…staying in Copenhagen for 1 semester…
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You think there is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.
Bad weather? Do you mean the grey sky, rain basically 5 times a week, wind in your face when you go by bike from the city to where you live, nearly getting knocked off the bike by its force, snow in the middle of April? If you think that’s bad weather, better don’t come to Denmark, I start thinking of it as nice warm spring days . And by the way as soon as the sun comes out a little bit, everybody starts wearing skirts without tights, sandals or goes out in the night with short sleeves…I mean do you really think 10 degrees is cold?
The first thing you do on entering a bank/post office/pharmacy etc. is look for the queue number machine
Oh yes..annoyingly true…so far I haven’t found a single place where you can just queue for the counter without first having to queue for getting number and then waiting for your turn.
You know that “religious holiday” means “let’s get pissed”
Avoid going too fast with the bike when there is a weekend’s night or some other festivity, you might knock someone over who is out partying and just decides to start dancing on the street. Danes basically use every night before a day off for getting really drunk. It seems they are even educated to do that, I mean even as little kids they have this attitude if it is a weekend they have to eat lots of sweets, because that’s when their parents buy candy for them. So well yeah I mean it is just logical to just eat it all at once so that you may even get more…maybe. This attitude continues…just the good changes…from sweets to alcohol. They can drink soooo much! I always thought Austrians are already pretty good!? at drinking. But hey everybody at home I have bad news for you…NO WAY you can ever compete with those crazy blond guys (and girls…oh yeah blonds, they seem to also have hidden in the winter time cause now I have a hard time finding anybody who is not blond 
) from the north. The thing is that they really go out with the idea to get pissed every weekend. I really wanna know why it is like that?
You know the meaning of life has something to do with the word “hyggelig”.
The famous word Hygge…means something like cosy, but can basically be used for every other word as well. I guess you could even say it is used as a expression of joy, anger or any other feeling you can think of. But the most important meaning of the word “hyggelig” is meating in a friend’s house, sitting there for hours, lighting candles although it is in the middle of the day and has maybe 20 degrees outside, drinking beer and just enjoying being incredibly lazy. You might also use it for the way they spend their Sunday after partying Friday and Saturday. Or spending their time inside the apartment, when it was winter and just didn’t feel right to leave the warm bed and go outside.
You are sincerely unable to understand someone asking for the Strøget if the ø is hesitant, the stød isn’t pronounced enough, the g not smelted into an l or the t is heard and have given up all hope of finding any logic in the pronunciation of the Danish language.
I sometimes think even Danes don’t know how to speak Danish. They leave out pretty much half the letters of a word. And they are soooo bad at understanding any dialect of Danish. People from Jutland don’t understand Copenhageners, Copenhageners don’t understand people from Sealand, or Funen, even people from the inner city don’t understand people from the suburbs of Copenhagen. Crazy!!!
You’ve become the master guru of bicycle repair
I am already a pro at repairing bikes. Doesn’t mean, though, that it works every time. 
Currently I am using my landlady’s bike, after I “broke” mine in my biking accident and tried to repair it, but unfortunately without any success. Hmmm maybe I am after all not that skilled at repairing it, although I did it already a few times and helped my friends repairing their bikes. I just don’t know if it is clever to buy a new tire, as mine has a terrible eight, or just buy a new bike for another 400DKK (=50 €), might even be cheaper…
You can tell the difference between a Grøn Tuborg and a Carlsberg beer
…but you don’t need to be able to tell it, because they are both not good. How can they be even proud of this beer? I don’t get it…but as the Carlsberg advertisement points out so nicely “PROBABLY the best beer in the world”. You can interpret the “probably” either way, I prefer the: probably means as much as certainly not! But anyway, it is not really important because you just adopt the way the Danes do it : You go to the supermarket and buy three good beers and 12 not too good ones, then you mix 3/4 of a not so good beer with 1/4 of a good beer and voila– that’s what it needs to get drunk, and there is nothing else you want –because you have been too long in Denmark when you can’t remember what a party without alcohol is like and are more interested in the alcohol content than the taste or the name of the drink and you no longer feel the urge to stand up and dance at a club or party until you have consumed large amounts of alcohol. Really I haven’t met another nation that knows soooo many drinking games. *hihi*
oh and now my favorites :
You feel comfortable laughing at jokes about Swedes
How true! There is no such thing as a good joke without being a joke about Swedes. Reminds me of the Steirerwitze! XD
You find the idea walking across the street when the light is red unforgivable, even though there are no cars in sight and it’s 3am in the morning!
That’s an unwritten law! Danes love to follow the rules.
