Jane's News from Denmark

Last updated Monday 15 October 2001, 10:45 + 1:00 GMT

8 August 2001:
Caltech is awesome. In addition to providing a great education in Pasadena, they provide opportunities to escape, as well! This is the first time that we have an exchange program with the University of Copenhagen, and I'm one of the guinea pigs! I arrived in Denmark a week ago, on 1 August, and am thoroughly enjoying it. The sun was shining then, so I had a chance to see some of the city: the changing of the queen's Royal Life Guard, the Little Mermaid, etc, etc. This past weekend, my aunt, Heidi, visited me from Norway, so we did some more "super-touring". On Monday I started taking an intensive Danish language course at the university, which is good - I feel like a total jerk when I have to ask people to talk my language to me, so it's good to be learning to communicate in theirs instead. Today's weather is wet: very, very wet. So I think I'll stay inside and maybe bake bread after class. I'll probably add more to this later.

11 September 2001:
This has already turned into a piece of irrefutable evidence that I'm a flake. My intensive Danish class is over, real classes have started. It hardly feels like it, though - they're orders of magnitude easier than classes at Caltech, even when the same textbook is used! I'm doing Cosmology, Simple Climate Models and Geodynamics, in addition to Danish Culture and Danish Language. It takes me 40 minutes in the morning to get to class, because the science buildings are on the other side of Copenhagen from where I live, but I look at it as a chance to get really fit (I ride my bike). I could, theoretically, take the bus, and probably will when the weather is really miserable, but for now I've discovered that it gives me a thrill to ride my bike in the rain and get completely soaked. Maybe it'll get old, but I don't know - I think I spent too much of my childhood in dry places for it to be annoying when wetness comes out of the sky. I'm starting to kind of get a hang of the language, too - I've really been working at it. Often in conversation, I can glean a faint idea of what people are talking about before they change the subject. This is satisfying. I'm often able to communicate in Danish for over a minute before I run out of vocabulary and have to switch into English, but I've found that people here don't usually mind practicing their English. In all, I'm really settling in here and, although I miss people back in the USA like crazy, I like it here a lot.

28 September 2001: I'm TOTALLY getting the hang of speaking Danish. It's really awesome. On Tuesday I went to the youth group at my church, and followed a healthy chunk of what the speaker had to say and a good 60% of what people were chatting about during small group time (I understood more often than I was confused!). I was able to say much of the Lord's Prayer in Danish (I've been memorizing it) and then <drumroll please> I talked to someone for almost 15 minutes before we had to switch into English! And that only when she asked about differences between church services in Denmark and America. The differences aren't too huge, but then I've been to such a variety of churches all over the world I probably don't find very much to be really weird. It's the first time I've gone to a Lutheran (or any liturgical) church, but to me it's the people who really make the church and the common ground (God loved the world so much He sent Jesus to die on our behalf, He rose again and we live for Him here and with Him forever) ensures a good deal of continuity. I've never seen the point of getting bogged down in details, it seems ludicrous to say, "I'm not going to fellowship with you because you believe in predestination" or something. As long as the fundamentals are there, I feel strongly that we should be "one flesh", whatever language we speak or traditions we follow, and that's something I'm experiencing again (and really enjoying) here in Denmark. A few days after the terror attacks one of the guys from the youth group left me flowers and a note expressing his condolances over America's loss, hoping I was okay being so far from home. The Danish response has been a real encouragement to me; even though it's so far away, they really care. It kinda freaks me out that the last time I put an update on this page, the terror attacks were in progress and I didn't know it - I found out about 20 minutes after and haven't looked at this page since. One of the other women living on my floor had been looking for me, and once she found me she let me watch her TV, made me tea, and translated what the announcers were saying (she just had Danish TV, not CNN). To some extent, it's made me feel like I want to be American. When King Hussein of Jordan died, I wished I were Jordanian so I could feel that it was legitimate for me to mourn his death, and it's the same feeling now, only more so - my parents and brother all live in the USA, the vast majority of my friends are Americans or live in America, I'm on an exchange program from an American university, there are so many links between me and America, it feels like my lack of citizenship is only a technicality. I have family in South Africa, but the same goes for Norway, I don't have many friends in South Africa, the last time I studied in South Africa I was 13, I've lived more years in America than in South Africa, my education has been vastly more under the American system than the South African. This whole "global nomad" thing... It's all confusing. But I'm really privileged to have had all the chances to learn about other people from inside their cultures, and I'm convinced I'm getting Danish so well in part because I've grown up around all sorts of languages. I think it's worth the confusion.

Monday, 15 October 2001 - I'm in Norway now, visiting my mom's side of the family. It's a bit odd, after a couple of months in a completely foreign country, to discover that just a car-plus-train ride away is a place I've known all my life, and although all the cousins are a lot bigger (it's been five years), almost everything else is the same. Last week, the climate modelling class I'm in had a trip to Sweden, to a tiny island in the Gullmarn fjord - uninhabited except for a research station with Internet access! Maria (friend from Caltech) and I decided that if this is what geophysics or planetary science is all about, we've definitely chosen the right majors. "Research" where you dive into icy cold water for long enough to see bioluminescent bacteria and run to the sauna where, at some point, someone pours beer on the coals, and where one of the members of your group was trained as a baker and you get fresh bread every morning - I like this idea! In any case, I'm enjoying my semester break, and had better get back to doing nothing!