Legos, Legos, and more Legos...

"Size doesn't matter.  When stepped on in the dark a 2x2 Lego brick causes the same amount of pain as a 2x8 brick."

-Anonymous

This past weekend my friends, Kate and Ashley, and I went to Lego World, an exhibit held at Bella Center. Seeing as how Denmark is the birthplace of Lego I of course needed to attend.

Legoworld was amazing.  The things they come up with to build.  This is of course James Bond and Queen Elizabeth jumping out of the airplane during the Olympic Opening Ceremony 

A hobbit hole from Lord of the Rings.

The place was huge.  Besides the Lego sculptures there were also lego boxes, like a sand box but instead of sand filled with Legos.

I think Denmark is confused.  Why is there a steel drum band in Mexico?

And the London Olympic Park

We couldn't catch a break.  Every time we tried to take a photo children ended up getting in the photo.

There was this whole track set up that marbles went through.  I just imagine a bunch of 30-40 somethings sitting in an office "designing" this (aka playing with Legos)

Denmark in Legos

I am not really sure what was going on here but there were adorable little Danish girls dressed in princess dresses.

I also just really want this guys job, fighting small children with a light saber 

This wall was made entirely of Legos!

Apparently there are velociraptors in Copenhagen.

The even had a replica of the Metro!

Why wouldn't there be bikes in Lego Copenhagen?

This one is for you dad.  Sorry I was wrong it is not a D10 it is a D7.

Legoworld was a lot of fun and I am super glad that I went.  It was one of those moments though that really made me wish I had Landon, Levi, or Mahri here.  When you have a small child that you can take along to something like this you feel less creepy taking photos.  I am glad however that I have friends who will still go along on my childish whims.


This weekend has also brought about a major change in my apartment.  My roommate, Anders, moved out. It's really sad because we have become a small sort of dysfunctional family.  This also means that I will have a new roommate.  This is also super scary because we have no idea what this new person will be like.  But since it was his last day here I decided to be super awkward and asked my roommates to take a photo with me.  It was quite possibly the most awkward time ever trying to get these three to stand normally and smile.  But here are the inhabitants of 11A 1TH: Anders, me, Daniel, and Morten.  Unfortunately Laura, Daniel's girlfriend who also lives here took the photo so she isn't in it.

Holidays, buses, and barrels...

"A love for tradition has never weakened a nation, indeed it has strengthened nations in their hour of peril"

- Winston Churchill

Danes love their traditions.  They also really really love their holidays and decorating the city for them.    

I loved that in November they put mustaches on all of the city buses in honor of movember.  Movember is an event for the month of November where guys grow mustaches to raise awareness for prostate cancer.

 This past week the buses have grown flags.  Apparently the flag is put up for birthdays of the royal family, when important people come to town, and pretty much anything else important happens.  But this pas week the flags are up for Crown Princess Mary's birthday on February 5th and Princess Marie's birthday.  Princess Mary is married to the heir to the Danish throne, Crown Prince Frederick and Princess Marie is married to the younger Prince Joachim.

But today is actually Fastelavn, Denmark's Mardi Gras or Carnival.  The weird part about this holiday is that it seems to also be the Danish Halloween.  Traditionally a black cat was placed in a barrel and then children would hit the barrel until the cat was dead.  Yeah some tradition.  Thankfully today's version is a little less sadistic.  A barrel is still used as a Danish sort of Pinata however the barrels today is filled with candy.       

Another tradition is fastelavnsris.  This amazing tradition involves children ritually flogging their parents to wake them up on the morning of Fastelavns, and American parents thought Christmas morning was rough.  The children flog their parents with bunches of twigs decorated with feathers, egg-shells, storks and little figures of babies.    

Not only do kids get to flog their parents on this day, but they get rewarded with fastelavnboller, basically cream puffs, afterwards.  

Children in Denmark also go trick-or-treating on Fastelavn.  However instead of candy the children get money.  So of all of these tradition the only one I can think of adopting in the U.S. is the money instead of candy part.  The children also sing this song in order to get the money:

The song translates to:

Mardi Gras is my name,
buns I want.
If I get no buns,
I will make trouble.
Mardi Gras is my name
buns in my stomach.
If I get no buns,
I will make trouble.

Basically I think this is one day where children get too much power.  I under no certain terms ever want my children to flog me, beat a cat in a barrel until it's dead, or sing a song threatening people with trouble if they don't give them sweets.  But that's just me.


Random Danish/Scandinavian Facts:
- Finland is home to the World Championship of Wife Carrying, the prize is the wife's weight in beer.
- Rekjavik, the capital of Iceland, has sidewalks that are heated by geothermal heat in the winter so that no one has to shovel them (This idea is genius, too bad Wisconsin doesn't have any geothermal power)
- In most of Norway the sun is only up for 3 hours a day, a phenomenon that is said to affect and slow pregnancies of Norwegian women.  There are more births in Norway in April than any other month.

Brie, Chemicals, and Being Creative...

"The only real stumbling block is fear of failure.  In cooking you've got to have a what-the-hell attitude."

- Julia Child

The past 6 months as most of you know have been quite a challenge for many reasons; being away from home, being in a different country, learning a new language.  But one of the biggest challenges has actually been cooking.  This is my first time living in an apartment, ever.  My first two years at university I lived in dorms so I ate at the dining hall.  If you asked me at home if I could cook, I would have said yes.  Here, I would have to think about that a little more before I answered.  Americans are spoiled when it comes to cooking.  When we say we make things from scratch, we truly only make about half of the dish from scratch and then cheat a little with some sort of pre-made thing.  

