Gi Mig Danmark Tilbage

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So its 1:38am. I’m getting fairly used to ‘this time’. Its my catching up time. It usually lasts anywhere from 1-4 hours. I’ve just paused my work on a paper that I’m writing since I’ve been researching and writing for about 3 hours and haven’t even hammered out a full page. This is disturbing but maybe it means the beginning of a great paper because of the thought I’m putting into it. Maybe not. So I’ve made a list of things to talk about. Its...extensive. I really need to update this blog a few times a week rather than once every 3 as I think this will be another long one. As an aside and for your audio expansion needs, I’m listening to two Danish groups: Analogik and Natasja Saad. One electronic with Balkan tones, and one pure reggae greatness. Its awesome stuff, do check it out!

Okay let’s start in chronological order:

Skip that.

Let’s do a brief synopsis, and then you can read what you like before. (Ha, I’ve re-read this, before? I mean after. Maybe its good I’ve paused writing my paper). Kim and Natalia came to visit me from Nottingham. We had a blast. My friend Jonas spent a LOT of time with us and we had a fantastic weekend drowning in wine. I worked with a team of two Swedish people on a making a shared experience for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, and wore my gorgeous white suit for the final presentation which was fun. I spent another blissful weekend in Copenhagen out all night twice in a row, then followed that up the next weekend with a club in Malmö, Sweden, and then back to Copenhagen for the rest of the weekend. I am taking Danish lessons and saw Swedish Improv and have started on a new project that gets me VIP access to a night club / culture club for the next two months. I’m still working at the preschool, on to babies (1 year olds) and changing diapers. I can finally pronounce sju. (Swedish “seven”). It involves blowing on my hand.

Sooooo let’s get started.

Kim & Natalia’s visit:

Kim and Nat came for 10 days, and we had a great time even though I was working full time at the school during the week (they went to Stockholm) during
that time. The first day they were here we went to a club in Malmö called Debaser, which was playing some great house music and had fun lighting. Kim met...every single person on the dance floor I think and proceeded to explain the benefits of sign language about 27 times to us. (I luv ya Kim). Beer may have been involved. In fact, there was one point where Kim ordered me a drink, asking what I’d like. I said, Red Bull and got ... beer. It was very strange. We met some nice people from Germany who live in Copenhagen, but typically, didn’t meet anyone from Sweden, while in a Swedish club. Sigh. Its a trend. These Swedes are shy. I’ve been told this repeatedly but its...really seriously true! I’m not talking men here, I’m talking social interaction with other humans. We’ll get to that in a few stories. Upon leaving the club at 2:30 we headed for the train station and missed the last train to Lund (we didn’t actually miss it, but the time went back an hour and we got confused and so did the trains and between the trains and us, we missed our train, technically, sort of.) So logically, we went to Copenhagen. (Why not?) On the way, we had a HIGHLY entertaining trip as Kim didn’t buy a ticket by accident and had to pretend to be sick in the washroom to avoid the ticket checker lady, and an entire Spanish flamenco band with a Swedish main singer entertained the train with guitar, singing, dancing and clapping in the aisles. Best. Train. Ride. Ever. I got the girls to get off the train at Islands Brygge (which apparently does not mean Islands as I’ve been thinking and pronouncing it, but rather, Ice Land Bridge). (Thank you Ry and Henrik). Its the bike bridge I’ve showed you before. Its beautiful at night so we wandered over that, freezing and chatting, and scaring the 7-11 workers as we scavenged for food amongst their bakery items. We finally made it to the city centre and realised to (my horror) that Copenhagen had shut down since it was technically 6am (or something) when really it was 5am (or something?) Either way, the bars were closing right then because of the time change. Us, and about 40 others surged into Burger King as it was warm, and open. We still had some time to kill before the trains started so we sat there and finally went to the train station, where to make a long, long story short, we were transferred about 6 times on and off trains, to buses, metros and more trains, and were delayed by nearly 2 hours trying to make a 45 minute trip back to Lund. We, and nearly 100 other people (including the flamenco team) all wandered around like sheep and finally were ushered on to a metro system that got rerouted at the airport and sent us back to Sweden. We got home around 9am and went to bed then Kim and Nat cooked a proper Sunday Lunch - roast chicken and all it was awesome.

