I have only a week and a half of my DIS semester left before I head back home. Sometimes it hits me how long I’ve been here, but at the same time it feels like the semester is just starting. I finally met all of my professors in person just this last week and all the other students from the US arrived in Denmark just a couple of weeks ago. So in that sense it does feel like the semester has just begun even though at the same time we are all preparing for departure.
This semester has been both so challenging while at the same time being incredibly rewarding. Looking back on it, I think it has been a growing experience like none other. Coming to a locked down Denmark in the middle of January without any of the other Americans in my program was really daunting. There were times when I was shocked at how out of place and removed I felt from anything familiar and without any kind of support system to fall back on. I had to make my own way, literally and figuratively. As time went by I slowly began to settle into life here and make it my own. The cold Danish winter has now turned into a warm green spring. Foreign buildings and sights have become familiar. Biking around the city which I once found intimidating has now become easy. I can understand some Danish spoken words in passing. I have made Danish friends and now made some new American friends. I have developed a routine, while at the same time life seems like it’s constantly changing. In some ways it feels like after moving to a foreign country in the middle of a pandemic and in the dead of winter, I can do anything. I know I will apply what I have learned here to new experiences going forward.
Here are some highlights from the past weeks:
One of my favorite takeaways from this experience has been the chance to build my own relationship with Denmark. I grew up visiting Denmark, but only on short term vacations. Going abroad here and not being allowed to leave Denmark has allowed me the time and space to really explore the city and the country for myself, make friends here, and build my own association with Denmark. I now understand so much more about where my family is from and where my Dad grew up. I can speak to my family in Danish and understand them culturally much better than I did before. These lessons are invaluable and I am very grateful to have been able to have the experiences that I have had this spring. I am just wrapping up my last classes now, and I am looking forward to a last week in Denmark spent enjoying springtime in the city with new friends and old.
Greetings from a (surprisingly) sunny Sunday in Copenhagen. Today it is going to get up to 60 degrees F, temperatures the likes of which I haven’t felt since I left California. When my Dad originally told me that Danish winters were harsh and cold, I though yeah yeah sure, I’ve lived in Maine, I know what a harsh winter is. But even Maine didn’t prepare me for Denmark. What makes a Danish winter especially brutal isn’t the darkness or the cold which is comparable to Colby, but the wind and the lack of sun. I was not entirely prepared for the amount of grey days there would be and how the lack of sun actually affects your mindset and productivity. Any cold day is made 10-15 degrees colder just by wind which seems to never stop blowing here. Needless to say I am very grateful that spring finally seems to have reached Denmark.
A couple highlights from the last month have been using these warmer temperatures and some time off to get out and see more of Denmark. A couple friends and I have had the chance to go and visit Møns Klint a couple weeks ago. Møns Klint is a long stretch of white chalky cliffs on the eastern island of Møn in the Baltic Sea. The cliffs were originally part of the sea bed that was pushed up by a glacier. The sea bed was full of fossils that give the cliffs its chalky white texture. It was nice to get out the city and spend some time relaxing with friends.
. . .
The following week I went up to Skagen, the northernmost point of Denmark that divides the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. Like Møn, this is a place that was sculpted by glaciers with a lot of geological and cultural history. I spent the week with my grandparents and aunt uncle and cousin in a summerhouse. Abroad has given me the unique opportunity to spend more time with my Danish family who I would normally only see around once a year at best. I am still working hard at learning the language. My Danish family insists on speaking to me pretty much exclusively in Danish which is definitely an incentive to learn as quick as I can. I am finding Danish a ridiculously hard language to learn. Even growing up with a mom and dad who both speak Danish and hearing it spoken around me a lot, I am pretty much guaranteed to be pronouncing things wrong. The language barrier here can be frustrating at times since I am pretty much the only person in my family and among the people I live with who does not speak the language.
. .
As the sun has come out and the days have gotten longer- the sun now sets at 9pm!- the city is starting to come alive. I think that it will become even more alive considering restaurants, bars, classrooms, stadiums, and most other things are opening up this Wednesday. In more ways than one it feels like we are coming out of a long period of lockdown and winter to a more social and open summer. Border restrictions have finally lifted allowing the rest of the American students to come to Denmark for the remaining 3 weeks of our program. This means that in the next weeks there should be around 100 more DIS American students in Copenhagen. I am excited to have some time to enjoy a newly opened Copenhagen and some new people to enjoy it with. That’s all for now!