They are nice but shy, seem a bit cold, would never show up at a party without announcing themselves, feel uncomfortable when you make them a compliment and it takes quite some effort to get friends with them, but once you succeeded they are really the nicest people and I guess really loyal. As long as you can keep up with their sarcasm.
Oh I just LOOOOOOOVE Denmark!!!
Oh by the way…my girls, for all of you who don’t know them: Silke, Tina and Marlies, were here for Easter! I really enjoyed my time with them, travelling in Skåne, so South Sweden, for two days, where we will forever remember the fact that you can’t go out in Lund if you are not a student at Lund, partying a lot in København, having nice Easter dinners with my friends here, strolling around the city and just relaxing, because we all needed a holiday. I guess if they wouldn’t have been here for Easter I would have even felt a little homesick, because many of the other exchange students went home for Easter and there weren’t so many of my friends, with whom I hang out a lot, left here in Denmark, and I mean spending Easter alone would just have been a shame.
so then some impressions of my stay here for you:
I am very bad at updating my blog (sorry Ami )…
I had a biking accident last weekend. On Saturday, when I went visiting some friends in the Vesterbrogade. (I found out I love biking and it is definitely the fastest way to get around København.) So there where these two girls going next to each other, chatting, on the biking lane. Another girl was right behind them and then there was me. I wanted to pass them so I rang the bell on my bike, looked back and went left to pass them. When I was just next to the girl in front of me she also wanted to pass the two others girls and got to the left side as well without looking back though. So she just rammed my bike and knocked me of the biking lane. So I was directly on the edge of the biking lane with my bike, and I knew that I am going to fall for sure. It is this slow motion second where you are quite helpless and just can’t do anything to prevent the fall. At least you can prepare yourself for falling and try to soften the fall, but that’s about it. And I also tried to fall onto the biking lane and not onto the street, which didn’t work out though, so I was lucky that the car that was coming was quite slowly and could break. So nothing really happened except that I got a sore on my knee, of which I am actually proud, because I haven’t had a prober one for about 4 years I guess. XD So the whole week was filled with trying to repare my bike that was worse off than me. Because I got a flat tire from the accident plus a terrible Eight in my back tire where the other bike hit me. So me and David ended up doing some reparations on my bike, which wasn’t that easy as it sounds. Fixing the tire was no problem at all, but as it was the back wheel we broke the gear shift and now it has only 3 gears instead of 7 which makes it quite some work to get from A to B. That was though the result from our second bike repair day. Because after the first try I had only 1 gear and then I got a flat tire again on the front wheel. Lucky me! So right now I am using my landladies bike, till I know if it is worth getting my bike repaired or just getting a new one.
On Sunday we went to Helsingør (Denmark) and Helsingbørg (Sweden) with the ESN network (that is the Erasmus student network, they are organizing some parties and trips). We went to Kronbørg Castle which is also called Hamlets castle, because it is said that Shakespear wrote his play Hamlet in this castle. So this attracts quite some people for the Hamlet plays that take place there from April till September, I think, where often famous people play the characters and which is not actually being played on a stage but they play in the different rooms of the castle, so it is quite an interactive play as visitors have to walk around as well. It is a really nice castle, right next to the sea and you can see Sweden on the other side of the water. The village, Helsingør is also really idyllically with lots of small, what I would call “typical Danish houses”. So pretty small, with big windows and mostly one floor half under earth and the main entrance a few steps above the ground. Okay it is difficult to imagine what I mean, but I am adding a picture then you can see what I mean. After visiting the village a little bit, we went onto the ferry to Sweden. It takes only half an hour and the funny thing is, that lots of people on the ferry have little trolleys with alcohol. So the Swedes just go to Denmark to buy lots of alcohol there as the ferry is quite cheap, and alcohol is much cheaper in Denmark. (Not compared to Austria, but compared to other Scandinavian countries – I think Norwayis the most expensive in general and concerning alcohol.) I also found out another rather funny aspect of life in the north. Scandinavians get trained in drinking extensively on weekends already when they are kids. Not by drinking alcohol, but by eating sweets. Usually kids don’t get sweets during the week, but therefore every weekend. So on the weekends they just eat tons of sweets (you can even see that in the Supermarket on Friday and Saturday sooo many people buy lots of sweets). And when they grow up, they kind of keep this tradition up. So they drink soooo freaking much on the weekend to, I don’t know, compensate not drinking during the week. Actually you would think they should be on top of the statistics of consumption of alcohol per person, but as they tend to drink mostly on weekends they are not . Perhaps it doesn’t sound very logical what I am saying, but this is definitely my impression. And I always thought Austrians already drink quite a lot..I was wrong!!..nothing compared to here…believe me!…So we got off the ferry and took a look at the nice fortress in Helsingbørg, on a ( believe me..)HILL!! Okay but I have to admit it is in Sweden so not in Denmark, means there exist such things as hills. I really start missing mountains or hills a little bit, it is just ways too flat!! It was freaking cold again, and I, optimistic as I am that it is gonna be warm, just had my spring jacket, because it was snowing again in Sweden and we got all the cold air over there. Oh and the canals in København are melted by now, and for exactly one week today!!