The next weekend was a gong show. We basically spent a day exploring Copenhagen, then came home, cooked a huge dinner, and went crazy. Jonas and Amanda joined us and we had a lot of wine. And Jello Shooters. Maybe not the best combination. But definitely fun. The pictures are worth so many memories and story starters its fantastic. I, the great party girl, failed all my friends by crashing right before the taxi came to take us to the club. I actually couldn’t move for fear for of losing said wine. So they went to the club and came back later. Harsh Times. But essentially a wise decision on my part so I’m proud of that. The next morning after walking Jonas to the train station (church bells kept ringing on the way - Jonas asked if I could ask Amanda (who is our resident church-going girl) to make them stop since his hangover didn’t appreciate them) I went for a beautiful run through the park near our house. I always feel that running off a hang over is the best solution. All you focus on is trying to push yourself harder, breath, and move, and all the feelings of ugh, gross, and yuck dissipate. I returned home to find my friends (Amanda, Kim and Nat) nursing Advil and water. After a text message saying “I’ll be there for dinner later, and why are some of my fingernails pink?” from Jonas, we all headed for a walk to town. The night was filled with a gorgeous dinner of... pancakes! Since none of us had really eaten, we decided to do a full breakfast for dinner. Bacon, Banana Pancakes, Hashbrowns and Orange Juice. It was wonderful.

Kim and Nat left the next day with promises of fun to come when I go to Nottingham for Christmas.

The following week was filled with preparing my World Cup final presentation and celebrating our South African teacher’s last day with a trip to the pub. That weekend, I headed to the barge for a performance on Friday night by a wonderful group who’s name I simply cannot remember. It was Balkanish music and really beautiful. The violinist was a woman from Montreal who’s lived in Denmark for six years and now plays with this group with her husband. It was really interesting to meet them and great to listen to them, I got some good video of their performance which I’ll try to upload somewhere. After their performance, a friend and I headed out to go to a party that was nearby at a student performance area. It turned out to be a lot, an awful lot of terrible shrieking horrible noise. I’m sure that there was some sort of artistic endeavour involved in the whole thing but I decided it was time to leave after some hooligan performer started tearing off his shirt, destroying his equipment and screaming into a megaphone connected to a microphone. The man was insane. Or high. Or both. Whatever. No more of that. Enough ‘culture’ in that way, thanks. We headed to Christiana and went to the Grey Hall which was hosting some sort of high school party thing, which initially doesn’t sound exciting but turned out to be a massive hip hop / reggae concert with a great stage setup and fun lighting so I joined a bunch of people who were easily 8 years younger than me and starting dancing my butt off. It was fun. Next up was the Jazz place briefly then on to the Opera, where we went in and some kind of fun Turkish music was playing so everyone was dancing dramatically and having a lot of fun. We met up with a group of people; a girl with crazy long dreadlocks, another couple girls, and two guys one of whom I was told was a Danish actor was preferred to go out in Christiana since he was too recognized at main stream clubs. (Turns out... he apparently does kids shows or something? Hmm. This is according to Danish friends of mine. I don’t know). Anyway, the party moved into the stairwell, where they all got singing, clapping and stomping a beat which was quite entertaining and actually not bad music wise. From here we all moved on to the jazz club again, downstairs. There was a few people on stage playing piano, sax, drums and singing. Turns out two of the performers own the bar, and the music was great. One of the owners who we got to talking to is Armenian (or something) and was raised in France and speaks English wonderfully; as well as Danish, French, Spanish and whatever Armenian people speak... crazyiness again. After a while, the crazy stairwell singing group got up on stage, took over all the instruments and proceeded to play beautiful jazz music. Amid all the history lessons I was receiving about Copenhagen, Christiana and politics, I was also told that some people here (Christiana) have serious talent but no one really realises it. It was amazing to watch them play, dance, and really care for each other.

Everyone in the club seemed quite close, they all knew each other and seemed like life long friends. We got back to the barge at 6am. 
The next day was spent shopping in Copenhagen (window shopping) and followed by a night out clubbing right beside the DJ Tiesto concert. We had a great time at the club, but there was definite longing to see DJ Tiesto right next door. Before we went out, we went to a friend’s place which is a dorm, and he had the geekiest but coolest room, with electronic projects sprouting from the walls like interactive paintings, and old style light bulbs serving as lamps, powered by some sort of object that one of my friends was quite impressed by (nope, I can’t remember what it was). All this was paired with (first off, it was a bachelor suite, one room) a very bohemenian bedspread which was a surprising but nice offset to the crazy technology everywhere. They also had an intriguing kitchen system that I experienced firsthand, which is communally stocked with beer, so that one only has to go in, mark off how many beers one is taking, and enjoy without ever having to leave the floor. It was fun meeting your flat mates N, if you’re reading this. Haha.

