I'm Back! (Two years later)

Welcome to my blog about my summer 2010 adventures abroad!! This is where I'll document my time in Copenhagen for four and a half weeks (June 3-July 4) as a Humanity in Action fellow, and you can probably expect a China blog after that (Crimson Summer Exchange fellowship, July 10-Aug 17).

When I studied abroad in London during the spring semester of my sophomore year, I liked keeping an occasional blog on the things that struck me about British culture. Granted, this largely ended up as, "Thank G-D they tell me which way to look when I cross the streets" and "Look! I cooked something!", so you can expect no better here.

But as I sit in a McDonalds that didn't open until 10 AM and made me PAY for ketchup (I'm not over it either), waiting for my hostel to find me a room, I figured that now is as good a time as any to start anew.

SO. I am here on a fellowship with Humanity in Action, which seeks to understand the ways in which World War II and the Holocaust have primed and continue to influence modern-day minority policy in Europe. The fellowship seemed built for me, aligning exactly with my academic and personal interest in the Holocaust and my attempts to understand exactly why Holocaust study remains important today. I hope the fellowship will also address my major problem with reactions to the Holocaust, in that I think many (by no means all, and perhaps mostly of an older generation) Jews have taken it as a sign that they must protect the Jewish people--which I agree with entirely. But the reaction becomes problematic when that protection is limited to the Jewish people, without extending to groups about whom prejudicial views continue to exist (I am particularly thinking of Muslims.) It seems to me that the lesson of the Holocaust should be exactly the opposite: that we must all look out not only for our own ethnicity/religion/race, but for our neighbors'. I hope the fellowship will address this disparity. More on that here.

Okay, enough of that. I arrived in Copenhagen a few hours ago with too much luggage (naturally), and had to drag my ass plus my overstuffed backpack plus a purse plus one HUGE suitcase plus one slightly smaller but equally overstuffed suitcase onto the Copenhagen metro and bus systems, both of which operate in Danish, which features long words and strings of consonants not punctuated by vowels. But most people also spoke English, and I found the Danhostel in time to hear that my room won't be ready until 2 pm (It's noon here now, 6 hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time.)

So I ventured around a bit. I have never seen so many people on bicycles in my life. There are huge bike lanes on every street I have seen thus far, completely blocked off from traffic, and people take great advantage of them. They also tote their adorable Danish babies in the backseat. The safety factor here is probably the only way to get people using bikes in the enormous numbers they do here, which environmental groups in the U.S. already know.


Unfortunately, I am jetlagged and wearing Old Navy flipflops, so my walking tour today was truncated. I am sitting in a McDonalds, where, as previously mentioned, I had to PAY for ketchup and still didn't get enough. I am so affronted by this that I would have left, but this is the only place around with free wifi, so I am typing while staring down the offending ketchup packet. I also ventured online, where I looked up the exchange rate for the Denmark krone, which I had stupidly failed to investigate in my ignorant belief that Denmark used the Euro. Though I have now found that the krone is fixed to the euro, and that it is 6 krones to a dollar. This makes my ketchup significantly cheaper than I imagined. I feel better now.

Other things Wikipedia tells me: Denmark has the highest level of income equality and the best business climate in the world, and is ranked "the happiest place on earth." ABC News has a kind of awesome article on it, which says that 50%-70% taxes for tons of government programs (including subsidized social clubs akin to Yale funding for a Simpsons club) actually allow people to choose careers without regard to social status. Idyllic. I'll try and assess the happiness level of the Danes I meet.

I think that's the extent of the wikipedic knowledge I can get in this fine eating establishment. Apologies to Jen for copying much of the email I sent her this morning directly into this post.