Christmas Markets

God Jul!  There are Christmas markets popping up in the city and I'm making it a priority to really embed myself in the Danish culture by exploring each and every one.  The first one was on the other side of the Frederiksberg Gardens behind my building.  I passed the elephants on my way.  Their enclosure was designed by Norman Foster, a rather famous architect.  The Danes are pretty proud of it.

 The Frederiksberg Christmas market had some really lovely handmade items, like these baskets.

And some Christmas ornaments for the tree, in every color.  I've seen a lot of black ornaments in shops along with fuscia, lime green, blues, and yellows.

 There were some booths selling old ornaments and decorative items.  We'll call them vintage.

 Greenery was everywhere.  Danes like their wreaths and garlands real, I haven't seen any fake trees or garlands anywhere.  See those tiny trees in the pots behind the wreaths?  They're everywhere, I have yet to see a tree larger than 2 feet anywhere.  I bought a tiny tree for my window sill.

 Next up was the market at Tivoli Gardens.  The Danes are also pretty proud of Tivoli.  It opened in 1843 and is the second oldest amusement park in the world.  Its kind of like Disney land, but on a much smaller scale.  An entrance ticket gets you in the door and lets you see any performers in the public spaces, play the games in the arcade areas, and gets you into the many restaurants inside.  It does not, however, let you ride the rides.  That's a separate ticket.  Its beautifully decorated for the holidays.

 And there are strolling performers.

 And live reindeer in front of the Chinese pagoda.  They're very multicultural.

 This building was pretty impressive.  I didn't have time to wander inside, so I can't say what's in there.

 Tivoli's Christmas theme this year was Russia, so they imported Ded Moroz, or Grandpa Frost.

 They also had a small version of St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow.

 I also explored a Christmas market at the Swedish church which had lots of herring-themed items and many booths selling more "vintage" items.  They also had homemade candy and hand-knitted items.

 The last market I explored was in Nyhavn, an area downtown with what must be the most photographed row of houses in Denmark.

 The booths in Nyhavn were, unfortunately, not all the interesting.  Some goodies to eat, some jackets and hats from Norway, some Christmas-themed trinkets from China, and this:

These are garlic graters.  They also grate chocolate, parmesan, and a whole host of other foods which you would find out if you stopped to listen to their spiel.  Mom and I run into the Garlic Grater Girl at several craft fairs.  She always insists she hand-makes the ceramic dishes herself.  I guess she's exporting them to Denmark now?

There are a few markets that don't open until December, so I am hopeful a few of them will be better than these.  The one in Christiania should be interesting even if there's nothing to buy.  Christiania is the "free" area of Copenhagen where they don't recognize the Danish government.  Since the 1970s they have made their own laws and the government looks the other way.  Pot is their biggest export.  Like I said, their crafts should be...interesting.

What color is your brain?

For our Leadership class, we each got the opportunity to take the HBDI "Whole Brain Analysis" test.  Its along the same lines as a Meyers-Briggs personality test or a Predictive Index test.  Its the latest testing fad.  The goal is to find out how your brain works, which will tell you what work-style preferences you have, which, through extrapolation, tells you what kind of employee or manager you'll be.

HBDI uses a 4-color system

Engineers tend to be blue, teachers red, accountants are green and psychologists yellow.  Roughly.

My issues with this type of testing are two-fold.  

1) I could take this test every month for a year and get a different result every single time.  The responses you choose depend entirely upon your mood, your most recent experiences, and what else you have on your mind.  This is not science, this is at best an educated guess about how you might behave at a single moment in time, a snapshot.  As such I believe it has very limited use as a predictor of future behavior.  

2) It boxes people in.  Our results were handed out in class and we spent 10 minutes reading through and chatting with our neighbors.  I heard so many people say "I'm blue!" or "I'm green and red!".  As soon as we apply these color labels, it narrows our view of how we think a person does or should behave.  If someone scores high in blue, does that mean they'll make a bad teacher?  Its a dangerous tool when applied too liberally.  Its best used as a rough guide for what a person might prefer as a work style or from a job.  

What color am I?  I know you're dying to know.  I fully expected to be blue.  I spent, oh, 7-odd years as a scientist.  I enjoy working through problems analytically and like to think that I react rationally under stress.  What did my test say?  That I was mostly red, then equally yellow and green, but very little blue.  But when stressed, I become very blue and not a lot of any other color.  Yes, I fully realize that because the test didn't give me the results I expected that I may be slightly biased, more willing to call the test into question.  Because clearly the results were wrong.  Right?  I've had a lot of time to mull over my results and read a little more about the colors and the test itself.  I'm now willing to admit that there may be some small, tiny, minuscule kernel of truth in the results somewhere.  Why else would I have hated lab work so much and chosen to run off and join the Red Cross?  All this self reflection made me realize that I had actually put myself in a box labeled "scientist", a box much too small to fit a softer, more intuitive red side.  I need to be more open to exploring all my colors.  So I guess the test was good for something after all.