This brings us to the following weekend where Amanda’s friend from Germany, Bonnie, came to visit. She was fun. We went out on Friday to Slagthuset, one of the bigger night clubs in Scandinvia, located right in Malmö. After nearly unsuccessfully leaving the house at 1am we were kidnapped by the bus driver who decided to take us in a circle, leave us on the bus during his break, take photos of us with his cell phone (yep, creepy) but we were taking photos of our own so that’s fair, and then finally caught a train into Malmo at 2am. On the train ride a tall well dressed blonde Swede carrying handcuffs decided to sit across from me on the nearly empty train. I still have his handcuffs. LOL. Anyway back to the story, he was accompanied by his Columbian-Swedish friend (yep, odd combo). They chatted with us, telling us how much money they made, (good for you) and how people in Lund are stuck up and have rich parents (perhaps but I don’t know them, so who knows). They came with us to Slagthuset. DJ Marco V was playing that night, so I headed straight for that dance floor (there was also a hip hop and an 80’s floor) and danced my butt off which was fun and increasingly fun when Bonnie and her crazy 1920’s vintage pink hat with veil started attracting all sorts of attention. Most of this attention came from a group of 10 guys who I got to talking to. Turns out they were all gay. (Go figure, Vanessa pulls the gay guys). They were great to dance with however, and after meeting up again with our train friends, the whole lot of us (16 in the end) headed back to their house to continue the party. They had a gorgeous apartment in Möllen, and we listened to some great house music, and headed home around 7:30am.

The next day (Saturday) we headed out to Copenhagen. I was trying to get there in time to see Helvetica, a film about the font. Oh yeah, geeky I know. But I missed it since my bus was insanely slow and late and I missed the train. Its amazing how quickly and simply a one hour trip can turn into 2 when the buses are slow. I headed to Ry’s house instead and we enjoyed tasty make-it-up-on-the-spot spontaneous strawberry/banana vodka smoothies and gin coffee. The latter was ... interesting but effective. We then hopped on our bikes and rode to the theatre to meet our friends who we missed. Instead, we decided to go to a tiny bar nearby which has apparently been around forever. We sat at the only available table... with a guy who’s English was great, except that he was one of those old guys who is insistent upon interrupting everything said with his own special two cents. Then he got annoyed that I was able to text message and talk at the same time. Sigh. We took off and headed to Christiana where we met up with Bonnie and Amanda and after mixing ourselves a homemade cocktail of water-bottle vodka and Fanta, we headed for another night at the opera. (Not to be confused with OPERA, ie: classy place to go see performance. This is opera, as in Christiana, unclassy, very culture grass roots kinda thing). It was a loud electronica night but a fun crazy dancing one nonetheless (Ry and I always end up dancing like crazy people, I love going out with her).

Sunday brought with it a slumber party as we all piled into Ry’s room. I cooked breakfast in the morning and Ry’s roommate, Marie gave the funny question “Where did the food explosion come from?” After this I took off to the barge for a meeting about how to dec out the little orange barge (check out halfmachine.dk) with a roof, flooring, etc. There were three women there who have taken various types of architecture and between the lot of us (including the regulars) we’re going to try to create some ideas of amazingness. Inspiration right now: Fireflies. Also, I was asked, FINALLY if I wanted to be Event Organizer/House manager of the barge, to which I enthusiastically said YES!!! However I want to wait to confirm all that fun excitement this weekend when I’m on the barge. There’s still a lot to sort out, but at least its in the works - told ya I could do it!

Ummm what else? I’m taking Danish lessons from a colleague at school who was a math professor before so he knows how to teach which is nice. I’m teaching him Flash in exchange...this is amusing since I’m useless in Flash but at least I can research good tutorials and go through it with him. Apparently my pronunciation is great. So that’s nice to hear. Screw you, Swedish number seven. “Sju” gaah. (Try spitting and hissing at the same time, that might give u an insight into this sound).

For this new project (designing interaction at a night club, InKonst) we get VIP access for two months. Monday we went to a film night and Tuesday was Swedish Improv. Note: Improv, though, mainly body language, is completely not as fun when you have NO clue what the context is. I was like, why, why, why is it funny? So I have some great video of ridiculousness. :P That’ll go up too soon.

Some fun things:

http://www.slayradio.org/mastering_swedish.php (Download the mp3s, then go to the bathroom, then listen to them).

http://theprint.vox.com/library/audio/ Danish Learning Fun - I’ve been told never to say these things by my Danish friend who said they not only are terrible, they just don’t actually translate that well.

Natasja Saad - something we were singing to “Vi vil ha ungdomen egen!” (Something to that effect anyway) (We will have the youth house again) this all fits in with the Christiana/Danish/Political thingy. See how mainstream artists represent!

That’s it for me!

I think I’ll update this after the weekend instead of waiting three weeks. Yep. Better idea.

3am. Time for bed? Naaah. Research to be done.

V

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Photos

I found Heels!
Don't worry, they're only a novelty.

Christiana House
Crazy architecture!

Party at Vanessa's
At my parties, we straighten hair as you sew your clothes and surf the internet. Yup.

The Girls
Dressed up!

Kim's Hotdog Eating Contest with herself
There's a video that goes with this, she nearly loses it.

Project time
My house, turned into a geek kingdom. Laptops everywhere.