Wait only for my boot heels, to be wanderin’

To my dear readers of my blog, I owe two apologies.

The first apology is that I have not updated a wholly accurate portrayal of my life and times–this is because for the past week or so, I have been in the Czech Republic, having various adventures and misadventures in the first week of my three-week spring break, which will be spent touring various parts of Europe. I promise to give a more anecdotal and appropriate update of my life at the end of the break.

The second apology is now that I have the opportunity (hurray for internet access in Czech hostels!) and the time (I really don’t have anything to do and it’s far too early to call it a night) to give my readers that update, I am choosing instead to record, word for word and with very little editting, a stream-of-consciousness-esque piece of writing that I wrote tonight in a Czech bar after my friend Luci had left me and I still had a beer to finish.

So here goes:

March 29th, 2009, 11 pm:

This is really my firs attempt being the eccentric American in a European place that my sister suggested I adopt as a role to integrate myself within the foreign community*.  So here I sit in a bar likely designed for English customers in the heart of Prague*, drinking the remnants of Bernard dark, a combination of my beer and that left behidn by my friend Luci as she dashed off to meet the controversial Czech sculptor David Cerny (I drink a toast to both Cerny and Luci, for her steel and ambition in setting up the meeting with him). The conversation aroudn me is alrgely a blur; perhaps English is a part of the commotion but I cannot isolate it, and so remain absorbed in the movement of my fingers and the occasionally-sipped Bernard dark, the taste of which is dulled by the cold from which I am still recovering (which, by the way, I blame on the initial 12-hour bus ride from Copenhagen to Prague). Th Danish identity which I have tentatively yet aggressively adopted tempts me to bellow “Skål!” (the Danish equivalent of “Cheers!”) and see who joins in with tht toast of an ethnicity to which I belong at best tangentially. But I remain quiet, once again reminded of the speech John Hodgen gave at the New England Young Writers’ Conference many years ago: to be a writer is to separate yourself from the group and be along, to be the one away from the bonfire on the beach, looking at the stars while your friends drink beer around the bonfire. A song starts (sung among the patrons of the bar) in a language I cannot recognize. I’ve always had a soft spot for people singing together regardless of motivation, purpose, or language. A brief toast to singing together as a group and a good group of fellowship knowing the words as a bass carries the lyrics along, even though I cannot piece them together. And a brief moment of homesickness for Alpha Delta Phi. Admittedly,  a voice speaking unnaccented English cuts through the din, asking without context “Remember? Remember?” I think I am doing my best to do so, is the answer I am tempted to give back, but the question is addressed to me only by coincidence, not by intent. So I stay silent with my voice while my pen still moves, always self-aware (at times painfully so). I tipped my bartenders (who were grateful–maybe I’m not expected to do so? Tipping in Europe is so inconsistent–it is its own set of rules, as complicated and as important as European Union development policy for Eastern Europe), so I think I have gained engouh good will from the gentlemen in tight red t-shirts (nice uniform, don’t you think?) to keep going, at least until my (tasty!) Bernard dark runs out. I see a warm embrace to my right and wonder what it’s like for expatriates and travelers to meet friendly faces in situations that hover between expected and unexpected. Yes, the bar offers Guiness on an English-speaking menu, but it’s still Prague. Whom do we expect to meet? I have used the Danish “unskylld” this evening to pass by strangers on my excursions throughout this bar–whom am I trying to deceive? And what motivates my fear or discomfort to the extent that I mask my English? Luci has made a point of learning “excuse me” and “thank you” in Czech and using them situationally, but my discomfort with the language is so great that I cannot bring myself to write down the actual Czech words. So why Danish? It’s a rare language, but far from exoticized–better to use English and better my chances of actually being understood. But with echoes of Joni Mitchell’s “Carey” in my head (I get that song stuck in my head a great deal, especially whenever I talk about my travel plans, mostly because of the lyrics “Maybe I’ll go to Amsterdam, or maybe I’ll go to Rome”), I won’t think about such things right now. I have my finished my beer (it was pretty good but not as good as the Czech Kozel) and I have a road well worth walking. In all languages, I wish to say that life is beautiful, and here I close.

p.s. The title of this post comes from Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man”, which is an extraordinary song the only way that Dylan can make one. And it’s surprisingly accurate–I’ve been wearing the same pair of boots my entire time in Europe. The boots are some of the closest friends I’ve made.

