i made it out of copenhagen alive. i am in lyon. it is fucking crazy. i can't really express myself right now. i am quite pleased.

there have been lots of explosions around my building lately and i've just casually assumed they were fireworks. but i was waiting for the night bus all fucked up with my friends and a bomb exploded in the "skat" building next to us. a man ran away from the scene and smoke started pouring out and we were like, "fuck!" but we didn't know what to do so we just got on the next bus. i just got back home and i saw rioting and bon fires in the street but all seems safe. too bad that building is right next to my fucking dorm. pray for me?

ps this really annoying girl kept hitting on me tonight and i had to be like, "if you touch me one more time im going to punch you in the face" but i didnt and i just kept running away from her/accepting her free drinks. asshole?

Tuesday. December 6-7.

I have been wearing the same clothes for two days.

The DIS program leaves Wednesdays free. They usually fill the Wednesday with a study tour of some sort, for instance, I have been to a two different mosques, one in Denmark, one in Malmo, Sweden on Wednesdays. Luckily, my program doesn't really do much on Wednesdays (although for a while Carsten was filling them up with bike tours and shit). This Wednesday I decided to be very productive and went to an extra Danish class where I learned a very important word that will make it soooo easy to make subordinate clauses and then, even thought it was gross and wet out, I went to the Kunst Museum. Or, the Art Museum. I have started using Kunst as an insult. It may or may not catch on. Anyway, some of the exhibits were good; I saw a famous portrait of Martin Luther and this really neat illusionary art from the 18th century. Other exhibits sucked, such as the Napoleon art, and the photography exhibit. I had to wait for the bus in the pouring rain so I was pretty miserable when I got home. I put my laundry in and got an email from J asking if I wanted to get together to do some reading and finish our project. I felt like baking since it was grey out and reading and baking go well together. I stopped at the store and picked up chocolate. Three different kinds. When I got there, J had made this delicious peanut butter stir fry for Katie and I but I had already eaten so I only had...like ten bights... Anyway, we went to the kiosk to get milk and butter for our cookies. Something about the flour in Denmark makes it impossible to make good tasting cookies so we added honey to them and they were fabulous. We also made some more special than the rest. The night got a little crazy and J couldn't respond to anything without laughing for twenty minutes. Some how Katie got straight enough to ride her bike back to Amar and J and I fell asleep to Donnie Darko. We awoke at nine, decided to skip class, and reawoke at 12:30. I had class at 1:50, so I got out of bed around 1 and we hopped on a bus. We were both still kind of fucked up from the night before and the class I was going to was an hour and twenty minutes of Yiddish folk music by a guest lecturer (a Polish Jew with holocaust survivor parents). Her stories were really good but they made up about 10% of the class while the rest was non comprehensible singing. And her voice was SO loud. Talking or singing I wanted to stop her and be like, woah, chill out. It was really pretty at first but that stuff can wear you down.

After class I sat in the periodical room reading the New Yorker. There was a really good article on Arlen Spector-- just a heads up. Then I went to the MME concluding dinner. There was free wine, as usual, and everyone got tipsy. We toasted each other and hugged and watched a slide show in which there were about 20 pictures of Bhaskar and I together. I began to notice that we have striking resemblances. Shit. I'll get those pictures and show you what I mean. I told everyone I would buy drinks at the Elephant and the Mouse after the party and we headed over there. It was really nice have one last experience all together because our program is really spread out. We are lucky to have such a nice small group. Once everyone had finished their Christmas beers, J, Hale and I went to this laundromat cafe in Osterbro. We did some reading but, honestly, I think I had too much to drink and I was a bit sick. I went to smoke a cig with Hale and our waiter grabbed me on the waste and went "OH! You smoke!" He sat down with us and we found out he was from Iceland and he owned the place. We told him what we were studying and he told us the world needs more people like us. Yeah. I know. So he was a sweetheart.