My favorite class that I am currently taking is called Climate, Glaciers, and Human Impact. I find the class incredibly interesting and very engaging; especially considering it is just me, one other student, and my professor. Learning more about ice cores and glacial climate science has really opened my eyes to a new field of study within environmental science. As Denmark is one of the leading stakeholders in ice and glacial science, it seems I have come to the right place to study it.
What I initially found so shocking about taking this class was the way that it reformed my fundamental understanding of environmental science. After taking many ES classes at Colby, I thought I had a pretty good understanding of climate change and the environment. However, after the first couple of classes here in Denmark, I realized there were major gaps in my understanding and knowledge, especially in terms of my understanding of Earth’s past climate. For example, I never knew that the climate had previously warmed during the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum to much greater temperatures than we are predicting for our near future. While the climate forcing (what caused this warming) was not human caused GHG emissions, the glacial melt, feedback loops, regional climate changes, and sea level rise can provide us with some idea of the future. If there is one outstanding message this course has emphasized, it is the power of examining our past in order to inform our future.
My course has more recently focused on our recent past, by that I mean the transition out of the last ice age, and into our current Holocene era where we now have relatively stable temperatures and conditions. We have discussed the melting triggers and processes that led to the melting of the great Laurentide Ice Sheet that once covered a majority of the Northern Hemisphere and was larger than Antartica. As Denmark sits in the North Atlantic and Greenland is technically part of Denmark, Denmark has been a key location and topic of discussion in my class. I have learned to recognize glacial moraines in Denmark, and am currently in Northern Jutland, where glaciers have shaped much of the landscape. We have discussed past climate events where key supporting evidence was found in the mud flats of central Jutland, and analyzed graphs that my professor has taken a part in creating during her part time work at the NorthGRIP remote ice drill site in Greenland. The class has engaged me in a kind of climate trouble shooting. My professor will set the context and provide me with graphs, or an understanding of a topic, but she is always asking me questions. It is then my job to try and understanding why something may have happened in our past climate. What caused what, and why something happened.
I have really enjoyed exploring a new frontier in climate science that I think will have a deep impact on the ES classes I take and work I do in the future.
As we come up on a year since coronavirus sent us all home from school I find myself reflecting back a lot this week on how life has changed in the past year, what I took for granted, what new doors corona has opened or closed for me, and what the future might bring. In so many ways my abroad experience has been defined by COVID for better or worse. This week for the first time in a year I walked into a clothing store and bought a couple things. I usually don’t enjoy shopping much, but after a year of buying stuff online, or more often, buying nothing at all, I found myself unable to contain my smile under my mask as I walked through the doors of Zara. Just one step towards getting a normal life back.
If you had asked me a year ago what I thought going abroad would be like I would have had a drastically different mental picture. Traveling to Sweden, Norway, or Paris and back. Taking a lighter course load, spending the majority of my time with other Americans from a variety of different schools, and going out to bars and clubs. COVID has made all of that impossible. Travel is only possible inside the country of Denmark, bars and clubs are closed for the foreseeable future, and there are only two other American girls in the DIS program who are actually in Copenhagen. While COVID closed the door on what I thought my abroad experience would look like, it has opened some other doors. I live with thirty other Danish students who have become my friends and family for the time being. It is a natural inclination to stick by other Americans when abroad because in some ways it is easier to stick with what you know. But since that is no longer an option, I have been forced to bridge cultural gaps and become friends with other Danes, which has actually been really fun and helped me gain a greater understanding of Danish culture. In the absence of the social spaces like bars and clubs that youth would usually gravitate towards, everyone, myself included, has had to find other social outlets. I now play soccer three times a week with a group of 25 Danes. I have played soccer all my life, but hadn’t touched a ball in three years up until three weeks ago. The joy of simply playing soccer a couple times a week with friends is something I surely would have taken for granted a year ago, but today seems like a luxury. Any travel I do is entirely domestic. I have been north to Hundested and Gilleje in Northern Zealand, and next week will be heading south to Møns Klint. Having more time in Denmark has allowed me to take the language much more seriously than I think I otherwise would have. Having Danish family I have always felt that I should one day learn the language so that I can better communicate with my grandparents and cousins. I have put a lot of my energy into learning the language and am actually able to now understand some things I hear in passing.