 

*My sister’s suggestion came from her text message, sent to me shortly after my departure. It reads as follows: “You’d better be the eccentric American to the point where everyone knows you don’t have any money and aren’t worth robbing, educated enough to know you can’t be swindled or bamboozled, and crazy enough that no one messes with you in any way. If they do…may God have mercy on them because I sure as hell will not. If you at any point need anything you call. Don’t worry about long distance or waking me up or anything. I will be on the next flight without question, a roll of cash in one pocket, a list of ’special’ numbers in my other and a big sister’s ‘Get the hell away from my brother’ attitude in full force. It will not be pretty but it will happen. Be safe. Have fun. Be safe. Don’t be generous or stupid or caught up in group mentality. Be safe.” My sister is a wonderful, wonderful human being.

*I assume the bar is designed for English customers because it offers Guiness. If a place offers Guiness, it’s probably reaching out to the homesick heartstrings of someone who knows English as their first language.

Every day for me is like Christmas

This post comes about as a sort of congratulatory gift to myself. I recently found out that I will be interning at the Community Transportation Association of America this summer, which is REALLY exciting for me. The CTAA is an advocacy/policy organization that tries to connect poor communities to better transportation systems. When I met two of the organization’s members last summer at a Transportation Conference (yeah I know what you’re thinking but whatever I had fun), I was floored to learn that this organization existed, because they do what I’ve spent most of my time in college studying.

And now I get to work for them! What’s even better is that I get to work in their communications department, which means that a good portion of my job is to write articles and press releases and other missives that try to teach people about the importance of transportation access for the poor. That means I’m being hired to do the thing that people usually ask me to stop doing after I’ve been talking to them for about five minutes and they make the mistake of saying “So, what do you study?” Now I get to do it without fear of being hit by a shoe!

So to celebrate, I’m going to write one of the two posts I’ve been dreaming about writing ever since I decided to keep a blog about my time in Denmark. That post is on Denmark’s transportation systems. The other one is about Denmark’s alternative energy, and it will be written after I spend a weekend biking around an island that produces all of its energy with alternative sources and actually produces a SURPLUS of energy. Well I guess I should say that I will write that post provided I don’t die in a biking accident. The odds for that are pretty high.

If you, dear reader, have limited patience for reading about transportation systems (I really can’t imagine anyone would, though), I’ll offer a very brief summary: Danish transportation is amazingly comprehensive, very user-friendly, and AWESOME. There. You can go now.

But I’m going to keep going. Danish transportation is extremely multi-modal, meaning that several different types of transportation are very strongly-supported by the design of the city and even the suburban communities. This means that bikes, trains, buses, cars, and, for a small part of the downtown area (but they’re expanding it!), the Metro system, are all viable ways of getting around. If anything, I think using a car is the hardest method of transportation to use, because the government very consciously creates disincentives for using a car: high taxes for the purchase of a car, high gas taxes, high parking prices, and they may introduce congestion pricing, where they make you pay for driving into the city. I think all of these disincentives are awesome, although I can’t quite say how effective they are given that I do see automobile traffic on the highways leading out of Copenhagen between 4 and 5 pm on weekdays.

