KBHFF

One of the changes for me in coming to Copenhagen was buying produce at the grocery store. This may sound strange, but normally 85-90% of the fruits and vegetables I eat come from the farmer's market or my own garden. Even in the winter I have produce that I've canned, frozen, or stored. So, it's been unusual for me to buy so much grocery store produce. Even so, I've been pleased with how much Danish produce I've been able to find: I bought Danish apples, carrots, beets, onions, and parsnips at the grocery store.

Still, when someone told me about KBHFF, I knew I had to join right away. KBHFF is a local, organic food co-op in Copenhagen. You pay a small fee to become a member, then pay to receive a bag of organic produce from Zealand (the region where Copenhagen is) each week. It's similar to a CSA, but the produce is sourced from multiple farms and you don't have to commit for the whole season. So, I got a bag this week, but the next bag I ordered is for two weeks from now because I will be travelling and my parents will be visiting, so one bag will last me two weeks. Pick up happens on Wednesday evenings.

The other unique feature of KBHFF is that as a co-op, each member commits to volunteering for a 3 hour shift each month. KBHFF is divided into chapters to serve the different regions of Copenhagen. You sign up for the location nearest you and volunteer and get your veggies at that location. Next week, for my first shift, I will be weighing vegetables and dividing them into the bags (I figured this was a good job that wouldn't require too much Danish).

My first bag had a nice variety (and two new vegetables that I'd never tried before):
.5 kilo salsify
1 kilo Jerusalem artichokes
4 pieces horseradish
.5 kilo red onions
1 cabbage
1 kilo potatoes
1 "Brussel of sprouts" (as Juliana would say)

Dinner tonight included roasted Brussels sprouts and baked Jerusalem artichoke chips.

I think I'm living my dream: riding my bike to get local vegetables in February.

Horse Attack

A horse tried to eat my scarf today. And it was captured on camera.

Ziyu and I went with another friend to a tour of the Carlsberg brewery. Carlsberg has special horses (like the Budweiser clydesdales) that pull wagons in parades and at special events. Part of the tour went through their stables. I went to have my picture taken with one of them and he decided that my scarf looked delicious and chewed on it. After some pulling I got him to let go. It was pretty funny especially because they had signs up that said "Pet horses at your own risk."

Learning Danish

Foreigners living in Denmark are entitled to three years of free Danish classes paid for by the municipality in which you live.
Although I may not get much opportunity to use Danish after this semester, I decided that it was worth taking advantage of the free classes and trying to learn some Danish while I'm here.
I had my first Danish class on Tuesday. I'm taking a class for exchange students at CBS that meets once a week. Ziyu and I are in the same class. We have a very experienced teacher with a good sense of humor.
As our teacher said, if you know English, Danish vocabulary and grammar aren't hard. So it's a good thing the pronunciation is difficult, otherwise there would be no challenge. Yes, Danish pronunciation will be the challenge. Apparently small Danes have a hard time learning how to spell because there are so many letters that don't get pronounced; it isn't intuitive moving between spoken and written words. I'm up for the challenge though and looking forward to learning some Danish!

Christiania

In 2008 I visited Mea Shearim, the ulta-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem. Many tourists visit the area and there are large signs posted in many languages that ask visitors to dress modestly and not take pictures.
On Saturday, I visited another neighborhood with similar regulation signs. However, Christiania, in Copenhagen, is the polar opposite of Mea Shearim. Christiania has been an autonomous area of Copenhagen since the early seventies. It is known for it's unusual architecture, bright paintings, and drug trade. It is because of the drugs that signs are posted in Christiania with three rules: have fun, don't run, and don't take pictures.
The neighborhood is not huge, although it is big enough to have a small lake and several streets. The architecture was unusual; many of the houses were built by the residents from salvaged materials. The more traditional buildings have colorful murals on the wall and there are various pieces of eclectic found object artwork.
I was primarily struck by two things. First, I was surprised how open drug sales are. After doing some reading, it seems that several years ago the drugs went underground, but now it's out in the open again. It is illegal to buy and sell marijuana in Denmark. However, due to Christiania's fuzzy legal status, drug sales go on without consequences. On "Pusher's Alley," vendors had tables set up with their products for sale.
The second thing that struck me was how junky it was. There were lots of houses with tarps over parts of them, scraps of things and garbage sitting in yards. I think Christiania has seen better days. In an autonomous, self-ruled community I would hope to see things like edible gardens, a community kitchen, and small businesses. The residents of Christiania are supposed to be working towards buying their land from the city. However, there is not a clear plan to do this and from what I saw I wonder if it is possible. Christiania is clearly at a crossroads.

