Meeting up with family and traveling to my second European country

Well, it's been a while since I've last blogged, mostly because I used to have too much free time and now I never seem to have enough of it! I got a gym membership so I go there frequently, and I often meet up with my DIS friends between and after classes. My school work has increased lately and I have a group project for every class at the moment! It seems that group work is more common here than in the states.
So last weekend I met up with my parents at the Copenhagen airport on Friday and together we flew to Stockholm, Sweden where Andrew was waiting for us to take the train together to Uppsala where he is studying for the semester. It's a small city, and Andrew seems to really like the size of it because he already knows his way around a bit. Copenhagen is much larger but that's one of the reasons why I love it. I can always seem to find some new place to explore! Anyway, we stayed at a really nice hotel which was about a ten minute walk from Andrew's nation, or apartment complex, where he lives. If you want to know more about what the nation is, ask him!
So we enjoyed a meal out together that night at an Indian restaurant, which consisted of lots of curry and rice and chicken and lamb and herbs..... mmmm. The place was a shelter from the biting cold of the city and left us warm, happy, and very very full.
On Saturday we walked to the nearby cathedral and spent a while admiring its beauty, in the architecture, paintings, and windows, and reading about its history. After a lunch with Andrew's friends at one of the nations, we traveled to Gamla Uppsala, or old Uppsala, where we saw the viking burial mounds (basically big hills covered in snow). The museum had artifacts that had been uncovered from the mounds so far, as well as facts and speculations about this ancient society.
We had dinner at a nearby pub and then spent the rest of the evening catching up at the hotel. We had an early rise the next morning to get to the airport to go back to Copenhagen.
The weather here in Copenhagen seemed balmy compared to the frigid cold of northern Sweden. My parents got to see two days of sunshine, which is practically more sunshine than I had seen in the past month here!
They were able to crash in the living room of Signe's and my apartment. We ate a fantastic Sunday brunch at the restaurant right across the street, then took a walk to the cemetary/park nearby. In the states (a phrase I find myself saying very often) our cemeteries tend to be very bleak and are very seldom used for anything other than visiting the graves of loved ones. Well here the cemeteries double as parks. There are wide paths, and a variety of trees and plants, so people are often going on walks, runs, or bike rides through the cemetery. I'm sure it will be even more beautiful and filled with color and life once springtime comes!
The graves are also different because many of them have square hedges around them and there is a lot of space for each plot. This cemetery, located in my neighborhood of Nørrebro, is also where the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen and the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard are buried.
We also went to a museum that is free on Sundays, called the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. The famous Danish beer, Carlsberg, is somehow connected to this because the owner helped fund the museum (or something like that) in the desire to support the arts in Denmark. The museum has a large collection of statues from all different places around the world and different eras. There were everything from statues from ancient Rome around and before the time of Jesus, relicas from 1500 BC Egypt, to modern French sculpture. It was a fascinating place!
On Monday I had classes and meetings so I sent mom and dad with a map and some directions on some sightseeing adventures. Unfortunately, there was a bus strike this weekend and that affected their travel at one point, as well as bad directions from strangers, causing them to get very, very lost. So it became a long and frustrating day for them, and I was unaware until they got home because they had no way of contacting me during the day! Luckily, Signe had decided earlier that she was going to make us all a traditional Danish dinner and my parents were more than appreciative of this. We had frikadeller (like fried meat balls), cold potato salad, and tomatoes and mozzarella cheese. Yum!
Tuesday I had the morning off because my class was cancelled, so that was great timing. We went to the most famous bakery in Copenhagen, Sankt Peder's Bageri, and mom and dad got pastries there, then we took a bus to a different bakery that sold gluten-free products, that I had been meaning to check out for a while. I got a piece of carrot cake which truly made my day! Everyone else takes baked goods for granted, but not me. When I am able to buy good gluten free bread or baked goods, I am so excited and appreciative. I always tell people that if there was a cure for Celiac Disease, I would never want it because it's a big part of who I am and I have no desire to change that. I would never appreciate food as much!
The last thing we did together before they left for the train station was to visit the Danish Resistance museum, which has artifacts that outline and explain the Danish involvement during WWII. Denmark was occupied by Germany for a few years because the Danish government let them be there. The Danish citizens eventually protested against their government's position in the war and there was an underground resistance movement, which is fascinating to read about!
Luckily they were able to make it back to the central station just fine, and now I'll see them again in May when I get home. Andrew, though, will hopefully come to Copenhagen and visit me here!

