Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy

Today was one of those days that I couldn't stop smiling even though, in theory, it should have been a bad day. My first class was cancelled but I still had to go in for a meeting and then the wireless wouldn't work for two hours. But that didn't phase me!

You know why? Sunshine. Today was a milestone because it was the first day that I took my winter coat off in Copenhagen! As long as the sun is shining on my face I'm happy. The bus was twenty minutes late this afternoon, which would usually annoy me, but I was as happy as a clam because there was a spot of sun at the bus stop that I was standing in. You can't go wrong with sunshine while listening to Jack Johnson!

Some other interesting things from this week:

-On Sunday I went to a F.C. Kobenhavn football game (no, it's not called soccer here) and it was fun! Why do hot dogs, beer, and popcorn taste infinitely better at sporting events? It's a mystery. Oh, and in case you were curious, FCK won against Brondby, 3-1. It was an exciting game!

-Today in my espionage class, a Danish man who was actually involved with HUMINT in East Germany and Poland in the 1980s came and talked to us. He told us his story and it was fascinating and so cool! You don't get to see that everyday...

- In my genocide class, we talked for the entire class period today about the current situation in Libya and how it relates to genocide. I love connecting current events with history, it makes it so much more relevant and interesting! There are some crazy things going on in the world right now...

-Tomorrow morning, I leave for Edinburgh until Sunday! I'm so excited!! (/stressed because I have a lot of connections to make before I actually get there. Travel is the one thing that stresses me out!)

"Joan of Arc stood RIGHT HERE!"

Yep, this sums up my excitement for history. My friend took this picture in Reims Cathedral so I thought I'd share. :)

Copenhagen Perspectives

I've put together some video clips that I've been taking for the past two months for you to get a glimpse of what I see everyday. I was afraid it would never export from my computer so I'm very happy that I can finally share this!

Je ne veux pas travailler...

is the line of a French song that I constantly had in my head while in Paris. Also, it means "I don't want to work," which is exactly the sentiment I'm feeling right now.

So, yes, I went to France for a week! Obviously, I'm not going to do a day-by-day summary or that would take forever and you would probably get bored. Instead of painstakingly inserting pictures into my blog post like I normally do (i.e. I'm becoming increasingly lazy), you should look at my facebook albums to get a better idea of what my week was like. I spent far too much time editing the albums down to about 200 pictures from the over 600 pictures that I took (yes, 600). Here are the public links to my albums if you don't have a facebook: (and yes, I have devoted an entire album to food.)

I'm in a serious relationship with food

Verdun and Reims

Paris

The 15 hour bus ride that we took from Copenhagen to France wasn't actually as painful as I thought it would be. We each had two seats of the bus to spread out on, I brought my pillow and blanket, and I just slept the whole time. Yes, I forgot my toothbrush so I went a day with disgusting teeth, but I just dealt. I probably got more sleep on the bus than I did most other nights in the hotels, actually.

From the moment we got to Verdun, our first stop, things boded well. Sunshine, blue skies, and amazing food greeted us when we arrived! As I've said before, DIS always picks the BEST restaurants to eat at and our first lunch was a wonderful wake-up call to the fact that we were in France and they have good food. I was very excited to see Verdun, as I learned about it last semester in my WWI class. It was pretty shocking to see how much the landscape is still so affected by the constant bombardment of shells. Every pit or dip in the ground we saw, even where trees are growing now, was from the war. As usual, pictures never do justice and it's insane to actually see it in person. We got a tour of Fort Douaumont, which was creepy and dark and wet, and there was also a great exhibit on the battle with a lot of artifacts. Verdun is a beautiful little town and I would love to visit it again when it is a little more lively (a Sunday night in March is not exactly peak tourist season).

We worked our way up to a bigger town by going to Reims, with its gorgeous Gothic cathedral. It's unreal to see this thing in person! Most of the French kings had their official coronation here and I got a big kick out of slowly walking down the center aisle of the cathedral, knowing that famous kings walked in my exact footsteps. It's mind-blowing! This is the part of history I love the most--walking in history's footsteps and seeing things in person. Sometimes it's hard to comprehend how old things are, even when you're standing right there looking at it all. These are the times when I wish I had a time machine so I could just go back and just see what it was like 500 years ago! We also got to go on a tour of some champagne caves that used to be below an old abbey, which was very cool. They were originally chalk pits dug out in the 4th century when the Romans were still around, and then became the crypt to the Saint Nicaise Abbey in 1211. Even though the abbey is long gone, the caves have remained and are very good for fermenting champagne. Talk about old! Even Peter the Great visited the caves in the 1700s, which I think is pretty cool. (Peter seemed to go everywhere, didn't he? He went up the Round Tower in Copenhagen, too.)