You probably won't remember this photo, but this was the first day I was in Denmark.  Kate and I went to the grocery store, where we were terrified, and bought potatoes, bread and butter.  That first night we made mashed potatoes.  Thankfully I have moved past mashed potatoes for dinner.  

 Now I have moved on to cookies! Just kidding, cookies were already in my repertoire before coming here.

I have to say that some of our best times  this past semester were when we were cooking together.  We made a lot of cookies, cakes, and other goodies.

We started a tradition to bake cakes for people's birthdays and show up at their bedroom windows at midnight.  

 There was one night, that we are not super proud of, when we ate three cakes for dinner.  Also not one of the proudest moments of my life, I invited a diabetic to this night.  Oops. (Chris if you read this, sorry about that one)

 Not only do I need to cook all of my food here, without the help of a cafeteria, but I also need to deal with everything being in metric.  Also Denmark kind of scorns pre-made food.  This not only includes things like frozen pizza but cream of mushroom soup and other things like that.

And yes you can make all of these things completely from scratch but it is not really the same.

Because truthfully, the chemicals and preservatives added to our food at home add taste.  And they taste good, crazy I know.  

This was my dinner tonight and this is where the creativity comes in.  Since we don't have the same ingredients here as in the US I have gotten creative mixing different things together.  I have also become more creative because I only cook for one person, which is actually extremely difficult.  I made this quiche because I needed to use up eggs, because there is no way that I can eat a dozen eggs before the go bad, unless I eat eggs everyday.  I also had brie cheese that I needed to use, so I tried to substitute that for the Swiss cheese that was in the recipe.  

The reason I started thinking about my cooking here was because last week my friend, Niklas, started writing a blog.  Niklas does not cook at all, so for his birthday we made him a cookbook, where each of us wrote a couple of recipes for him to try.  He started this blog as a challenge for himself, he wants to cook each of the recipes in his cookbook in the next two months.  So far he has made 3 of the recipes, even my recipe for German Potato Salad.  It is very humorous.  If you want to check it out here is the link: Niklas' Hyggelig Cookbook

Also I don't think I have shared photos of my apartment yet.  Christmas Eve all of my roommates were gone and I was having people over for dinner so I majorly cleaned my apartment.  Since this is probably the only time it will ever be this clean, I decided to take pictures.  So here is my room:

And here is our living room:

 And our kitchen.  On the left you can see our refrigerator.  One of the things that I am looking forward to the most next year is having a full size fridge! The fridge here is about half the size of normal ones at home and 5 people share it.  This also makes cooking difficult because we don't have enough room to store things.   

So there you have it my cooking and apartment.  I know this post is not very exciting but it's all I've got, until I have things to do such as classes and I have friends.  Ok that sounded pitiful, I promise I am not that pitiful.

Random Danish/Denmark/Scandinavian Facts:

- In Iceland there is governmental agency whose job it is to go to building sites before construction begins to see if the site has elves or trolls, which means that the building/road cannot be built on that site (and we thought the DNR was bad).

- In Denmark if you are not married by the age of 30 you receive a pepper shaker, no one really knows why.

- The refrigerator, the zipper, the pacemaker, and the computer mouse were all invented in Sweden. 

- Finland, a country that is roughly the size of New Mexico, has 188,000 lakes and 98,000 islands. 

The walk that never seemed to end, the opera, and homesickness...

"Maybe you had to leave in order to really miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was."

- Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care

Yesterday Niklas and Krys thought it would be a good idea to walk to the city of Dragor, which is an old fishing village on the East side of the island of Amager.  It was supposed to take 2 hours to walk there.  In the end it took 3.  So 8.4 miles later, in 12 degree weather I might add, we made it. And after about 5 minutes walking around the town we decided we had had enough and just wanted to go home and get warm.   

As you can see Krys and I were not exactly thrilled by this journey, but it did get us out of our apartments and took up an afternoon.

I also went to the opera Carmen on Thursday night.  When I decided to go to the opera, I decided to buy the cheapest tickets available.  Little did i know that the tickets I bought ended up being for standing room, which actually mean standing.  Yup standing through a 3 and 1/2 hour opera is not the greatest thing in the world, but it was still a lot of fun and we all got to get dressed up and act like we were classy.

Also this past week I signed the lease for an apartment next year.  Also the last of my friends leave this week.  They are all really excited to be going home and keep talking about what they have missed from home while being in Denmark.  Because of this I also became REALLY excited to go home and have everything that i miss here in Denmark.  But then I remember that I have another 6 months before I can go home.  

I have found that I miss this place, really miss this place.  Since signing the lease for the apartment, I am really excited for next semester.  I am also really excited to go back to real classes and an American university.  Currently I am watching all kinds of cheesy teen movies about American College campus' just so that I can feel like I am back there.

I also REALLY REALLY REALLY miss these guys and their brother Landon.  At home I am always surrounded by children, and I definitely miss that.  Levi is turning 8 this next week.  I first started watching him when he was 3 months old and I haven't missed a birthday since then.  

I even miss these two, my mom and dad and my house.

 Even though I do really miss home I know that the next semester will be amazing.  I just need it to start already so that I can meet new friends and get my mind off of home.