Now those who have listened to me talk about transportation policy before (and I owe you an apology) will wonder why I think that discouraging car use is such a good idea, given that I’ve often said that cars are the best ways to connect poor people to jobs.  I usually argue that that’s the case when there isn’t already an effective mass transit system already in place. And while it may be that using cars would be better for inter-suburban transit (I was having a conversation with my host brother about this earlier today), I really can’t say the same for getting in to Copenhagen. As I’ve said before, I live in the VILLAGE of Greve; there is farmland out my window. And yet I am a two-minute walk from a bus stop that is serviced by a bus that, during the rush hours, comes about every ten or twenty minutes, and even in the “off hours” the bus still comes at least once an hour. The buses run almost like clockwork–each bus stop has a full schedule of when the buses are expected to arrive at that particular bus stop, and it’s rare that the bus shows up more than five minutes later than the posted time. Buses in the city are even more reliable. Denmark even offers a cell phone service that enables you to send a text message to a number that informs you of how far away the bus is from your exact stop.

The buses themselves aren’t quite the Bus Rapid Transit systems that I wish they were (I recommend that you look up BRT systems, if I go into them here I’ll get too excited and make this long post even more painful for those polite enough to read through everything), but they’re very nice–the aisles are wide, accommodating strollers and wheelchairs without impeding the flow of traffic to the seats. The buses are very clean and I’ve seen many that run on biofuels (or at least I think that’s what the sign says, I still don’t know enough Danish to ask my host brother to pass me the potatoes, let alone ask “So does this bus run on environmentally-sustainable fuels?” I feel like that’s just not a priority).  The buses are built pretty low to the curb, so that it’s easy for the eldery and those with strollers/in wheelchairs to get on board the buses, and the buses have multiple entry/exit points to speed up boarding/exiting times. I don’t have a sense of the average bus capacity, but I’d say it’s at least fifty people.

And if you think the buses are cool, you should see the trains. My God, the trains. They’re  run off the electric grid, they’re reliable, they’re pretty, they’re CLEAN, which is particularly amazing. I don’t have any statistics on ridership (YET), but each train car holds about thirty or forty people and still the seats somehow remain in better condition than the average chair one would find in a college dorm lounge.  There are two types of trains that I’ve experienced: the S-Tog, comparable to the MBTA commuter rail and run throughout the greater Copenhagen area, and the regional trains, which run throughout Denmark and into Germany. The S-Tog system is incredible–there are eight lines running from Copenhagen into the suburbs, mostly on a North-South scale but covering the whole area, and they run every ten minutes during rush hours and every twenty minutes during non-peak hours. My one complaint is that the trains stop running at around 12:30 at night, but they start up again at 5:30 most days (and in Copenhagen, it’s pleasantly easy to find places that are open between those hours). The exception is on Sunday, when they start up at 6:30 or 7. And let me tell you, that’s been one of the most painful lessons that I’ve learned so far.

In addition to seating large numbers of people, each train car also has a section that accommodates bikes and strollers–the seats in these sections fold up, exposing these strange rubber-coated wire frames that will hold the bike or stroller while you ride. And amazingly, people are polite enough to move if they’re sitting in one of these seats and they see someone board with a bike or a stroller. People are also quiet on the train, which is remarkably different from my experiences on mass transit in the States (and especially when I was riding the Green Line of the T on days when the Red Sox were playing at Fenway). They’re not silent, although there are designated “silent” cars, and boy, the people there won’t hesistate to enforce the rules if you board one in ignorance. Between the quiet of the train’s interior and the smoothness of the ride (now I’m writing copy for a car commercial…), it is very easy for one to fall asleep in perfect comfort. And it’s also very easy for one to fall asleep and sleep through one’s stop and wake up on the other side of Copenhagen, disoriented and panicked. Good times, good times…

Each train car also has a display listing each stop along the train’s route, with colored lights on the display marking the train’s progress. This gives you a pretty accurate idea of how far you are from the next stop, and when the train reaches the stop, the stop’s name is announced over a speaker system. This is how I first learned that Danish is a twisted and perplexing language. For example, “Ny Ellbjerg” is actually pronounced “Nooh Ehl-byah” and I still haven’t figured out this one stop called “Sjælør.” It’s something like “Schilleh” but I don’t even know.