The last four days were spent in Paris, and I don't think I've ever done more walking in my life. By the end of the week, I was so sore! It was completely worth it, of course. It was so refreshing to understand most of the signs, or least be able to pronounce them! (unlike Danish.) Even though I didn't get to use my limited French that much, I still attempted to order food in French and even succeeded a few times. Although, sometimes I got myself into trouble when I would order in French, not understand a question they had, and then automatically say "Quoi?" Then they would just repeat the question in French and I would look at them idiotically until they switched to English. Oops. Ah well, at least I could finally say "Bonjour" and "merci" without looking silly (my friends know I say random things in French all the time...). It was also exciting to see words that I learned in French class for vocab tests come alive in the city. They're real! They're really used by French people!

The weather was FANTASTIC and we didn't have a drop of rain the whole week. Most days were sunny with blue skies, and it usually got between 15 and 20 degrees C!! (That's in the 60s, for all you Fahrenheit people.) The day we went to Versailles was especially beautiful, and it was wonderful to walk around the gardens without our coats on and soak up some vitamin D! The early spring flowers were already blooming and the forsythia and crocuses and daffodils were in full force! I was maybe a little overly excited whenever I saw flowers, but I'm just so deprived of spring weather that I couldn't help it! (It also made Copenhagen a bit depressing when we came back, because it's only 5 degrees C here and no flowers blooming yet.)

I saw all the main tourist spots in Paris, including: Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower, Sacre Coeur, the Arc de Triomphe, Musee d'Orsay, the Louvre (my favorite part was Napoleon III's lavish apartments!), and lots of other monuments. We also visited the Jewish quarter (AMAZING falafel there!) and Belleville, a more multi-cultural neighborhood where we had delicious Lebanese food. I started to get the hang of the Metro, ate crepes with Nutella, and had a meal sitting outside at a cafe. Even though it was only a week I felt like I had a great French experience and it made me want to live there someday. Maybe I should have studied abroad in France, eh? But I love Copenhagen--coming back was a relief because it's so much cleaner and simpler and I actually know how to get around. I'll just be patient for spring here and then I know I won't even miss Paris!

P.S. I had to change the background of my blog because I'm fickle and also I wanted something happier and more springy. (even though I have a sneaking suspicion that this background is actually in the Netherlands...)

Some things I've learned

I've started compiling a list of random things I've learned:

1. I love duvets and I never want to use normal sheets again.

2. Standard printer paper is slightly taller here so it sticks out of my folders I brought from home.

3. Weinerbrød = Danish pastries = heaven

4. I love Danish design--simple and sleek and practical

5. Their gummy candies are addicting (and terrible for your teeth).

6. Two words: Fresh Bread. (and Nutella)

7. Disney channel and cartoons like the Fairly Oddparents are dubbed over in Danish, which make them more awesome.

8. Danes really do party hard.

9. I have seen Danes bike: talking on their phones, smoking a cigarette, without hands, in skirts, in heels, in the snow/rain, drinking beer, etc.

10. Babies are classy because they ride in prams (i.e. real, legit baby carriages).

11. Heated bathroom floors. Why hasn't the U.S. caught onto this yet???

12. Herring isn't that bad.

I'm leaving for France today!!! Au revoir!

‎"No man in the whole world can change the truth. One can only look for the truth, find it and serve it."

First of all, can we just talk about the fact that it's already MARCH? When did that happen?! I'm halfway through week 7 already. And we're only here for 17 weeks, 3 of which will be spent traveling (so they don't count). I'm starting to realize that people aren't kidding when they say your time abroad goes by fast. It really does!

However, I'm perfectly okay with it being March, because March means that I can start to be slightly more optimistic about spring. No matter how pretty the snow is in Copenhagen (see

exhibit A on the right), I've had ENOUGH. Snow isn't so appealing when you have to walk around in it! The pictures look pretty, but every time you take your hand out of your pocket, it gets progressively more painful, even with gloves. I'm surprised my hands haven't fallen off yet. Even

though I told everyone I was going to Copenhagen for the spring semester, that was a lie. I'm in Copenhagen for the winter semester, with a little bit of spring at the very end. I just keep telling myself that I'll appreciate Copenhagen even more in the spring now that I've experienced the winter. I can just tell that all the gardens and landscaping will be so beautiful by May! I understand why the Danes need hygge to get through winter.

