Photos from down town CPH

The metro underground in Copenhagen is at times a bit of a touchy issue. While Danes love public transportation, building it can bring some downsides and placement of stations is always a debate.

A historical church in down town Copenhagen. The Church of Our Lady, or Vores Fru. Kirke, is pretty impressive. It is like a temple with the focused function of providing places to sit while worshiping God. The stark contrasts of colors is done in Gimp, but the color behind the alter is true to the church's intent; they did provide the lighting, I only adjusted the saturation.

A pretty impressive plaza. This place is something like a gathering point for protests, artists and shoppers alike. Street merchants will peddle their goods here and you can sometimes find an interesting bit public art.

I have taken at least a few dozen photos of this theater. It is the movement of the car, the people walking and the bike which point out how close everything is packed together. You enter the theater in the archway. On either side are apartments, stores and a sushi restaurant.

To have no room

What is it like to feel like society is pressuring you from all sides? You wont know unless you are there for something more important than the pressure. If you have no reason to stick around, then you likely will leave and find a place where you can live a life and make ends meet. I can't.

Sailing in Denmark

Sailing is big in Denmark. It is difficult to overstate that when comparing Denmark to countries such as the United States, any South American or African country or even the U.K. There are about 406 islands according to Wikipedia and economic factors have lead to only 70 of them remaining populated in recent decades. Add onto those 70 the Faroe Islands and Greenland and you start forming a picture of a maritime culture. That culture has historic roots that rivaled the U.K. during its greatest periods.

While I was crashing with my mother's cousin, who I will refer to, incorrectly, as my uncle from now on, I sailed with him on several occasions and became repeatedly sea sick. But, I must admit to a certain attraction with sailing. The freedom. The peace. How cool it is to say you have your own yacht.

To Contact Old Friends

 I am not the kind of person who gushes over friends and keeps a long list of contacts I write to every single day. I have people I keep close to myself, who I see often enough. I guess I should be the kind of person who puts down roots and doesn't move around a whole lot, but I am the person who moves, a lot.

I suppose one of the joys of loosing contact is regaining contact after many years. I have been doing exactly this over the years. I contact friends I went to school with or trained with and have a good time chatting about what we have been doing. Some people I am happy to hear have not moved on because they were.... less than the best of friends. I am glad to hear others do well or at least make ends meet because they changed who they are. Some I am happy to hear from in general because they were and still are good people.

IPC wasn't all bad if you had that impression from an earlier post. While I may have been push out to the corners, it is a highly social school and you do end up making a lot of good friends and connections. The school is about the informal exchange of culture and learning through communication between the students in equal parts to communication from teacher to student. It is there students challenge their assumptions about other societies, start a professional career in NGOs or an in depth political analysis to bring back home. While it may sound like classes would have titles such as 'Cross Cultural Communication', 'African-European Political Relations', 'Political Organization Theory' along with the actual classes 'NGO Work I and II', 'Communication' and 'Media and the Middle East', there were equal parts Yoga, Drama and Arts. These were forums for communication between students. Classes where we expressed thoughts outside of the formal academic subjects we studied and listened, carefully, to the thoughts of others.

If you ever have the chance, please stop by www.IPC.dk and think about attending for a semester or two.

The first year in Denmark

In my first year in Denmark, I started at a school for a spring course in Globalization and Communication. I studied at IPC and got my first taste of college.
The day I arrived I felt a bit like a fish out of water. I met people from places I have never been to before. Personalities I would not consider adopting myself. Characters that would in my eyes at the time come from books.
My most vivid memory of my first few hours there is one some might call me a racist for bringing up and rant I am fabricating. It is a memory none the less.
I sat at a coffee table in the commons and was speaking with a student from the Eastern Bloc, when a very bold and outgoing student from South Africa came by and introduced himself and promptly stood behind the girl at fondled her breast. This took me aback and I expected a very strong reaction from her, but to my surprise, she smiled, laughed and, well, that is where the memory tappers off for me. I suppose they arrived a day or two before me and became acquainted.

Over the next few weeks, I was introduced to people from around the globe and both rubbed some people the wrong way the got along, kinda, with others. I was far from popular; I overheard some talk poorly of me and I can tell you, to hear that kind of candid speech hurts deeply. I wonder if diplomacy has been affected by such episodes at high level talks. Perhaps even a little war or two.

While I did come out of my shell over those 20 weeks and looked back fondly on that school and my time there, truth is, while I did improve greatly, I wasn't truly welcomed or well received. If anything, I felt like I was pushed out to the corners and found it hard to be part of the group. My time at the school was more about learning that being especially social, except for one girl who I had three kids with over the years. What I got out of those 20 weeks is a certain awareness of what is happening around the world from the school's perspective and a weight loss of 15kg.

Maybe I'll go back and have a better experience the next time around.

Hard to find any time

New title. A Decade in Scandinavia.
I moved to the Faroe Islands in 2010. I have been here for a year now. I have been in the region for a decade come the new year.
What a difference a decade makes.

Here is a quick autobio of what I have been up to my entire life.

I grew up in an academic house. My dad worked at Argonne National Lab until Clinton's cuts. My mom was an internal medical student in Denmark. My dad had a Ph.D. from the Poly technical University, now DTU, in Quantum Physics.
Despite this, my home had real big problem. Mom and dad fought all the time. Dad drank. Mom was the do nothing, throw nothing out pack rat that never kept her word to me or even tried.
I didn't have much of a school education. My mom took me out of school in the fifth grade and didn't keep her promise to find me another school or buy the school books to teach me at home.
So from the middle of the fifth until I was 19 I was sitting at home in front of the computer. Then I moved to Denmark and was seated with learning a new language and catching up in school. By 2008, I had been to an international college studying communication and globalization, an agricultural school, a language school and I took a normal HF degree. I have worked as a farm hand, farmer, fruit picker, warehouse worker, logistician, forklift operator, retirement home orderly, postal worker, delivery man, builder, bartender and now as a fisherman. I met a girl when I first moved here and I have three kids today. I am not even 30 years old and I have done more than most over their entire lives, in terms of diversity.
So where do I go from here. I hope to leave the Faroe Islands and study Laboratory science in Denmark and follow through on a physics degree at Københavns University.
But enough on the future for now.
I think I will stay on the past, at least for a little while.

Please leave a few comments. I always enjoy them.