CPH City Life

Its hard to describe the feel of Copenhagen.  New York is gritty and strung out on caffeine.  San Francisco is friendly and tech savvy.  Paris is dirty yet chic.  Shanghai is modern, young, and exotic.  Reykjavik is just quirky.  Copenhagen is...cozy?  Warm?  Laid-back?  Its hard to pin down.  Maybe the best word is no-nonsense.  People here don't fuss over anything.  Long line?  No worries, Copenhageners are patient.  Sleeting out?  Just ignore it, we're on our bikes, there's not much we can do about it.  Traffic jams and honking horns?  Non-existent.

I've only been here a short two months, but it definitely feels like home.  I love having everything so close!  The supermarket?  2 blocks down.  And I know where everything is.  Looking for the pasta sauce?  Its over by the rice.  No, I don't know why its not next to the pasta.  The movie theater is 2 blocks up (but I know a shortcut).  The park is out my back door.  My doctor is a half a block down and Charlotte, the receptionist, teaches me a new Danish word every time I visit.  The Taco Shop (Mexican food is a must-have in any city I inhabit) is three blocks over.  My favorite bar?  I've got a couple, are you looking for a local dive or swanky and hip?  The best cafe?  The Phoenix, its across the park, but they only serve cocktails after 9.  Ask for Jakob. :)

The one thing that took the longest to adjust to was the noise.  Having lived in the country, I was used to silence with maybe the occasional coyote or turkey.  Down the street from my little apartment is the town hall and its got a bell tower.  The bells ring every hour and every half hour, though sometimes they start a couple minutes early.  Its quirky, but hey, that's Copenhagen.  The ambulances and police cars have those weird European sirens that sound more like broken Fisher Price toys than real sirens.  Luckily I don't hear those more than a couple times a week.  I'm also far enough up that I don't get much street noise.  Though, as I said, there aren't any honking horns and I've heard exactly one booming stereo in 10 weeks.  Its almost peaceful.  You know, for a city.  I can see why it consistently ranks as one of the top cities in the world for quality of life and happy residents.

Tycho Brahe's nose and the Roundtower

Disclaimer:  This post does not contain a whole lot of pretty pictures and is filled with Sciency stuff.  Consider yourself warned.

One of the things about Copenhagen that I think sets it apart from other cities I've visited is the science history.  Two qualifiers here: 1) I've never lived outside the US, though I have seen a few other cities so my data set isn't all that large and 2) I'm a big science geek, so I may seek it out more than the average tourist.

A little background to begin...Tycho Brahe was a Danish nobleman who made some astronomical discoveries in the 1500s.  Literally astronomical, as in new stars and calculations that would allow Johannes Kepler to form the basis for the laws of planetary motion.  Smart guy.  Except he got into a disagreement with a cousin over the validity of a mathematical formula.  Neither could convince the other he was right, so they agreed to a sword duel.  Really.  Check Wikipedia.  Tycho lost the bridge of his nose in the duel and forever after wore a metal plate in its place.  Sometimes silver, sometimes gold, perhaps even copper (it was a heck of a lot lighter).  This has absolutely nothing to do with the building I visited last weekend, I'm just a big Brahe fan.

Anyway, Tycho had become a bit of a celebrity in the Astronomy field and King Frederick II wanted to keep him in Denmark, so the king gifted Tycho with an island and the funds to build his own observatory, which he built and ran as an institute for several years.  I wonder if I can visit the island...mental note for future explorations.  Anyway, King Frederick died and his 11-year-old son Christian became king in 1588.  Tycho and the new king did not get along and eventually the astronomer moved to Prague and became the Royal Astronomer under Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II.  Did you know there were not one but two Holy Roman Emperors named Rudolph?  

When Tycho left Denmark, Christian Longomontanus became the new Royal Astronomer of Denmark.  I don't think he made any particularly important contributions to his field because I had to check the spelling on his last name three times.  But he was influential with the new king and convinced King Christian IV to build a new observatory for the University of Copenhagen.  At the time, the University was also looking to build a library and a church.  Danes being efficient men, they combined them all into one building.  There are several dozen snarky comments running around in my head about one building devoted to both science and God, but I'll be nice and keep them to myself.  What resulted was the Rundetårn, which translates as the Round Tower.  Creative, I know.  

