Weekend update

On Friday, the Danish students at the højskole concluded their "1920's America" theme week with an elaborate role-playing game from 6 p.m. to midnight.

The Americans were not invited.

Instead, I went to a party at KUA (University of Copenhagen). One of my classes is open to KUA students as well, so we have a teaching assistant named Lisbeth who comes in and tells us what's going on at KUA because, our teacher says, "I'm not going to sit through another meeting trying to figure out why you people come here for months and never meet a Dane." It's funny, but he's right; a lot of students live with other Americans (or Russians or Chinese students). The people who get the most contact with Danes are the ones living in the højskole or in host families.

At any rate, the party was in honor of Fastelavn. It's similar to our Halloween in that children dress up and go door-to-door collecting candy and coins. It used to be a period of fasting, but now is a holiday for celebration. So the Danish students threw a costume party. It was odd because it was actually in a campus building. And there was a bar there and several varieties of alcohol. Back home, student groups have parties all the time in the Stamp Student Union or wherever, but there's never alcohol present.

It's also harder in the US, I think, to pull off a theme party. It was a costume party and surprisingly, almost everyone was in costume. The few Americans who came weren't because we had to pack for four months, so clearly we had to pick and choose what to bring and costumes didn't make the cut. There were definitely Danes who didn't dress up, either, though, so we didn't look too out of place.

The party was a lot of fun, Lisbeth introduced me to some of the Danish students. My friend Elisabeth, who is actually a KUA student, showed up and I introduced her to some of my American friends. At around 11:30, I had to head out. It's unfortunate that I live so far away because I can't stay out past the bus schedules. As it turned out, I missed the last bus, which was apparently at 12:15 and not 12:39. I should've stayed out longer, because then I would've been right on time for the night bus at 1:08, but it was cold and rainy so I took a cab instead.

On Saturday, the Danes started leaving. Their semester ended and eight of them were not continuing on at the Grundtvigs. Tomorrow, 30 new students are coming in and this semester will end in May, about the time that we're leaving.

Today, I took my first trip to a movie theater. A bunch of the Danes wanted to go see "Juno," so I went with them. I learned that movie theaters have assigned seating. Every ticket has a row and seat number on it. I've never seen that in the US, which surprised Louise. It was also interesting to see Danish subtitles. My Danish isn't good by any stretch of the imagination, but you can tell sometimes when the subtitles are a lot shorter or aren't quite the same as what it actually says.