I just rode three different busses home and it is so nice to be in my room. Here are some pictures:

Limbo Time

That is the best way to describe the time between one class and another. There isn't enough time to do anything but read articles for class, return library books or eat lunch. I guess there is a lot one "could" do in that time but because it is only an hour or two it is easier to say that the time is useless and spend it doing nothing. the fact that the most comfortable place to hang out in dis is the periodical room or the computer lab makes that limbo time usually time spent on the computer. like now. i would go to the periodical room but the new yorker is old and ive already read it.

so here i am. on the computer. i woke up and considered not going to class but i knew we had a city planner coming in as a guest speaker so i got my act together and left. he was a great speaker and im glad i went. but i got my period and wanted to die. i was looking for pain killers when my friend nicki walked by. she is one of those girls whom, though she is the same age and has the same amount of life experience as you, could actually be your mother. and she had some. actually, she had a plethora for specific pains so i got exactly what i needed. but it was kind of late to be taking it so the next hour i was in extreme pain. but probably not as painful as lucy's pain. sorry about that boo.

i had a fantastic weekend. friday night i ran the bastions with haley. we went at five so it was pitch dark. it looked like the bastions were closed but we went anyway. bastions are earthen fortifications that are shaped like spades. they were constructed to give full offensive range as well as take the impact of cannon fire. copenhagen kept theirs and made some of them into parks and, actually, the theme park "tivoli" was built on a bastion. but the ones we were running on were in a circle because they were protecting the original fort. now military personel live there. so we were running it in the dark, there was no one there, the moat was glistening in the moonlight, the windmill was glowing, the bells on the church were going off--it was unbelievably beautiful. at the completion of my first lap there stood a man in military fatigues. i ran back to haley so i wouldn't have to have this awkward interaction on my own. he told us the bastions were closed and we had to leave. so we left. and then we ran around the outside of the bastions. but the trail stopped half way around so i suggested we run through the fort. which we did. and when another man in fatigues started towards me i turned my ipod up and sprinted.

after our run we went to my place and ate delicious spinach and garlic mashed potatoes. the we hung out with froter the norweigen, peter, and dan at brendan's flat. we had fun for a while, then dan creeped everyone out so i left and went to bed.

the next day i spent with jaimie working on a project for carsten's class. we walked from rådhuspladsen to vesterbrotorv and decided to get lunch before starting the project. we got this spicey "pizza" to which i unknowingly added that sun dried tomato chili pepper sauce. i was on fire. but it calmed down and i ate the rest with lemon juice. why am i writing about this? anyway, we took over fifty pictures of vesterbro and were lucky enough to catch a man shooting up under the church steps.

we decided to go do our write up at jaimie's flat. she was riding her bike so, when it started pouring rain, i was miserable and alone at the bus stop. the bus was packed and a woman in a gigantic fur coat kept leaning on my face. now this was not only gross fur, but this was WET gross fur, in my face. i wanted to die. i kept knocking her leg with my breifcase but she wouldn't move! ugh. i arrived at j's traumatized. she made me coffee and talked me down. then we typed typed typed and finished the majority of our write up before abbey came over. then all work ceased and we had very intense intellectual conversations comparing smith to bryn mawr to col college. it was nice. later, abbey made us chestnuts but i ate one that tasted like clams so my chestnut eating experience was cut short. j must have thought we didn't get enough to eat so she made banana bread to complete the night. i walked home in fear that someone would rob me of my computer but i made it home safe.

i wanted to go to this photo exibit that has been travelling the world (a bunch of award winning photos) so i called up jack to see if she wanted to go. we took this crazy train route into the city, but im glad we did or we would have missed the most exciting thing i have ever scene in a danish subway. we were just standing in nørreport station when this man started shouting up the escalator in danish. people started running and we just stood there unable to understand what was going on. this man emerged from the stairs and started chasing these guys around with a knife. it was crazy. once things settled again this girl told us the man was pissed at another guy for not getting out of his way. right. i should pull a knife every time someone doesn't get out of my way. WHAT? she went on to say that copenhagen is a crazy city where people get shot in coffee shops. i was like, girl, im from america. people get killed on the street just cause. but we acted impressed and caught our train.

the photo exibit was behind kobenhavnH station. on our walk to the warehouse where the photos were displayed we stepped over needles and saw the sketchiest drug deal ever. i was scared to look. but once we got there the photos were so depressing and scary that our earlier experiences didn't seem too bad.

we returned to keops kollegium for a christmas party where they were serving æbleskiver (danish doughnut holes) and gløg (warm red wine, schnapps, and schnapps soaked nuts and raisins). as you can imagine, the combination of wine and carbs lead to a comatose evening. we met a girl at the party who had a bunch of movies on her external hard drive so she sent me some. jack came over and we watched "good night and good luck." it made me proud to be friends with j, a future journalist and world changer. lisa also sent me "rize" but it dled with no sound. damn.

that is all.