My Office

Currently I only have class for about six hours a week. I have a lot of time where I don't need to be anywhere. With all that free time, I'm really lucky that I have some office space at CBS.

The campus at CBS is spread out (I will do a blog post on this soon). Each of my classes meets at a different site and my office is at a fourth one.

Exterior of my building.

We're using someone else's office who is currently away. It's very quiet at the office and I enjoy having someplace to go everyday to work.

Inside the office.

Postal Bike

I frequently see these postal bikes* around Copenhagen. It makes a lot of sense for delivering mail in an urban area because you don't need to find parking and the bike can carry a lot more than a walking mail carrier. 

The postal bikes have some kind of motorized assist (I think they're e-bikes), which means they can make better time than a regular bicycle with 

*Technically they aren't bicycles because they have three wheels.

Snowy Commute

In Chicago, the days with the most snow and ice are often the most stressful ones for commuting. Traffic is backed up and the risk of an accident is high. Yesterday we had a snowy commute in Copenhagen and I found it peaceful and relaxing.

One of the bike racks outside my apartment.

I'm not sure how much it snowed, but when I woke up on Tuesday morning, there was a thick layer of snow on the ground and it was still snowing. Going from my apartment to CBS doesn't take me through the city center, so I decided to take a detour to see what the snowy commute was like in central Copenhagen.

Bike commuters making their way through the snow.

Copenhagen has special snow sweepers for the bike lanes. I saw several out, but wasn't fast enough to get a picture. (If you're curious, you can see pictures and video here.) They also salt the bike lanes. Since it was still snowing when I was out, some of the bike lanes were a bit messy, but overall I felt very safe. There were enough cyclists out which helped to make a path through the snow. Everyone went a little more slowly, but I still felt like I was making good time.

Waiting for a light to change in the snow.

The reason the ride felt so peaceful and relaxing was how quiet it was. There was less car traffic out yesterday morning than there normally is. In part, this is probably because of the winter holiday this week, but also the roads didn't get plowed, just the bike lanes. There were spots where the roads were pretty messy and the bike lanes were totally clear. There were points when I was in the city center and there was not a car in sight. Just cyclists and snow. Not a bad way to get to work.

Celebrating Danish and Chinese Culture

One of the advantages of the way our exchange program works is that CBS students come to Purdue in the fall, then return to CBS in the spring, while we're here. That means that I already know a few Danes. One of our Danish friends who studied at Purdue invited us over for dinner on Friday and made incredible vegetarian versions of traditional Danish dishes. We had Danish style lasagna which has a wine sauce rather than tomato sauce, a mushroom paté (normally it would be liver), and beet patties with remoulade (traditionally made with pork). The dinner and company were both excellent.

After Friday night's celebration of Danish culture, I spent Saturday celebrating Chinese New Year with Ziyu. There was a large celebration held at the Copenhagen City Hall. There were performances all afternoon as well as booths about aspects of Chinese culture like tea and calligraphy. The performances represented many different cultural groups and traditions in China. Ziyu helped explain the different performances and translated for me because the emcees only spoke in Chinese and Danish. At the end of the performances on stage, we went outside where there were lion and dragon dances followed by fireworks at 5pm here, which is midnight in China. When we got home, Ziyu cooked Chinese food for dinner.

In one of the performances, a calligrapher wrote while the woman on the right sang.

The lion dance.

Dragon dance.

Fireworks at "midnight."

Classes

During the semester I am here, I am taking three classes. Two are during the first part of the semester and one is during the second part.

My first class, Organizational Theory, meets on Tuesday mornings. We're discussing different paradigms for studying organizations. It should be an interesting class, particularly because we're reading a lot of authors that we cite or reference in Organizational Communication, but we don't actually read or engage with. It also seems like the class will be an interesting mix of sociology and philosophy.