Every train station keeps a running display of how far each train is from the station. And remarkably enough, the display is ACCURATE. The company that operates the train system reports that about 95% of trains run on time. And keep in mind, there are eight different lines with trains running every ten to twenty minutes. That’s a LOT of trains and a LOT of opportunities for delays. Yet somehow, that doesn’t happen. Over the past two weeks or so, I’ve had the great misfortune of showing up at the train station when the display says “E-Train Køge: 0 minutes”. So  I stand there and swear, having chased yet another train out of the trai.n station (it loses its romance after a while, especially when you’re just trying to get home for dinner rather than catch the train to make it to the airport and tell the girl you love that you still love her and that she shouldn’t take that plane to the other side of the world. Yes, I’ve written the scene. It stars Kiera Knightley and Ewan McGregor, but I will graciously step in if Mr. McGregor is busy). But despite my frustration,  I take comfort knowing that the display above my head isn’t lying when it tells me that the next train will be along in nine minutes. And that’s enough time to go get a $4 coffee or something, which is available at the convenience store “Kort & Godt”, found at every S-Tog station. The food is pretty good!

So basically, the S-Tog system is incredibly user-friendly to the point of being intuitive. I’m pretty awful with directions, but within a week of being here in Denmark I felt perfectly comfortable with taking the S-Tog, and most of my friends here feel the same way.

I’ll stop soon, I promise, but first a word about bikes. As I said when I first started this blog (ah, the ignorance of youth!), Denmark’s transportation infrastructure really supports bicycle use. I underestimated how true this statement is. In addition to designated bike lanes on just about every street in Copenhagen, the bike lanes are protected from traffic by an elevated curb, meaning bike-to-car collisions are rare, and bikes usually don’t have to compete with pedestrians for sidewalk space. Bikes also have their own traffic signals, and places to park your bike are FAR more numerous than places to park your car. Bikes are also welcome on trains, to the point that staircases at train stations have a little ramp for the bike to roll up, rather than requiring that  cyclists carry their bikes up the stairs. In the summer, the city of Copenhagen puts these “city bikes” around town that are available for use and essentially free. You deposit a 20-kroner coin in the bike, ride it for however long you need it, and when you return the bike to the bike stand, you receive your kroner back. I’m curious to know how the system works that these bikes aren’t stolen, destroyed, or stripped of their parts, but apparently it either doesn’t happen or else it doesn’t happen to an extent that counteracts the benefits of the program.

Bikes also come in different styles that accommodate different uses. Some bikes, called “Christiania bikes”, have a three-wheeled frame that supports a large box in front. I’ve seen people put groceries, packages, children, and even dogs in these bikes. Small businesses will also use these bikes to transport goods from one location to another. These are more expensive, but they’re also much more flexible. This means that the bike is a much more multi-use form of transportation. I once nearly smacked a person for suggesting bikes as anti-poverty solutions in the US (I get passionate about these things, but I should probably talk to someone about that incident) because bikes in the US can pretty much carry one person. Not the case, here in Denmark.

Okay, so in summary: transportation in Denmark is user-friendly. It is comprehensive, with many different systems supporting each other. It seems to get pretty high ridership (I’m not the only one on it at 5:30 in the morning). It is efficient (I get from Greve to Copenhagen, a distance of about 18 miles, in 24 minutes). It fits well within the infrastructure of the city. It is integrating environmentally-sound policy into its services. I don’t really have a proper sense of where the poorer communities are in Denmark, so I can’t quite say if it’s effective connecting poor people to jobs, so the critical element (for me) is as of now unknown. But damn, I’m impressed. The title of this post sums it up–every day I see something about the transportation system that impresses me.

I wonder if I can take a train home as a souvenir.

