A few months in a nutshell

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I have absolutely lost track of time and have not entered anything into my blog since mid September. So this will be a quick summery of everything I've done since then.
After the short study tour to Jylland, my host mom had her 40th birthday. She threw a GIGANTIC Octoberfest part in our backyard the day that I had to leave for Germany with my holocaust and genocide class. Fortunately I was around to help set up and also to see a lot of the guests arrive before I had to leave.
My class went on a trip to Hamburg, Germany for the weekend. It was a very quick trip, and we didn't see much other than the concentration camp we went there for. It was called Neuengamme, located right in the middle of Hamburg. We took a bus and ferry there and back, so it was a lot of traveling for such a short trip.

Fast forward: I joined a gym called SATS which my host mom works as a sports masseuse when she's not doing her stuff as a bioanalyst. So that's a good thing to keep me busy while i'm here. I've been slacking lately though, and been really busy with school.
One of my neighbors is the childhood (and still) best friend of my host mom, so we go over to their house every Monday to watch this show called Robinson Ekspeditionen, which is basically Danish Survivor. But neither my family nor theirs will admit to anybody else that they watch this show, so we just say we are going to "drink coffee". So that has become a weekly tradition, which I'm really happy about. They are a great family, they have two kids, a boy who is 16? and Sabrina who is 18. Sabrina goes to the gym with me sometimes. They also have a little dog which i love on every time I am there because I miss my dog Flaps so much.

Fast forward: My core class, Healthcare in Northern Europe left for our long program tour to Tallin, Estonia, and Helsinki, Finland. This trip was a week long and we started out flying to Estonia. Estonia is a little country on the Baltic Sea bordering Russia. It gained its final independence from the Soviets in 1991, so the city of Tallin has a lot of Russian influence. We stayed in the Old City of Tallin, which looked straight out of that scene in Shrek when he enters the old village. We ate dinner at a medieval restaurant in town that served us really heavy foods, as well as honey and cinnamon beer. Quite an experience. The point of the tour was to kind of evaluate and learn about the health care systems of Estonia and Finland, so we visited a few general practitioners offices and health centers in the area. Estonia's health system is mostly interesting because it is still being developed due to their recent independence and the huge decrease in funding available for their health care. They basically had to start from scratch. We go to spend quite a bit of time in Tallin on our own, exploring, and going to pubs and that sort of thing. It was a beautiful little city.
From Tallin, we took a ferry to Helsinki, Finland. Unfortunatly while in Finland we were put up in a hotel that was nice, but it was in the middle of the industrial/business part of town. That made exploring the city really difficult because getting back to the hotel was a challenge with unfamiliar transportation. In Helsinki we went to more health clinics. We also did some cultural things, like going to a sauna. The average Finnish person saunas at least a few times a week, either in private saunas in their homes, or public ones located everywhere around the city. It is not uncommon to have business meetings in a sauna either. We went to one of the original saunas in Helsinki for a few hours and it was amazing, we all felt really refreshed afterwards. One night we all got dressed up and went to the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra in downtown. Estonia was defiantly enjoyed more than Finland, but I think the main reason was just the time spent exploring the city.

As soon as I got back from this week long trip, my parents arrived in Copenhagen! I met them at the airport and we had dinner at their hotel. The next day the three of us went to Tivoli to see the Halloween decorations. Tivoli is a big amusement park located right in the heart of Copenhagen. Within the past few years Halloween has grown in Denmark (still nobody dresses up) but Tivoli decided to decorate. There were pumpkins EVERYWHERE, it was amazing. That night my parents met my host mom at the Opera House where we had dinner and saw the West Side Story ballet. My parents left Tuesday to go to Jylland to see our Danish relatives for 2 weeks. I decided I wanted to go over and visit a few of the relatives again while i'm in Denmark and to spend more time with my parents. So i bought a train ticket to Herning and left Friday after class. I stayed with one of my dads cousin's family, and my parents stayed with another cousin. We had a big family dinner with maybe 4 families? It was fun to see them again. At night I went out with my guy "cousins" who are 24 and 26 I think. All their friends met us out in the town, including some that I had met earlier in August when I visited them. We had a fun time. The next day we saw more family and ate more food. On Sunday I left to go back to Copenhagen.

Tuesday the 20th of October I had my 21st birthday! My host family woke me up around 6:30 singing Happy Birthday (the danish version) and then the happy birthday that i understood, in english. They cooked breakfast and we all ate together, even Kasper came over early to sing! Sara was out of town though. My host dad, Peer, gave me one of Dan Brown's older books, Deception Point. A few weeks prior he bought me the new one, The Lost Symbol (which I am now reading, and its exciting..) And my host mom, Birgitte, got me a gift card to H&M. I left for school after breakfast with the family. After classes ended at 11:30 I went home and relaxed and waited for 4 of my friends to make their way out to my town on the train. I picked them up at the station and we went to the store and they bought me birthday gifts like champagne and rum. We went back to the house and carved pumpkins, which was so much fun, even for a 21 yr old. Afterwards we cooked dinner for my host family and roasted pumpkin seeds (the first batch got burned, but luckily Kasper still thought they were good, and ate them) We had a great dinner, and my new friends got to meet my whole host family. We always have stories about our host families, so it is really fun to finally meet a friends host family. After dinner Peer packed us a bag of cider and beer, and we got ready to hit the town. On the train into the city my friends decorated me in Danish flags, and we drank champagne. We met more friends in the city and since it was a Tuesday night not too much was happening in the city, so we went to a few low key bars and just enjoyed being together, and celebrated. We met some Danish Royal Guards who bought us drinks, so that was lovely. My 21st birthday was rather anticlimactic since I'm in Denmark where they can buy alcohol when they are 16, but it was a great birthday nonetheless.
On Thursday my parents came back to Copenhagen. We had a big family dinner with my entire host family as well as my parents and it was really great. They got along well, and there were no awkward situations! I think it helped my host parents get a better grasp on who I am, too. My parents took off on Saturday, and I had a lot of school work to catch up on. I wrote a paper for my Holocaust and Genocide class about the social-psychological impacts on the Holocaust perpetrators, it turned out pretty interesting.
That week Lily, a friend of mine from SCU who is studying currently in Amsterdam, came to visit me. Oct 30th was J-dag, which is the day that Tuborg comes out with its annual Christmas (Jule) beer. They give it away free all over the city that night at 9pm. So of course, everybody is in the city that night, so i took Lily into the city to a party held by my program at a club called K-3. We had a fun time at the club with the few friends who had not already left for their 2 week break. Halloween was uneventful in Copenhagen. Nobody dresses up, there are no trick or treaters, and no halloween candy. Lily and I had spent the day sightseeing in the city, and were really tired from the night before so we decided to stay in and watch a movie. It was really nice to see Lily, since I hadn't seen her since June, and I am going to visit her this coming week in Amsterdam!

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Photos

Birgitte's Bday Fest
My host brothers and host sister's boyfriend.

Tallin
The ladies wearing our mustchaes

Helsinki
Sauna!

Copenhagen
Tivoli dressed up for Halloween

Fall in Copenahgen
We don't have seasons in California

Birthday
My friend Meagan and I on the train into the city