Copenhagen, I love you

Last semester, Katy introduced me to the movie Paris, je t'aime, which is a collection of 20 short stories about love in Paris. These include various couples, being present or former lovers, parents and children, and random acquaintances. In one of the clips, an American woman travels to Paris and falls in love with the city.
Today, I went to class in the morning and had a meeting afterwards, then I was headed back on the bus to my apartment. I was enjoying the relaxing bus ride back, and I had just pressed the stop button on the seat in front of me when I realized that I had never grabbed my keys when I left in the morning. While unpacking the day before from my weekend away, I had put my keychain on my desk and never remembered to put it in my bag. Not knowing what to do, I got off at my stop and walked over to the apartment door. After a few seconds I remembered that Signe's sister, two doors down from us, has a spare key. Unfortunately, this was further complicated by the fact that I somehow misplaced my cell phone this past weekend, presumably in the hotel. The phone had numbers for Signe, her sister Maja, and her brother who also has another spare key. I took my chances and pressed the button next to Maja's name at her apartment door, but there was no answer. I walked over to the bus stop and waited a few minutes for the next bus to take me to Radhusplads, the city square near DIS. Twenty minutes later, I was at DIS asking the housing department if they had a cell phone number for Signe. They only had her home number, which doesn't do much in the middle of her work day. After chatting with friends for a little while, I remembered that I could access my cell phone records online, so I studied my list of calls and made an educated guess as to what her number might be. I borrowed the housing department's phone and got right through to Signe, who was at work only a ten minute walk from DIS. I got directions and set off for Signe's workplace, Journalisten, and took a few wrong turns but eventually figured it out.
Signe gave me her keys and I left the building and stepped out on the Copenhagen cobblestone street. It was then, after a frustrating few hours had passed, that I stopped, took a deep breath, looked around and realized how incredibly beautiful the city was.
I am now starting to feel a connection with Copenhagen, even if it means simply recognizing a few words on an advertisement on the side of a bus, knowing the correct bus ettiquette, or a successful grocery shopping trip. I smiled like a fool on my way back to Radhusplads (which I can now pronounce) to take the bus home.
So, Copenhagen, I love you. I love the biting cold and all the clothing layers I need, the small park nearby where I go running, the various graffiti found throughout the city, the delectable roasted almonds for 25 kroner from the sidewalk stands, the convenience store where I get my hot cocoa/coffee in the morning, running to the bus stop, chatting with Signe after a long day, and so much more. This weekend I get to share the city with Eileen when she comes to visit for three days! I cannot wait. Two weeks later I get to show my parents around too! I am so fortunate :-).

Classes so far

My classes have only met three times each so far, but there is much to tell already about them. The academic program that I am studying with here at DIS is Migration and Identity, which deals with issues surrounding immigration in Europe. I am taking two classes that fall within this program: the core class, Cross Cultural Encounters in a European Context and Human Trafficking. The academic program is important partly because of the two different study tours with the group. There are about 40 students in my program, and it's mostly girls. I have some good friends within the program so far, so that will make the study tours more fun! Next weekend is the short study tour, and I'll go to western Denmark. I don't know too much about the trip so far, just that it lasts from Thursday morning to Sunday, and that we'll be staying at a hostel. In March I'll be traveling to Bulgaria for a week for the long study tour.
On Wednesdays, no one has classes and its a day for field studies, and this week I went on a trip to the US embassy for my Human Trafficking class where we listened to two speakers talk about how they combat trafficking in various ways, including ad campaigns that encourage people to report suspected trafficking, writing a report on the status of all countries and trafficking, etc. Some of what they said we already knew, but it was interesting to hear it from their perspective.
So immigration is a very appropriate subject to study in Denmark because they are known through Europe as having a strict immigration policy. After 9/11 especially, there was a rising nationalism in Denmark and the government elected in November of '01 made it difficult for anyone to immigrate to Denmark, and even to get asylum in the country. This becomes a serious problem when there are immigrants from Middle Eastern countries where there is conflict that are seeking asylum, or protection in Denmark, and they cannot meet the demands of the government to get asylum. Recent figures show that even the small country of Denmark has about 2,000 asylum seekers every year, and that larger European countries, Germany for example, receives about 20-25,000 every year. Last year, about 18% of asylum seekers in Denmark were granted asylum. On Thursday, we had a speaker in class who was a legal advisor working with asylum cases and she explained the complexity of the process and how many of the applicants end up living in centers for years and years due to discrepancies in certain laws. For instance, people may not be able to prove that they have individual risk of discrimination, torture, etc. in their home countries. To do this, papers are needed to prove it and some of the applicants don't even have proper ID so they cannot complete the process. But, because of the state of certain countries, asylum seekers won't be accepted by their home countries so Denmark cannot send them back home. Instead, these people live for years and years in centers where they are unable to work or become self-sufficient at all, and must just wait.
A semester-long project that we will be all participating in is helping the asylum seekers publish the next edition of NewTimes, a magazine that is produced by the asylum seekers in the Danish Red Cross asylum centers. They want to tell their stories, but the magazine is produced in English and many are not proficient in the language, so we are going to be interviewing them and helping them tell their stories in English. This Wednesday we will be going to meet those involved in New Times and be assigned to specific people and stories to write. I'm really looking forward to seeing how this project turns out. I'm sure I will learn a great deal more about the asylum process too. To see the website for New Times, visit http://newtimes.dk/.