Spring definitely changes the face of København. I think it looks soo different when it is not gray. It is BEAUTIFUL!!!
You know you’ve been in Denmark already quite a while, if… »« let the sunshine in…the suuuunshiiiine iiin
As there have been a few sunny days recently (I guess I can count them on one hand for the time I have been already here ) we did some exploration again. Two weeks ago on Saturday, I went to Malmø with Kevin from Italy and Tomas from Lithuania. So it wasn’t a shopping day, for what Malmø is famous here in København –everybody just goes shopping there, because even with buying the train or busticket, it is cheaper to buy clothes on the other side of the Øresund Bridge-but another sightseeing tour. I am not complaining about that, because I am not the shopping girl , and we had a great day in Sweden, I am just trying to write complicated sentences in English, which seems to work, because now even I am a little confused.
In Malmø you find the highest appartement building of Europe, as far as I remember. It is called the Turning Torso and is about 190 meters high with 54 stores and an turning angle of 90 degrees from bottom to the top. We also visited the Malmøhus, which is an ancient castle and an evidence of the ancient fortification against enemies coming from the sea. Furthermore we ate a very nice typical Swedish desert at a café, forgot how it is called something with bølle though…surprise surprise…at least I remember that it was very tasty.
A windmill in Malmø…
The torsing tower
This weekend, or better Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday we used for getting around København a little. Everybody, except me, because of the lab project, had a week of holidays. I thought it was actually really funny, at home you guys just start with the sommersemester, and we here are already having a holiday week. Weird! Anyway, I took Thursday and Friday off and we went to the Louisiana, a museum of modern art, which was very awesome, but it is supposed to be ways more spectacular in sommer (I am getting a little annoyed by hearing this phrase so I decided enjoying it even though it is still winter). The current exhibition is called “colors in art” and shows paintings from Van Gogh, Kadinsky, Matisse… As I like to spend time in museums and tend to look very carefully, I kind of got left behind, because most people were already going home 2 hours earlier than I. Well I guess this can happen . By the way, I learned how to say Van Gogh with the right pronunciation – it is very nice to have people with different languages around.
On Friday we went to Christiania, the “social experiment” in the city of København, tend to be not very accepted by the government though, well and honestly I am not surprised, because you can see people smoking joints in the middle of the day, in the middle of the street. It also seems to be a quite good market of drugs there, just noted by me, as lots of people sell their “goods” there. It is really a completely different part of the city; You can even see farmbuildings in there, people on trackers, little houses, that look more like “Schrebergaerten”, than real houses. And all in all it seems to be a very “chilly” place. The funny thing is: When you leave the area it says: “You are now entering the EU”…just funny!!!
Then on Saturday we went to the “Black diamond”, the royal library of Copenhagen. It is near the sea and the new part of the building is black glass or something like that so it looks very fancy and it really is. We actually saw the Danish press pictures of the year exhibition and some cartoon drawings, which I thought were quite great.
Hmmm…and what did we do on Sunday? Just a second I have to think about it…oh yeah..we went to Hillerød, which is a suburb of København. It takes like 45 minutes by S-train and we took a chance of the free S-trains they have on the first Sunday of every month. That’s a quite great idea, I think, because that way people, like even Copenhageners themselves travel around the city area a bit. They actually have this free train because all the shops are open on the first Sunday as well, and they want to transport people to the shopping centers outside the city or to the ikea mostly (because on this Sunday every second person I saw, carried an ikea bag. Anyway Hillerød castle looks very nice and has a fancy garden in the backyard and it looks like it is built in a lake.
