 mile international road rally.  I just read the wikipedia page for this race and apparently this isn't actually a "race", there is not winner instead it is supposed to be seen as more of a "road trip adventure".  See that makes this seem even more pointless to me.

 Apparently this year is the 15th anniversary race.  Entrants include David Hasselhoff, Prince Talal M.A. Al-Faisal Al-Saud of the Saudi Arabian royal Family, Eve, and Tony Hawk.  There are a lot more participants those are just the ones I recognize.

Also I would like to point out that I was promised that the Batmobile, from the Christian Bale movies, would be here.  It however was hidden until the next morning when the cars set off.  I however was not getting up before 10:00 AM to go out in the rain to see a bunch of cars drive off.

Now I know that the U.S. Navy and Army sponsors Nascar cars so this isn't super weird to see the German Coast Guard sponsor a car.  However whenever I see a branch of any countries military sponsoring a race car I just think that there has got to be more important things to spend the defense budget on.

 Again I know that these doors are supposed to be super cool and fancy but I just imagine that you would have someone park next to you and you wouldn't be able to get in your car because you couldn't open the doors.

And then we were ready for Eurovision!

 We went to the Town Hall Square where a big screen was set up.  This year the contest was held in Malmo, Sweden; which is just across the bridge from Copenhagen.

Coke has started a new campaign called, "Share a Coke",  which means that they have replaced the Coke logo with the most popular names of the country.  Which basically means that every time I buy a coke I look for the most stereotypical Danish name ever.  I think I succeeded here, you can't get much more Danish than Rasmus.

It was awesome how many people dressed up or brought flags to show who they were supporting.

I am not really sure why there were Welsh flags, seeing as Wales is not an independent nation.

The contest began very much like the Olympics does, with a parade of nations and an anthem.

The theme this year was "We are One" and the symbol was a butterfly.  The opening video actually had a caterpillar traveling from Azerbaijan, which was where the contest was last year, across Europe to Sweden.  The butterfly symbol was used throughout the contest.  Whenever a new country was announced a butterfly with that country's flag showed on the screen.

There was an overwhelming amount of Germans and Brits showing their support.

And a surprising group of  Lithuanians.

Germany's performer was Cascada, who was really famous about 10 years ago for her song, "Every time We Touch".

This was the performer from Armenia. I don't actually remember anything about his song because I could only look at his crazy eyebrows, there was no looking away.

The British entry was Bonnie Tyler of "Total Eclipse of the Heart" fame.

Denmark's entry was Emilie de Forest who sang "Only Teardrops".

The song contest is actually very political and voting not exactly fair.  You can also tell that a lot of countries enter because they want to participate but they don't actually want to win, because winning means hosting next years competition, which also means you have to pay for the next years competition.  Take Greece for example, they participated with a song titled, "Alcohol is Free", and they were dressed in kilts, not exactly trying hard to win.

And then there was the singing doctor from Malta who just seemed super happy to be there.  And really he is a full fledged medical doctor and just sings on the side.  

One of the coolest performances was by Azerbaijan.  I know what you are thinking Azerbaijan is not in Europe or I didn't know Azerbaijan was a country.  Apparently anyone in the European Broadcasting Union can enter the contest.  So countries such as Israel, Morocco, and Georgia have participated.   Azerbaijan's performance this year was so cool because the performer had a shadow in a box and it was awesome!

The voting process is also very political.  People text in votes, they cannot vote for their own country.  Then the votes are counted in each country.  Each country awards 78 points.  They award one country with one point, one with 2 points, one with 3 points, and so on until they award one country with 12 points.  The political bit comes in when you can predict exactly who each country will vote for by which countries border each other.  Europe has cliques such as the Scandinavian countries, former Yugoslavian Republics, and former members of the Soviet Union.  And these cliques always vote for each other.

Even thought voting is only open for 15 minutes, presenting the points by country takes FOREVER! It took over an hour just to go through all 39 countries.  Each of the people giving the points kept giving dramatic pauses, we just wanted them to get on with the show and see what I mean about the cliques of Europe?

Kate and Ashley anxiously awaiting the final results:

But in the end Denmark reigned supreme!!!!!!!!! 

I was there!!!!! It was a very cool experience to be surrounded by Danes when Denmark won.  It is also quite a weird feeling to feel proud and patriotic to a country that is not my homeland, but also very cool at the same time.  

I will say however that Denmark is lacking in a fight song or really any sort of competitive spirit.  I guess the competitive, we are the best, sort of spirit is definitely an American thing.  Whenever we win everything we chant "USA" or sing the national anthem.  Everyone here cheered but that was pretty much it.  The quote at the beginning was a lovely quote by Kate.  While the voting was going on, Denmark had the lead the whole time but Azerbaijan was close a couple of time.  Being American, Kate and I did not think it was good enough to win by 1 or 2 points.  We wanted Denmark to win by a landslide.  

And now some random photos from last week:

Last Sunday was Mother's Day in the U.S. so I did a Google Hangout with my grandparents.  I love the special effects feature, and so did they.

The weather in Denmark has been beautiful for the past couple of weeks and on Tuesday we were even brave enough to go to the beach!  All those things you see in the air are people wind boarding.

The water was surprisingly warm.  No I would not be brave enough to actually swim yet, but it was fine to dip my feet in. 

This was a kind of fail at trying to write "Copenhagen 2013" in the sand.

In this coming week I need to really buckle down and write my final paper for one class and read the novels I was supposed to read all semester for my other class.  I hate finals time. But on the bright side my friends Niklas and Krys, who were here last semester, are coming back to visit in 10 days!


Eurovision Facts:
- Norway has come in last 10 times
- The most notable of the contest have been ABBA in 1974 and Celine Dion in 1988.
- Julio Igelsias competed for Spain in 1970.
-Ireland has the most wins.  It has won 7 times.
- The song "Volare" was an entry in 1958.
Countdown: 32 days