Updates!

Liz and I on the harbor. This is an old picture - all the way back during orientation!

I joined a painting class! These are our paintings from the first day. We looked at  Pablo Picasso's Guernica and then picked a square from the painting to use as inspiration for our picture. Then we had to visualize our favorite color and a color that we hate, and use them BOTH in the same painting!

My scary bull picture

I joined the gym! It is literally right around the corner from my building so I  can't use distance as an excuse not to go!

My "visiting family," Lars and Lilly, took me to see Tivoli before it  closed. The next exhibit will be for Halloween!

The Tivoli boys guard. 

Hard Rock Cafe in Tivoli!

The bubble fountain

We shopped at the glass market for food to make a delicious dinner! This is the table set up before the food was done cooking. We ate delicious homemade curry with white fish and brown rice, and a raw salad with juicy tomatoes :)

Lars and Lilly love cooking and they collect the most unique utensils and food ware! There is even a whole wall dedicated to their collection in their living room :)

Me with my visiting kitty cat!

Liz, Hannah and I biked to a forest/park last Wednesday. It was beautiful - we were inspired to do some yoga!

Walking in the forest. 

My Danish Language and Culture class took a field trip to Christiania, the permanent Whole Earth Festival in  Copenhagen, as I like to think of it (Sorry non-Davis people, this reference probably won't make sense to you...). It was founded in September of 1971 when a group of hippies, young homeless people, and bohemians started living in an old military base (or so my Danish textbook says). We actually ended up going on Christiania's Birthday, so there were many festivities going on while we were there! Christiania operates a bit outside the rules of normal society; for instance they openly sell "hash" (what most Californians call POT), but outlawed hard drugs and violence, and no cars are allowed on the streets, and dogs are NOT allowed to be on leashes! I didn't bring my camera to this adventure because you aren't allowed to take photos on pusher street (ALL drugs are still illegal according to the Danish government, and people don't want to get busted), but I stole a few from my friends...

The bridge in Christiania, plus BUBBLES!

Me being creepy, and Mary Jo looking normal

Me and Haley Mae!

Alright folks, that's all I have for now! Hope you've enjoyed my update. More to come... later. 

:) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) 

Ring your bell when you smell Adventure!

Me riding my bike onto the ferry! If your a biker you get to enter and exit the ferry FIRST, ahead of all the cars and people. Very exciting :) P.S. Yes, Mom, I'm wearing a HELMET!!!!!

 So... A few weekends ago I went to Helsingborg, Sweden with some friends from my kollegium. It's really easy to get to Sweden from Denmark (you can see Sweden from Denmark from many places along the coast anyway), all you have to do is take a train to Helsingor, Denmark and then take a ferry to Sweden! We planned a bike trip to a nature reserve in Sweden, and we were originally planning to bike to the nature reserve, walk around the nature reserve for a few hours and eat our lunch, then bike back. This was going to total to about 50 miles of biking in one day... but fortunately for our gluteous maximuses a few things went askew along the way so we never actually made it to the nature reserve... but we still had a great time!

Hiking along the coast of Sweden

So what ACTUALLY happened when we got to Sweden was that we had no idea how to get to the nature reserve. We spent a while asking various people for directions and eventually figured out that all we had to do was basically bike up the coast. This went fairly well at first (once we got over a huge hill) but when we stopped in a random field to eat our lunch and sing campfire songs, Meghan realized that her bike tire was flat! So we asked a random woman walking if there was anywhere nearby that had a bike pump. She said, "My house" and took Meghan to her house to get it fixed! Unfortunately it turned out that there was actually a huge hole in the tire that couldn't be fixed... but luckily the nice elderly couple next door offered to drive Meghan and her bike back to the town and the Hostel we were staying at. Don't do this in America, folks, people there aren't always this trustworthy!

Liz, Steph, and myself enjoying the wind in the forest

So the remainder of our group decided to explore the nature a little before meeting Meghan back at the hostel. We ended up turning our bike trip into a biking and hiking trip, and explored the Swedish coast a bit!

Creepin' on the house of some rich Swedish person

No explanation needed...

While on our hike, we accidentally stumbled upon the back of a park called Sofiero, which is where the Swedish Royal family used to spend their summers. It was incredibly beautiful and there were several interesting statues. Here is the link to the Sofiero website: http://www.sofiero.se/

Feeding the rat statue... a small rock. Nom nom.

They're so cute!

Making our own addition to the Sofiero statues. From left: Liz, myself, and Isabelle.

Meghan, Liz and I looking at Helsingborg from the top of the tower!

Steph, Liz and I looking at the city from the tower tippy top.  

 Some things that happened worth mentioning that I don't have pictures for:

• Steph and I played a nail biting game of pool at the Hostel on Saturday night. We were pretty evenly matched, which was good but also hilarious. Each of us managed to accidentally make some really spectacular shots as well as some really spectacularly awful ones, one of which had us laughing for about 5 minutes straight. Well it started out as us laughing at my shot, and then we just started laughing at each other laughing...
• I had an interesting encounter with a man lifting weights in the "exercise" room that was right next to our room. I went in to ask him to turn down his music, but we had a bit of a language barrier problem. Somehow he understood "I am from California," but could not understand "Could you please turn down your music," even when I did my expert miming. Oh well. 
• At one point along our journey back into town on Sunday we passed a pirate themed playground. We had to climb on it, even though we got some weird looks from parents and children alike...