With the mentor program of the university of economics we went to the Carlsberg brewery this Friday, for a business presentation and some free bears afterwards. I thought the best story the guy was telling us, was the one about the alcohol shops in Germany near the border to Denmark. Carlsberg sells the Carlsberg bear to those shops and about 90% of the Carlsberg bear in these shops goes back to Denmark. Because in Denmark a can of bear in the supermarket is about 1 Euro and in Germany it is about 40 cents. That is just ridiculous somehow…And the other really crazy thing is, that they want to change the skyline of København by rebuilding the old brewery in the city (they only stopped brewing in the city about 14 months ago) to make a fancy new district there. So they are planning to put 6 (lets call them) skyscrapers there, and as København has no other high buildings this will just be very striking. And the government already approved it, so they are just waiting until the crisis is over and they can start. Oh and I learned something very important. The main focus on bear advertisement is for males, aged between 25 and 30, who are single, football/tennis/skiing/golf fans have a good job and like driving Audis or BMWs. …definitely out of my league XD.
Med venlig hilsen
Michaela
Christiania
With Sophie and Kevin in Christiana..pleace notice: THE SUN!!!
on our way to Hillerød
Strong (needs to be if he wanna carry me ) Hungarian David and me in front of Hillerød Castle
Soso…Lots of news from me again:
I have a lab project, finally, took me quite a while to get into one, because all the lab projects here are for 30ECTS points, but I don’t have that much time next to the Economic Principles course and the other lab course I am taking, so I was lucky I found one project for about 15 ECTS points. The professor, Genevieve, is really nice and all the other people in the lab are as well. She is French and I love to listen to her, talking in English . It was really funny, when we found out, that my landlady’s mother used to work in her lab about 20 years ago. I think that is a quite funny coincidence. The project I am working on is about inheritance and maintenance of heterochromatic regions in S.pombe. Schizosaccharomyces pombe is a fission yeast and often used as a model organism for research of heterochromatin, which is just densely packed DNA. And today I made my first, very own Plasmid and it is even named after me pOM1 (for plasmid Michaela Obersriebnig XD)…that’s soooooo great!!! It has mCherry as a marker for the heterochromatic region…an sooooso exciting!! But to keep you all reading my blog, I better stop talking about yeast, except it is sold in the form of beer, right .
Well so next to the lab I am attending a very nice lecture in the department of economics, called Principles of Economics, which gives a general overview of economy and I really like it, although I have to get used to the economic way of thinking. Because it is a rather harsh view of the world, it seems to me everything is seen in money. But it is really interesting and I like getting to know a different point of view. Why not? But you know, everybody keeps on asking why a “molecular biologist” needs economy.
This week I made the first contact with dentist here in beautiful Copenhagen. Because my wisdom tooth in the lower jaw bone started hurting terribly last week and as it was really painful I had to go and see my favorite doctor: The dentist! So I went there the first time and because there are so many operations right now they couldn’t do anything else than putting me on a waiting list for the removal of this stupid tooth. The appointment was for the 13th of March. So not to be on painkillers for 3 weeks, I just phoned them again when it was really hurting, and as the guy on the phone could hear, that it was really painful he said he could sneak me in if there is a cancellation. And lucky me, there was one for Friday 7:30am. So I went there and then they couldn’t take out the actually hurting one, because it is directly above the nerve and they told me it would be too painful. So they removed the upper one, because then I should stop jawing on the lower one and it would be able to get out a little more and won’t touch the nerve directly anymore. So yeah!!! The fun part of the whole tooth thing was, that the dentist was really sweet because he started singing while getting out the tooth and I couldn’t do anything else than to laugh about it, which I suppose must have looked really funny, with one numb cheek, anyways he said I am like the craziest person he ever had on the operation table, because I start laughing while every other person is just afraid and hates the situation. But I just had to laugh about him cheering me up with singing.
So that’s why I had a really lazy weekend last weekend, because he told me not to do any exhausting activities. Well I only went out once, because it was Sophies birthday, which I just couldn’t miss. But on Monday the pain was basically over, so I got back to eating normally and not eating one piece of pizza for half an hour.
let the sunshine in…the suuuunshiiiine iiin »« exploring the city
…that’s what I am doing the last couple of days. We went to the Glyptotek, a museum here in Copenhagen with ancient greek statues and modern danish ones. It is free on sunday, so perfect for students to visit it. Then we went on a bustour through Copenhagen yesterday. It was organized by the ESN Copenhagen, which is the Erasmus network organizing trips and parties throughout the whole semester.
We went to see the little mermaid, Copenhagens landmark. She is not a very impressive figure because the artist intended her to be “human” and not heroic. The Little Mermaid symbolizes the fairy tale by Danish author and poet Hans Christian Andersen, the story of a young mermaid who fell in love with a prince who lived on land, and often came up to the edge of the water to look for her love. The story of The Little Mermaid is not a very happy one – she visits a witch and agrees to give the witch her tongue, in exchange for legs to replace her fish tail, so she can live on land with her love, the prince. And every step she takes on her new legs hurt like she is walking on swords. To be with her love she becomes a mute and is in pain with every step she takes – but despite alle her sacrifices she never gets to be with him. (no happy ending like in the disney movie Arielle 
) The sculpture pictures her as she sits and looks out over the water, after never actually having married the prince, reminiscing over her lost childhood in the sea, as a mermaid. We were actually very lucky to see the mermaid because it will be gone for a few month to be on an exhibition in China. The busdrive even told us why the Chinese love the mermaid so much . “…because she is half porn half sushi”. 