My second class is really interesting and very different from anything I've done before. It has a rather long name: Applied Creativity Through Design Thinking. CBS owns a house which they've turned into a 'studio' and the class meets there. There is a kitchen with coffee and tea and the house is divided into different group workstations. My class is taught by two men, one who has a background in neurobiology. In class this week, we were divided into teams of three or four. We will be working in these teams for the rest of the class to solve a real problem for a company. Our homework for the next class is to do something social with our team and come up with a team name, logo, and slogan. We will spend the next two weeks of class talking about the basis for creativity in the brain. After that, we will be learning about the creative process through doing. A Danish company is going to come give a presentation on a problem that needs to be solved and we will generate solutions in our teams, simultaneously learning and using theories about design and creativity. At the end of the course, we will actually go to the company and present our solutions. I'm looking forward to this class. I think the content will be interesting, but I'm also looking forward to getting pedagogical ideas.

Introduction Week Social Program

Last week during our orientation ("Introduction Week"), we could choose to buy a social package which meant you could participate in a social event each evening. Ziyu and I both decided to participate because it would be a good way to meet people (even though we were probably the oldest students there). The activities were well-planned and there was a nice variety.

To participate in the social program, you had to buy a package deal for the whole week. We got wristbands to indicate we had paid for the social program and to get us into the events. The wristband is like none I've ever seen before. It's a specially made piece of ribbon. When we went to pick them up, they put a piece of metal on and clamped it to our wrist with pliers.

Here's the run-down of the activities:

Monday: Meet n Mingle
Essentially this was speed dating; you could meet a lot of people in a short time. We sat around tables and every five minutes we rotated around the table. You then spent five minutes talking to the person sitting across from you. When we came in, they made you sit at different tables than the people you came with to ensure you met new people

Tuesday: Danish Folk Dancing and Lake Party
On Tuesday, we had a lesson in Danish Folk Dancing. A group of dancers in costumes came and gave us a performance, then we all learned some dances. It was really fun. They had a live band and the professional dancers joined in with us. Especially since there were two or three hundred of us dancing in a big circle, there wasn't too much pressure to get it right. There was a lot of running into each other and laughing. Here are the dancers performing for us. This move was especially incredible: they spun so fast that the women's feet went off the ground!

After the folk dancing, there was a party at a club. The club is apparently pretty famous; it's on a bridge between two lakes in the center of Copenhagen. This was the first of two events at clubs. I can't imagine official orientation activities at an American university involving clubbing.

Wednesday: National Museum
On Wednesday, we went to the National Museum of Denmark. We had time to look around and could also go on a guided tour. I went on a tour of the ancient Danish artifacts. It was interesting to learn about the development of civilization in Denmark. One thing that I found the most interesting was that there is Viking graffiti in the Hagia Sofia, which means the Vikings made it at least as far as Turkey. I also learned that the Vikings did not wear horned helmets.

To the left is a mold used for making jewelry. The top and bottom molds are crosses while the middle is Thor's hammer. This artifact shows the syncretism that took place in Denmark as Christianity was introduced into the culture.

To the right is a series of ax heads. The stones available in Europe are different than those in North America, so these looked really different (and a lot prettier) than what I'm used to seeing in American museums.



Thursday: Buddy Dinners and Park Party
Thursday night, we had a dinner with our buddy and a few other buddies and exchange students. Two of the other buddies in my group are twins and they live with their parents in Copenhagen, so we went to their house which was in a more residential area on the edge of town. It was a nice group of people and we had a really good traditional Danish dessert: rice pudding with a cherry sauce on it. After the buddy dinners, there was another party at a club.

Friday: Movie Night
We watched a popular Danish comedy. Although I didn't get most of the jokes in the movie, I was entertained by seeing the Danish students in the audience (and some of the other Scandinavians) laughing while the rest of us had no idea what was so funny. There were definitely cultural differences and one scene in particular that I think most Americans would find really distasteful. It was a very cultural experience!

Saturday: Formal Welcome Dinner
The week culminated with a formal dinner. They did a really nice job dressing up a lobby area in one of the academic buildings.

As we came in we drew a number. All the seats were numbered, and we sat at the appropriate place. I was number 72:

There was a nice buffet for dinner. (Apparently the Danes are really into buffets). After dinner a band performed. It was a nice culmination of the introduction week.

Downtown Copenhagen Walking Tour

Yesterday as a part of our orientation activities, we went on a walking tour of downtown Copenhagen. We saw a lot of interesting sights, many of which I'm looking forward to going back and exploring more. Here's a photo overview of some of what we saw.