The observatory is the tall round tower on the left, the church is the main part of the building on the right, and the library was in the church attic.  One problem with this set-up was that they had to get lots and lots of heavy books and observatory equipment up to the top of this building.  Their solution?  Eliminate the stairs.

The observatory tower has seven and a half turns from bottom to top and its one giant ramp so they could pull the books up with a horse and cart.  The builders of the W.E.B. Du Bois libarary could have learned a thing or two from these guys.

In 1726, Czar Peter the Great ascended the tower on horseback to look at the stars.  Unfortunately its no longer an official observatory, though they do hold amateur stargazer get-togethers up there.  They've had several bicycle races inside the tower and in 1989 Thomas Olsen set a world record when he rode a unicycle up and down the tower in 1 minute, 48.7 seconds.  But the best thing about the tower are the views from the top.  They're out of this world.  You can see the tiny windmills in the sound to the left of the 4 smoke stacks and waaaay off in the distance is Sweden.  (hint: if you click on the pictures, they get bigger)

City Afternoon

I took the afternoon and saw more of the city center today.  I plugged a destination into my phone and stuck the headphones in to listen to the turn-by-turn directions, but a short way into my bike ride I realized the navigator was taking me the boring way.  So I took a few turns that weren't in the plans and wound up at Rosenborg Castle.

 Built beginning in 1606, completed in 1624 under King Christian IV.  It was only used as a royal residence
until 1704 and only twice after that due to a fire and an invasion.  To the left of the castle, out of the picture above, are the garrisons for the Royal Life Guards, which provide a permanent guard at Amalienborg Palace, the main royal residence.  Here they are in the process of the changing of the guard.  They leave Rosenborg Castle and march several blocks to Amalienborg Palace.

                                      
 I love the cute backpacks they wear.  I wonder what's inside.

 Next stop was a flower market

 With roses of every color.

And then I wandered around taking pictures of buildings downtown.  I believe this is one of the buildings of the University of Copenhagen, which was founded in 1479.

My last stop was the Round Tower, one of the tallest buildings in Copenhagen.  Its an interesting building and deserves it own post.

Term 1

The last two weeks I've spent almost exclusively in my apartment or in the library reading, writing, and studying, but the sun is shining again because the first term is complete!  5 more to go.  I wrote 30 pages for 4 different papers and took one 3-hour exam that wasn't nearly long enough for all I wanted to write.  I know I've been out of school for, oh, 10 years or so, but I wonder if things have changed drastically in the states, because our exam here wasn't what I was expecting.  It was taken at a computer terminal.  I took both the GMAT and the GRE at computer terminals, but this was different.  We were handed paper copies of the test questions, but we were expected to write our answers a Word file, which got saved to the hard drive.  We were allowed to perform calculations in Excel and save that file as well.  When we were done, we printed out two copies of each, put them in separate envelopes, and sealed and signed them.  I can't remember the last time I wrote 7 pages in 3 hours.  Have I mentioned that the standard paper here isn't 8.5 x 11?  Its something called A4, which is 8.25 x 11.75.  It means more words per page.

I think I did alright, I won't know for a few weeks.  I certainly wouldn't want to be tasked with grading 43 10-page papers or 43 7-page accounting exams.  I'm confident I passed, at least on the Danish scale, which runs from 12 to -3.  An A is equivalent to an 11 or 12, a B is an 8, 9, or 10, a C is 5-7, a D is 1-4, and failing is 0 to -3.  I was wondering aloud how there could be different degrees of failing when a classmate explained that in Germany you can receive a few -1s or -2s, on exams and still work hard and pass the course if you pass other exams.  But if you get a single -3, you've failed the class.  I think I like the alphabet system better.

What did I do to celebrate?  I caught a movie.  Yes, it was in English, but it had Danish subtitles.  Skyfall opened here a week ago and I've been dying to see it.  It was pretty fantastic.  I paid 85 DKK for the ticket, which is the equivalent to $15.50 for a matinee.  In Hadley I think I was paying $8 or $9?  It gets pricier for evening shows.  Popcorn starts at $5 for a small and goes up to $10 for a large, so that isn't too different from home.  There's almost no limit on what I'd pay to see Daniel Craig as Bond, though.  Oh, and they have assigned seats in Danish movie theaters.  I could have bought tickets online and chosen my seats if I'd wanted to.  Even buying them in person, the clerk asked me where I wanted to sit.  Jury is still out on whether its a better system.  More research is needed...