I think everyone has had doors shut on them this past year. Plane tickets never used, experiences postponed, expectations unmet. Everyone has struggled and pivoted and tried to find a way to lead a life that is both fulfilling and COVID compatible. I’m not writing this to compare what I thought my abroad experience would be a year ago, to the reality of it today, but rather to reflect that although both experiences are very different, they both have value. And I think that one thing I have learned in the past year is to not try to compare what is to what should have been, but rather recognise and find value in what is.
Copenhagen is a city built for sustainability. Sustainability guides everything from how you do your laundry and what shampoo you use to how often you shop and how you commute to work. Some days I look around me and swear I am living in some clean green utopia that is almost too good to be true. Here are some sustainable staples of the Danish culture that I have noted over the last month and a half of living here.
Biking everywhere: Copenhagen is first and foremost a bike city. Built with huge and clearly marked bike lanes, smaller traffic lights specifically for bikers, bike racks everywhere you look, and not a single hill in sight, Copenhagen is a bikers paradise. I myself have rented and bike and am blown away by the ease and comfort with which I whizz through the city. Biking in Copenhagen is the fastest means of getting from point A to point B- faster even than driving a car or taking the metro. Rain or shine, snow or sleet, Danes can be found biking through it all. Rather than have Uber Eats, there are a multitude of ‘Wolt’ bikers whizzing through the city with big insulated food backpacks. Most Danes don’t own a car instead opting to bike. Where they can’t bike, they take the metro, or do a combination of biking and metro as there are specific compartments of the metro designed for commuters with their bikes. The cars which Danes do own are much smaller and more eco-friendly than what you would see in the U.S. Bike culture is a testament to the eco-friendliness and general high levels of physical activity that Danes maintain.
.
Plastic bags? What are those. One of the things I first noted upon trying to store away left overs while cooking in my Kollegium’s kitchen is that they have no plastic bags and no plastic wrap. Instead they opt for containers. I have yet to see a Dane out and about with a plastic water bottle that isn’t reusable. At the grocery store, you better hope that you brought your reusable bags because they don’t have any plastic ones to give you. This is not to say that there is no plastic in sight in Denmark, but they sure make it hard to get your hands on.
Speaking of grocery stores, this brings me to my next point- shopping small. Danes don’t buy in bulk. When my Danish relatives first came to Costco they were dumbfounded. I now know why. In Denmark the shopping carts at the stores set the precedent for the amount you will buy, and they are about a quarter of the size of the average American shopping cart. When you go to check out, they make you bag your own groceries and you have to leave the store and bike home with only what you can carry. This results in Danes buying much less, but more frequently than in the U.S. This ultimately contributes to less waste and a ‘buy as you need’ consumer culture.
I remember last year in my Human Health and the Environment class at Colby talking about the progressive policy of Scandinavia in regards to toxic chemical additives in consumer products. This is very clear to me upon coming to Denmark. The laundry detergents, shampoos, lotions, cosmetic products, you name it are designed with the environment in mind. This is in part due to legitimate policy regulations that disallow toxic chemical additives, but is reflected by the concern and engagement the people here have about what kind of products they are using, and what environmental impacts they might have. A couple of the Danes I live with use only home remedy style (baking soda or vinegar) laundry detergent to clean their clothes because they want to avoid toxic chemicals.
Perhaps the most obvious token of sustainability in Denmark is their commitment to renewable energy. When looking out at the ocean one can see a line of offshore windmills off in the distance. Denmark pioneered the first offshore wind farm in 1991. Today offshore wind farms can be found all along the Danish coast. Ever windy Denmark is a an ideal location for wind energy. As of 2019, 47% of the total electricity consumption in DK was covered by wind- the highest in the world.
Today marks a month in Denmark. Most days I wake up still surprised I made it to Copenhagen. I thought abroad was as good as cancelled two days from when I was supposed to leave. Denmark had imposed new border restrictions disallowing visiting students entry into Denmark. I unpacked my bags, almost cancelled my flight, and began trying to figure out what to do next. Then I got a call from one of the DIS faculty mentioning that because I had a Danish passport, I could still go. I had really no idea what this new experience would look like, but I decided to go anyways. What was once a program of about 500 kids was now just 4 of us who all had citizenship, who would still be heading to Copenhagen. I think it is safe to say my abroad experience thus far is very different from what it normally would have been. Instead of using Denmark as a base for traveling all of Europe, I am required to stay within Denmark. Instead of living and socialising with primarily other DIS American students, I live with 38 other Danish students in a classic Danish kollegium. In some ways this has set me up for the more intimate and integrated experience I was hoping for. Borders, restaurants, bars, museums, you name it are all still closed. Only stores providing essential services are open. Danish winter and the quintessential study abroad experience look a little different this year, and me along with everyone else has had to find new ways of adapting and embracing this cold Danish winter. Here are some of my favorite corona and winter friendly activites so far.