Okay well that's all I have for now! Oh and by the way the title of this blog was inspired by our spontaneous, play-it-by ear type approach to our journey, once we realized things weren't going to go as planned. There were so many cool things to see and do along the coast that we decided we would ring our bells when we "smelled" adventure (my phrasing...), and then all of us would pull over together to explore. 

BAM.

Daily Life in Copenhagen

Hello again!

Here are some pictures from my everyday life ;)

The front of my door!

My bed. 

View from the back of my room. Notice the expansive kitchen area. Bathroom is behind the kitchen.

The view from my window. I live in a neighborhood called Østerbro, which is know for being very family friendly and quiet. This doesn't explain the loud noises and fireworks I heard in the middle of the night the other weekend... Here is a link to Wikipedia! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%98sterbro


Exciting advancements in the food department! (soy yogurt and rice/almond milk!)

Because of our large brains, humans must consume a large amount of food every day. Most people eat three meals a day; breakfast, lunch, and dinner, although this can vary from person to person. Some people prefer to continuously eat small amounts of food throughout the day. These eating habits are very different from other animal species, some of which only need to eat a large meal every couple of weeks. Snakes, for instance, can eat a nice large juicy rat for lunch one day, and then won't need to eat anything else for two weeks!


More food.

Okay, well that's all I have for today! Next time I'll try to write a bit more substance. ;)

Hej hej! (Not "hi, hi"... this actually means "bye" in Danish.)

~Liliana

P.S. Please don't mind all the emojis; I've gotten used to using them because Danes are accustomed to putting smiley faces after everything; they use them in emails, texts, etc. If you don't put a smiley face after your message, they will assume you are mad at them!

Blog take one!

Hej! This is "hi" in Danish ;)

Soo.... I have decided to start a blog. I'm starting a bit later than most people would in my situation (I've already been abroad for 3 weeks) but that fits nicely with everything else in my life, which is also late.

This is a picture of my friend Meghan, who has graciously let me into her room to use her internet, because mine is NOT WORKING and has been NOT WORKING for a WEEK now. Anyway, we are working on getting that fixed (the wall aaaand the wireless router) so it should be remedied later this week :)

I will work on putting up pictures of my everyday life this week, so whoever is reading this can see my room, my kollegium (which is the type of dorm where I live), and so on. I live in an international kollegium, which is an apartment style dorm for international students. My roommate and a few of my neighbors are also from the states, doing the same program I am (Danish Institute for Study Abroad, or DIS). 

Even though I've already been here a while, I am still adjusting to daily life (I like to take my time with things),  but things are gradually falling into place. I'm finally comfortable taking the train every day to class, and next on my list is bike, then bus ;). I have also learned to take the train/metro to the Royal Danish Academy of Music, where I have finally started taking trumpet lessons. At RDAM I will be switching off taking lessons with two different teachers, Nikolaj Viltoft and Jonas Wiik, who both play in the Royal Danish Opera. Nikolaj is Danish, and Jonas is Swedish. They both seem very nice and I am excited to learn from them!

I went on my first study tour this past week, which was AWESOME and got me really excited for being in the Child Diversity and Development program. The girls (and one boy) in my class are really nice, and I can already tell that my teacher (who is Danish), has some really interesting material planned for us this semester. We are not only learning about Children with Special Needs (the title of our core course), but we are also learning about the Danish Education System, the Danish view on Special Needs, Scandinavian philosophy on criminals, and much much more! We had the opportunity to visit several really interesting places on our tour, including a Danish boarding school (here's the address if you're interested http://www.ringekostskole.dk/), a Danish prison and a modern art museum. I have some pictures of the other places...

Happy Pigs at the Heartha Levefaellsskab! I'm pretty sure all the food they cook here is vegetarian ;)

My future home...

Another house at Heartha Levefaellesskab, a residential community based on the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner. Here they have a units for adults with special needs as well as anyone else who wants to live in the community. They practice "reverse integration," which means that instead of trying to integrate the disabled into normal society, the "able" people choose how much they want to be involved in the lives of the disabled.

Here's the web address in case you're interested. http://www.hertha.dk/

One of the fields at Heartha Levefaellesskrab. They grow all organic vegetables here, as well as bio-dynamically grown produce. They also milk their own cows and have other activities for the residents such as a weavery and a kitchen to cook their own food!

These are images from Odense, the charming town in which the famous story teller Hans Christian Andersen was born and lived for many years. We also walked past the river in which his mother washed clothes of the wealthier families of the town in, which Hans would pass every day on his way to the library.

Also in Odense is the "Tinderbox," a sort of play museum for kids to experience a story of Hans Christian  Andersen and act it out in play and artwork. My class did a pretty good job of becoming children again as we put on costumes and experienced the music and set for the original "Little Mermaid" story!

Mermaids!

Okay, well I think that's all I have time for tonight. I will work on trying to make up for lost time the rest of this week! Stay posted for when I get my internet back...

PEACE and BLESSINGS.

~Liliana