We then visited the important and impressive buildings throughout the city, but I just gonna go there again when it is warm and take lots of pictures, because most of the sights are really beautiful. Furthermore we went trough all the parts of Copenhagen named after the bridges like Norrebro, Vesterbro…We even saw Christiania, which is a social experiment with self-government and a democracy based on dialogue replacing majority voting. Christiania was started in an abandoned army baracks in Copenhagen in 1971. The current government is not particularly sympathetic with the aims and achievements of Christiania, since soft drugs have been part of the experience.- but still I think it is really worth visiting this place, you just need to respect there rules, like not taking pictures but then it is no big problem to go into there.
On Wednesday I had my first lessons in University. It is really much more to do than at home in the university. I mean perhabs not that much more to do, but to do it regularly. Which is actually quite good. But the professors get payed by the number of people who pass the exam so there are like 4 test in the middle of the term, to keep everybody updated with the learning matter, so everybody is for sure passing the exam. So there is a little pressure to really keep repeating the lectures.
I already met soooo many people here. Dutch, Italiens, French, Greeks, Canadians, Australians, Brazilians, Germans, Austrians and people from Singapur. Mainly on the Insomnia Parties going on the whole week . And I actually also happen to meet Danes,which is great, because mostly exchange students meet other exchange students.
greatings!!!!
Michaela
the little mermaid
that’s what is left over from
the climate conference
view out of my window- so I see a very
friendly face every morning XD
Sophie and Emma the dutch girls
I defenitely learned something today. Watch out for thieves!!
We (means the two dutch girls, one Australian guy and me) we were sitting in a café, talking, drinking coffee and didn’t realized that somebody took the purse from one dutch girl from under her seat. We then searched the whole café for the handbag but we finally ended up at the police station filling up a record. Luckily her wallet was on the table and didn’t get stolen, so they won’t actually have that much of stealing that particular handbag, but still it takes a lot of time to get a new passport and whatever…So I learned a lesson today..always watch your things.
so then..wish you all a good night XD
Hugs from Kobenhavn
I already love the city, and the people, despite the snow and the coldest and hardest winter Denmark has had in the last 20 years. The people here are sooo friendly, you can get anything from them if you need it. Like I had to find out about a course, and the ones who didn’t know about the course, knew someone who could eventually know it or someone they can ask and just helped me around with patience and pleasure. GREAT!!!
I am right now just exploring the city, trying to get all the official stuff done (like signing up for classes and exams—you have to do that at the beginning of the semester—, getting a residence permission and a Danish CPR number) and do a lot of walking around. On Wednesday I got a bike, which makes me feel even more at home, because as a Dane you just have to have a bike. There are a lot of Erasmus students around, and I met two very nice dutch girls on the second day here, with whom I spend my time in the last days…drinking a lot of coffee and tea.
The apartment I live in is great. It’s about 15m2 big, I have an own bathroom and it is really close to the city and to the biocenter, which will make me be late for every lecture, because I live so close . The landlady, Pernille, is really great, very kind and she showed me around city yesterday, pointing out her favorite places all around the center. It’s a good way to get to know the city from the view of a “real” Dane.
In the evening I went to a party at the Department of Science. Actually all the Erasmus and other exchange students went there, after the information meeting we had in the afternoon, but I was the only one staying for a longer time. So I finally talked with Danish students as well and already got an invitation to a party next week…so yeah!! There English is perfect, with a really sweet accent, I feel especially dull with my English next to them, and really I went home quite early from the party, early for me, because I could no longer get any of the English, because it makes me really tired thinking English all the time and in every situation…but it’s great fun anyway …Eventually I get to hear a lot of the “Where are you from?” question, but I have to admit it is great finding out from where everybody is and eventually it is just a way to start talking to someone.
p.s.: They sell yoghurt in cartons that look like the milk Tetra Packs at home …the butter is salted and everybody is running around with the yellow “Netto” shopping bag, because this is the cheapest supermarket (it is still more expensive than at home )
This is an attempt to start a blog about my semester in Copenhagen. I am right now trying to make myself familiar with all the functions of this university blog so that I can start to write when I arrive in Copenhagen
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