1.Winter bathing- the right way to wake up
Denmark has experienced an especially cold winter this year. A succession of days below freezing long enough to allow ice to form in the canals, lakes, and seas. According to the other Danes I am living with, the canals of Copenhagen only freeze over about once a decade. The frozen canals of Copenhagen in conjunction with corona lock down has prompted a winter bathing craze. Danes very much live up to their viking heritage- winter bathing has never been so popular. On any dock with a ladder you can find people huddled together in various states of dressing and undressing. Someone descending the latter, dipping their body down into a punctured ice hole,putting their head under the water if they are really brave, and racing back up the ladder to their towel, clothes, hot coffee and fresh pastries. I too have taken up winter bathing and find it one of the most brutal but rewarding ways to start my day.
2. Frozen canals and long runs that turn to walks
Over the past two weeks Denmark has progressed into a state of winter wonderland. At the same time gym closures have forced Copenhagen’s entire population out into the streets for exercise. I myself have been trying to get out for a jog or walk everyday. I think a COVID phenomenon we can all relate to is the reality that as everything has moved online there are actually days when there is nothing forcing you to leave the house. You can spend all day sitting in the same room. When facing this phenomenon is has become more important to force oneself out of the house for a long walk or jog just to get some sun on your head and re-emerse yourself within the real world, if only for a little while. During my daily jog/walk I have really enjoyed watching the canals ice over a little more day by day until finally one day they were entirely frozen over. Below is a view of Nyhavn, Denmark’s most famous canal, and also a stop on my daily running route, entirely frozen over.
3. Fastelavnsbøller in evert shape size and flavor
Fastelavn is a Danish holiday on February 14th, similar to Mardi Gras or Halloween. Fastelavn is a shrovetide celebration, taking place the week before the season of Lent. Historically it was a time of feasting before fasting. Nowadays it is a time when young children dress up, walk door to door gathering treats, and hit a barrel full of candy- similar to a pinyata. Fastelavnsbøller are a favorite Danish pastry made in honor of Fastelavn and available the entire month of February. Made in both old style, a hollow bun filled with marzipan and cream and topped with chocolate, and new style, a croissant like pastry topped with whipped cream, Fastelavnsbøller have become a staple of every popular Danish bakery in Copenhagen. The bakeries within the city compete for who can make the best Fastelavnsbøller, each one putting their own spin on the traditional dessert, creating it in new flavors and styles. I have enjoyed many Fastelavnsbøller throughout the last month. Due to corona there has been a marked uptick in the sales of Fastelavnsbøller. On a Sunday afternoon you can find the lines outside bakeries extending around the block. My favorite fastelavnsbøller is the original style from the Andersen bakery just down the street.
4. The Copenhagen light festival
The Copenhagen light festival provides an exciting and fun spectacle for a cold dark evening. Lights fixtures are set up all around the city. On any given evening you can find groups of families and friends walking around together and observing the lights. The CPH light festival has been a tradition for many years during the month of February, but during corona times it has become the ideal activity for safely meeting with friends for an evening activity.
5. Hyggehygge and more hygge
The Danish concept of hygge is the best course of action during these times. Hygge is a one word culmination of coziness and comfortability, feelings of wellness and contentment. To practice hygge one must create a warm atmosphere and enjoy the good things in life with good people. Danish culture I have noted is more relaxed and less fast paced, allowing for time to stop in between and relax in the presence of others. Following a group meal with Danes, I am often surprised when everyone sits around chats and relaxes for 2 hours after the meal has ended. Evenings are spent together, watching tv, knitting, baking, playing games, and drinking tea.
One of my favorite takeaways from this experience has been the chance to build my own relationship with Denmark. I grew up visiting Denmark, but only on short term vacations. Going abroad here and not being allowed to leave Denmark has allowed me the time and space to really explore the city and the country for myself, make friends here, and build my own association with Denmark. I now understand so much more about where my family is from and where my Dad grew up. I can speak to my family in Danish and understand them culturally much better than I did before. These lessons are invaluable and I am very grateful to have been able to have the experiences that I have had this spring. I am just wrapping up my last classes now, and I am looking forward to a last week in Denmark spent enjoying springtime in the city with new friends and old.
. 
. 
. 
. 
. 
. 
. 