I Don’t Believe in the Sun

In my experiences so far in Copenhagen, there are two things about the general atmosphere of the place that I do not like. One of them is the REALLY high costs of living here. While the dollar enjoys a favorable exchange rate to the kroner, about 6 DKK (Danish kroner, because each Scandinavian country has its own) to the dollar, the Danes have the last laugh because just about everything costs a whole heap of kroner. For example, a cup of coffee from a decent cafe is about 20 DKK. That’s between $3 and $4 dollars. And I’m not talking about a fancy Starbucksesque concoction, I’m talking about a cup of black coffee.

This has led to an amusing information network reeking of opportunism and desperation that cycles among my peers. Deals and steals are bandied about like trade secrets, and any store that offers an affordable alternative usually finds itself swamped with American students, buying their wares in broken Danish. Case in point: St. Peter’s Bakery, which is astoundingly good, offers a different pastry as a 12 kroner special each day of the week. St. Peter’s is well-known and well-appreciated among Danes, but it is a Mecca of affordability to the Americans. This, combined with the fact that it is about three blocks away from DIS, means that I see at least three or four people I recognize each time I go in to the place. I’ll probably write them a thank-you letter when my time here comes to a close.

The other thing I don’t like is the weather, which is, to be perfectly blunt, dismal. They tell us that Copenhagen’s climate is very similar to Seattle’s, meaning a lot of rain and a lot of cold, but not necessarily bitter cold, weather. Unfortunately, the fact that Copenhagen is on the coastline near the Baltic Sea means that it gets a lot of wind. And the narrow streets of Copenhagen can often create an urban canyon, which funnels the wind into a tight blast that somehow knows exactly how to slip in between the three or four layers that you’re wearing and make you shiver. Frankly, it’s never the cold that gets to me–for the most part, the temperature has never been low enough to make walking outside actually unappealing. It’s always the wind that makes us huddle together and look for the nearest place to hide in.

The most difficult part to deal with, however, is the persistently gray skies, covered almost in their entirety by an even sheet of clouds. My friend Eric, who knows a thing or two about photography, says that these gray skies can make for better pictures, since you don’t have to deal with changing light levels. I, for one, like light and shadow in my pictures, I think they make it more dynamic. But the gray skies can really hang over you and drag you down, especially when they are so consistent. For the first two or three weeks we were here, I think we had two days that you could call partly cloudy? It’s made most of us very excited about sun, whenever it arrives. I was very amused to check facebook on those days (rather than, you know, being outside…) and see a friend’s status reading: “John is REALLY happy to see the sun.” In some cases, people even drop proper grammar in favor of unbridled joy: “Mary is OH DEAR GOD SUN”

The first truly sunny day took me by surprise–it had been snowing that morning (and my host father thought it would be a good idea for us to walk by a frozen lake to get some fresh air. I don’t understand outdoorsy types), but when I returned to my room I found sunlight pouring in through my window. I acted fast and actually took a picture of my shadow on my bedroom wall (and again, I’d put up the picture but my computer is being difficult). It was the last time I saw the sun for about two weeks, and in the mean time I, along with many, many others, grumbled about the dishwater-colored sky as we walked our various paths with shoulders hunched against the wind.

But I’m glad to say that the unpleasant weather does not blunt the Danish spirits. Here in Denmark, there is a historical/cultural concept (taken from a poem! Yay poetry!) of “outside losses, inside gains”. It technically refers to a change in foreign policy in the 19th century, but I think it also describes the way Danes approach the weather. Since it’s so bitter outside, just about every place you go into puts a real effort into being warm and cozy, immediately making up for whatever hellish weather you had been facing moments before. Whether you go into a bar, a cafe, a shop, or even a school, it’s very common to be greeted by lit candles in the windows and tealights on the tables. It is a wonderful thing to go from the cold and wind to the quiet warmth of a candle at your table. It brings people closer together around the table and quickly dispels the gloom. Oftentimes, these candles are the primary source of light for the room, which makes every individual table feel a bit more separated from the larger world. But I don’t think this is a negative isolation, like you’re not supposed to step outside of the circle, but rather draws your attention more fully to the people you came with or the moment you are immediately. I see it as a way of shutting out distractions. My host family keeps candles in just about every room, simply to have going whenever we’re in there together. They even gave me two little lanterns for my room, which made me feel quite welcome. I think if I were to invest my money here in Denmark, I’d invest it in a tealight company. Or maybe a green energy start-up OKAY THERE I SAID IT NOW LEAVE ME ALONE, NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL BOARD.