Anyway, this past weekend, I traveled to Hamburg with my Holocaust and Genocide class (and my hopes for spring were falsely raised when it was 8°C on Saturday!). Even though it was a short trip (only Saturday and Sunday), I learned a lot and it was great to finally see another city in Europe besides Copenhagen. Hamburg is actually quite different from Copenhagen, which I wasn't really expecting. Because about 80% of the city was completely destroyed by bombs during WWII, the city is much more modern, and has a completely different feel to it. Also, everything is in German (duh) and I can't even pronounce the street names (much to the chagrin of my very German family, I'm sure). Believe it or not, it was a relief to come back to Copenhagen and see Danish again. It felt like coming home!

But I digress. On Saturday we left much too early in the morning and took a bus to Hamburg, including a massive ferry across the Baltic Sea from Denmark to Germany. We went to the Hamburg Museum and saw some interesting exhibits on the war in Hamburg, and I was greatly amused by the fact that one of the display rooms was labeled "1998" and had an old Mac computer and printer. 1998 is in museums already?? I feel old. Most of Saturday we just walked around and saw some of the city, and then in the evening we went to a delicious German restaurant (as usual, DIS feeds us well). I have to say, one thing Germany does better than Copenhagen is cheap beer! It really is cheaper than most water. Then I was lame and went to bed at 9:30 at the hostel (the earliest I've gone to bed since my jet lag the first few days here!), but I didn't regret it because we had a very full day ahead of us.

On Sunday, we were thrown headfirst into dealing with the tough stuff. After seeing a bit of the city, including the remains of a church that was bombed in 1943, the first stop was just outside of Hamburg, at an old school building. In 1945, shortly before the Nazi regime fell, the SS wanted to remove all evidence of what they had been doing. At Neuengamme, they had been performing tuberculosis experiments on twenty Jewish children, so they brought them to this school building and hanged them. There is now a small rose garden in memoriam of this awful event, and for me it was much more powerful than any of the big Holocaust memorials because they had a plaque with each child's picture and how old they were when they died. It made the war seem so much more personal and horrible,

especially because they were children between the ages of 5 and 12.

Then we headed to Neuengamme concentration camp, which is about 15 km outside of Hamburg. For some reason, in my head I had convinced myself that the camp wasn't as bad as some of the more well-known ones, since they didn't have as many Jews and there wasn't much gassing. But my assumptions were totally wrong. The prisoners at Neuengamme were worked to death, and in some ways this was even more horrible. Of the over 100,000 men that went through the camp, about half of them died. That's a lot of people. The conditions were absolutely horrible--12 hour work days, even in the winter, wearing only a thin layer of clothing and sometimes no shoes. This was better appreciated by the fact that we were standing out there for 2 hours shivering, even though we had many warm layers on. They had to either lug around clay to make bricks (there was a brick factory there), or dig out a canal. Much of the work had to be done at a running pace, or else you were beaten. If you were beaten, it meant death because you were so malnourished from lack of food and sleep that your wounds probably wouldn't heal. Most men only lasted a few miserable months. Add to that extremely crowded sleeping quarters, often 3 to a bed, and most of them had diarrhea because they were so unhealthy. It

was very sobering to walk around the camp and know that almost everywhere you walked, someone probably died there. No matter how much you learn about these camps, it is very chilling to actually walk in one.

The two barracks on either side are original (one of them is pictured), and one of them had a very good exhibit on life in the camps and how it has been used since. The camp was used as a real prison until 2003, if you can believe it! Naturally, friends and relatives didn't like this, as they couldn't even go on the premises to pay their respects or lay flowers. On the right of the picture, you can see an outline with stones, which is where the wooden barracks that most prisoners slept in were located. It's hard to describe what it's like to see this and realize that these atrocities were actually committed. It was very sobering and if nothing else, I walked away with the knowledge that I'm extremely blessed to have such a great life. It makes the small complaints of life seem silly and unnecessary, and made me appreciate all my friends and family and the warm, clean bed I have every night. I have absolutely nothing to complain about.

So, life is very, very good. This coming Saturday I'm leaving for my long study tour to France already! I'm starting to get VERY excited. I need to brush up on my French. Probablement, je vais seulement dire "excusez-moi" et "merci" parce que je suis un lâche!

P.S. In case you were wondering, the quote in the title is by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It was on a plaque at the church memorial in Hamburg.