Put a yule on it and call it christmas

Merry christmas and/or happy holidays to all!

I meant to take more pictures of the christmas set up in Denmark but I'll just post a few here today. One thing that was pretty funny was that the grocery stores managed to acquire a "yule" (christmas) version of almost every product - yule beer, yule sausage, yule cookies, yule paté! Yule tea pictured at left.

 This is the view from the christmas ferris wheel - you can see the Fjord off in the distance and the christmas lights on the town hall below.

 

Here I am hangin' on the christmas wheel in front of one of Aalborg's churches.

Christmas train! This was an adventure with a few of my group mates that involved riding a really old train about a half an hour out into the middle of nowhere to spend about an hour freezing cold at a "christmas market" that was actually mostly selling christmas trees. The train was pretty cool though, and as you can see in the picture above the Danish babies were at their best. They usually wear little colorful one-piece rompers, and it's pretty adorable.

Christmas lights in one of the squares in Aalborg.

I wish I could post some pictures of the sunny spanish christmas I've enjoyed, but those will have to wait until I'm back in the 'borg. Needless to say I enjoyed a local beer and tapas earlier today in a t-shirt, followed by a delicious (and extremely filling) christmas day lunch/dinner. I've been dusting off the old spanish so to end I will say, feliz navidad a todos!!

Lots of love to everyone who has been reading the blog, I really love hearing from you and I appreciate you taking the time to follow along on my adventure here!

Bike commute

Here's a little video I made of my bike ride to school. It's pretty shaky due to a lazy mount on the front of my bicycle, but hopefully gives a little picture of what cycling here is like.

You do have to be aware, but you also don't really have to interact with cars - which makes a HUGE difference! The risk of being hit my a moving car is almost eliminated. To turn left you do a "danish left" where you go straight through the intersection, stop at the other side, swivel around 90 degrees, and wait for the next light. I love it. Another great thing for safety is no free turns on right here - for anyone! And I think my favorite thing is that both cars and bicycles get a yellow light before the light turns green - how practical! That way if say you are going straight and cars in the lane to your left are turning right, you are probably already through the intersection before they turn. Drivers generally seem to be very aware here. One thing that is not nice is that mopeds are allowed on the bicycle tracks! They come racing by these narrow lanes, which is not ideal, but also doesn't happen much.

just a note

The past week has been pretty intense, working at the group room from 10 am until 10 or 11 or 12 at night trying to get a good draft of the project to our supervisor. Yesterday we officially went on "break", although we still have some work to do.

Here's what its looked like:

Most of the other international students have gone home now. I remember this feeling from a few times in college when I was the last to leave for a break - kind of lonely, especially knowing that everyone else gets to go home and celebrate christmas* with their families. But since I've been so busy it still felt nice to sleep in and relax today, wondering around the streets crowded with christmas shoppers.

I'm a bit behind on posts so hopefully I'll have another tonight or tomorrow. Saturday morning (4:45 AM taxi!) as some of you may know I'm making a little trip to Spain, where I hope to see my long lost friend, the sun.

*I've gotten so used to saying "happy holidays" that it does feel kind of nice here to go ahead and throw out a jolly "merry christmas!" (or "god jul" - yes my danish is really coming along!) It seems pretty acceptable here, and with the exception of a few muslim friends, it seems the Danes are pretty into christmas.

Hope you all are winding down the week and getting ready to enjoy some holiday fun!

Reader Requests: Part 2

I think this request came from Caroline - asking for some pictures of cool bikes. These aren't so much cool bikes as they are just little bike scenes. (btw I'm still open to reader requests if you've got any burning questions) 

These photos are mostly from my two trips to Copenhagen so far, enjoy!

 

Who's that dude and why is there a huge box on the front of his bike? Oh that's just the bicycle mailman, nbd.

Slow beer? Sounds interesting....

 Univeristy of Copenhagen campus, back in the "fall" days

Just a little bike party.

Red bikes go faster, I've heard.