And on the plus side, as I write and complain about things, I’m thrilled to announce that my sentiments are rapidly becoming outdated. It has actually started getting nice here! It hasn’t necessarily gotten that much warmer, but there is more sun these days. In fact, last Tuesday was the first day that hinted at spring’s approaching arrival. It was a clear sky, and just warm enough that if you stood still and let the sun fall on you, you’d feel a warmth combating your cold extremities. And the really nice thing was that everyone in the city seemed to get the memo. I went for a good long walk along the Stroget (walking street, pronounced like “strohl” because Danish is a mean-spirited language), and as I walked past cafes I saw people sitting outside with their coffee, still wearing hats and scarves but clearly happy to be outside. It was magnificent. I cannot wait for the days when I will shed the two coats that I wear, put away my hat and gloves, and sit down with good friends at a sidewalk cafe to watch the world and the shadows it shall cast. I found out from a friend that there’s a beach in Copenhagen about ten minutes away from the downtown along the canals, and that it is perfect, needing only the weather to set the stage for a good day there. They tell me these days are coming soon.

P.S. The post title is a song from The Magnetic Fields’ “69 Love Songs”, which is one of the greatest albums I’ve ever heard. It’s a three-volumn album that touches just about every emotion that love can make you feel, and does so with wit and honesty. The songs are often absurd, but somehow most of them manage to touch just the right heartstring. Some fall flat, but I figure that happens with every album. I never thought that driving with someone would be an expression of love for them until I heard “Luckiest Guy On the Lower-East Side”, which features, among other things, a keyboard playing sounds that a friend once described as the sounds your boots make when you’re out splashing in puddles.  If you just want an emotional tour of yourself, see what makes you feel like what, put the album on from start to finish and pay close attention.

I think “Ambassador Bream” has a certain ring to it…

It isn’t easy trying to summarize the US political system to a group of Danish students when you’re not sure how much of a language barrier exists and you’re worried about whether or not they think you’re some cool American or some dip whose only value is that he’s taking up class time.

But this past Wednesday, that is exactly what I did. I went in to each of my host brothers’ English classes and talked to them about life in America. Stage fright and fear of being judged by teenagers notwithstanding, I had a really great time. It definitely was a challenge, trying to communicate the entirety of my life in the United States my experiences as an American in a foreign land, but in a way it was surprisingly liberating, especially when I realized that there was very little structure to the entire set-up. Furthermore, I could spout misinformation and still be considered an authority figure. I now understand why my 11th-grade history teacher loved to throw little white lies and larger, technicolored lies into his lecture. He had enough authority, being the one standing at the front of the classroom, that he could tell a group of reasonably intelligent high schoolers that Niccolo Machiavelli, a 13th-century political philosopher, had a great outside jumpshot and the students would write down the information and take it as an undeniable truth. I had to fight off this temptation time and time again when the students would ask questions about life in the states. “How do you get to school in the morning?” “I ride elephants. No, really, everyone in America does it.”

In both classes, I talked about where I live, what I do with my time, what an American university is like, and, of course, what it means to me that Obama is now president. Unfortunately, I feel as though I offered a pretty bleak picture of the US at times, especially whenever I found myself drawing a comparison between Denmark and the States. For example, education in Denmark is free up through university. Education in the US is not free, and I was pretty upfront about the fact that because a year at college can cost up to $40,000 a year, it means a lot of students can’t afford to go to college, or if they can, they can’t necessarily study what they want to study because they have to study something that will help them earn a job to pay off student loans. The students were pretty stunned to hear this. And because I couldn’t help but talk about transportation, I told them how you have to rely on a car in the US to get around, which can be expensive and, at times, unreliable, whereas here in Denmark you have a wonderfully comprehensive and mixed-use transportation system that makes it much easier to go from one place to another.

So this was awfully cheerful. Of course, I tried to balance it out by talking about the hope we have for Obama and the new administration (I asked for the classes’ patience as we try to set things right from the past eight years). I told them how my university’s campus celebrated the night he was elected–dancing and singing in a huge crowd, because we were full of hope that things could get better (and kudos for Obama’s progressive budget, btw). I also talked about how fun university is, even though it can cost a lot, and I talked about the drive that Americans have to succeed even in the face of adversity. When my 12-year old brother’s teacher asked me about religion in America, I said how people disagree with each other about religion and whose religion is correct, which makes it difficult to get along, but I also said that we have pretty good dialogue about it, and that the religious differences aren’t as pronounced as they are here in Denmark (more about that later). I have to say, I found it REALLY difficult for some reason to remember all the different religions in America, which led to an egg-on-my-face situation since I tried to diagram them on the blackboard. I could only remember about four sects of Christianity and I couldn’t remember which ones were Protestant and which ones were Catholic. I would have felt better about this forgetfulness if I hadn’t gone full-steam ahead with the damn diagram. I think my confusion was pretty evident to the class, given the number of times I stepped back from the blackboard and stared at it with an audible “Uhh…”

Oh well. The students were a lot of fun. In my twelve-year old brother’s class, it was hard to say if they followed me most of the time–they’ve only been taking English for about a year and a half, and I don’t think I was sufficiently aware of this while I was talking. I didn’t feel like I needed to only use two-syllable words or less, but I think I spoke too quickly at times. On the plus side, the students had a lot of questions, mostly about my life rather than American institutions, like do I have any siblings and do I like Danish food and, best of all, do I have any pets. I got to talk about my cat. I love talking about my cat. But there were two students in particular who really impressed me. One asked about three or four questions and always nodded in a manner that made me feel as though I were reaching her, which was a good feeling. Another student asked a question more complex than many of the ones I’ve heard in my classes back home. She raised her hand and said the following: “It seems to me that you speak of your university as though you don’t have many freedoms about what you want to study. Would you say that you feel limited in your university, and does this keep you from enjoying what you study?” I was so stunned that I didn’t answer for a moment. I stayed for the rest of the class and I’m damn glad that I did. I didn’t understand any of the lesson (which was in Danish), but it was one student’s birthday and she passed out cupcakes. AWESOME.

The students in my fifteen-year old brother’s class didn’t really have any questions for me (or if they did, they asked them in Danish to the teacher, who translated), but they were a very engaging audience. Since theirs was the second class I went to, I felt a bit more comfortable talking in front of the students and so I made more attempts at humor. And whether they did so out of genuine amusement or considerate awareness of a confused American, the students laughed a lot, which certainly made me feel at ease (and, frankly, kind of awesome). They also applauded for me when I spoke in Danish to them, which made me feel oh-so-multicultural. You know, being able to order a piece of pastry really shows fluency.

My experience in US-Danish relations drew to a close, with me nervously asking my host-brothers at dinner that night if their classmates liked me. My twelve-year old brother nodded, and my fifteen-year old brother said they thought I was funny.

I am so going into the foreign service. I’ve got this diplomacy shtick DOWN.

And as a quick P.S. on the topic of US-Danish relations, I just want to say that last night, some friends of mine and I went to a Dominican club to learn salsa. It didn’t really occur to me that these salsa lessons would be in Danish (yay for US-centric mindsets…), but lo and behold, the charming man who stood in front of a group of surprisingly diverse salsa-learners spoke Danish into his headset as he walked us through the steps. But it is with great pride that I say that, knowing how to count to four (en, to, tre, fire) and left (venstre) and right (højre), I learned a couple steps. I was still the goofy American on the dance floor, but my partner and I held our own, at least, against most of the other Danes in the club. I’m definitely going back there.