Easy home entry solution - pull up your bike, scale the vine, pop in the window

Wow someone must have been working late on their group project! All that empty space is bike parking that is full up by 10 every morning.

Things that are fun

Things that are fun may include but are not limited to:

- birthday cake, or cakes for any occasion, or actually lets make that any desserts for any occasion
- festive dips (dippin!)
- shreddin' the pow
- partying like it's 1999 or actually any year
- hiking around in the mountains and/or baking in the sun
- hanging out on the guest bed with the lovell crew watching some Ina or some ten ten
- chattin
- lots of other stuff

Things that are not fun:

- Riding your bike in the pouring rain with hurricane-esque headwinds and semi-flat tires in the dark in the cold with your glasses on
- Realizing you've made a bit of a "time management error" and have to come up with a thesis question, devise a methodology, locate sources, and produce a proposal in addition to completing an overview of transportation modeling approaches and mode choice decision research, all within the next 30 hours.

Today's tally: 0/8 on list 1, 2/2 on list two. Whoops!

CPH

I went to Copenhagen for the second time this past weekend. It seems like a very cool city, though like all of Denmark it might be more fun with a Danish salary. Denmark is known for cool design, and Copenhagen has got lots. A lot of cool modern architecture mixed with historic cool architecture, fun-looking shops, hipster window displays, cozy cafes, and much more.

A few highlights:

Saturday night I went out to dinner with "Cousin Ida", who is actually the cousin of my roommate Tia's mom and good friend of tha Pegsta, Ingrid. Anyway, I like referring to her as Cousin Ida and she has certainly welcomed me like I was a cousin! First we stopped by a very cozy little brewpub with rotating taps and sampled some tasty Danish brews - it was quite a treat to try something different from the Carlsberg (or worse) that I've been drinking regularly in the 'borg. Then off to a tiny restaurant in a funkier part of town (from what I was told), where we ordered the two person menu - a bunch of small plates of whatever they've made that night.  It was very fun and tasty - and to me - danish, alhough Cousin Ida told me that many danish wouldn't even recognize the things we were eating. Some of the plates I remember... beets with creme freche, poached egg with capers and couscous, white fish with crunchy toasted onions and dill, beef, thinly sliced root vegetable with mussles, root vegetables in brown butter... and some other things I don't remember.

Sunday we went to the Louisiana Museum - a bit outside of town but a beautiful setting for a museum, right on the water look across to Sweden. The grounds are an attraction in themselves; see the Calder piece and view above. The Klee and Cobra exhibit was also very interesting though. A big theme of the exhibit was the inspiration these artists drew from children, which I thought provided some food for thought.

Then of course there was a lot of walking around, as there is any time you're in a new city. I tried some of the toasted sweet almonds, which you can smell wafting up the main pedestrian street - the longest in Europe.

The weather was a mixture of sun, rain, freezing cold, hail.... so below are a few pictures of one of the sunny moments, in the park/castle near the hostel, in the latin quarter of town. You can always click the photos to see a larger version. You may notice that with the arrival of the new camera I've been doing some "experimenting", with mixed results :)

Another highlight was thanks to my good friend Amy Chamb, who provided some great recommendations from her many visits - but most important was her suggestion to visit Sank Peder's Bageri. It was so bomb we went there twice in one day. A few photos and the surrounding area below.

I have a lot more pictures so I'll post some more in another post or set up a way to make a gallery or something. For now I'll end with me chillin Danish style.

"it snowd"

I think that's the message that was on a little postcard that Myra (pretty sure it was her) left under my parent's door one time when we were little and it had snowed a bit in Portland. As I recall it also had a drawing of a tiger. Not sure where that came into play, but anyway.

It snowd a bit in Aalborg this weekend, as you can see in the picture below it is just a dusting. That's the area near the university campus that is in the center of town where the planning dept is moving/has moved. Guess there will plenty more snow coming down the pipeline... 

More posts coming soon on a recent trip to Copenhagen and a few other topics.