Little things

As I'm getting used to all things Danish I find myself less and less surprised by the small things but thinking back today there are a lot of small things that threw me off a bit in the beginning. Here is a small list.

1. Light switches are typically small square buttons and flip the opposite direction. ie. down is on.
2. When people go grocery shopping you only shop for a day or two, not the whole week. For this reason you don't see many shopping carts.
3. Because there are no shopping carts homeless people can't keep their stuff in them as is the fashion in nyc. Instead they use handtrucks or fashion rickshaw type carriages. (Also I've only seen like 10 homeless people, all in better shape than most in ny though equally crazy).
4. In money, commas and decimals are the opposite of the US. 3,000.00 is written as 3.000,00
5. Sometimes you see something for like 49,99. I'm not sure but I think this is an impossible price to make with Danish currency. The cents are called øre and I think they are only in denominations of ,25.
6. No fatties. Sure there are some heavier people but it's really pretty rare to see someone I'd call obese. In my nyc experience I'd say maybe a quarter of people on my train everyday were visibly overweight.
7. Bikes bikes bikes. They are everywhere. This is pretty obvious but when I first came here I really wasn't prepared for how much people ride. Also I've learned that people are just as much impatient assholes on bikes as they are in cars.
8. History. Århus has got some! Again, obvious but unexpected when I first arrived. The office building I work in for example is from the 1600s, over 100 years older than America, additionally it's in great shape. Things are extremely well cared for here.
9. At grocery stores the cashiers sit down and they have a panel in front of them that lifts up which is where the money is kept, not in the register.

It would have been nice to have an even 10 but I can't think of one more right now. Maybe ten could be that I'm surprised how much it feels like home. I've been here a bit over 3 months now but I feel extremely comfortable and it genuinely feels like a lot longer. The city is smallish and in a way reminds me of the city where I went to school. It's got the same sort of charm and while Århus is a bit larger it affords the same sense of familiarity.

Also, I started Danish lessons and it's great! Having been mostly programming for the past 2 years I think has restructured the way I process information and I think my mindset is now a lot more compatible to learning languages.

vi ses!

Hallow Helloween

Halloween post! We had Halloween in November because, we did. Everyone that showed up was in costume, it was fantastic! Though they don't really celebrate Halloween like we do in the states I felt right at home at our party. On the real Halloween we actually got some trick-or-treaters which was really strange.

Anyway, this post needs less words.







My photos always look terrible when I upload them. I blame flickr, or compression algorithms or something.

Stuff you don't care about

My camera ran out of batteries and I'm sort of scared to try to charge it because that last thing I used my adapter on (alarm clock) got fried. So instead a story. Last Thursday I went to a meeting of the Danish Flash User Group (DFUG) to see Mike Chambers and Lee Brimelow speak. It turned out to be a really good time and I met some really cool people. Long story short one of the people I met was Ralph Hauwert, one of the developers of papervision 3d, a 3d engine for Flash CS3. Still with me? Anyway talking to him was nice for more reasons than that neither of us speak very good Danish (though he is much better than I am) and we conversed in english. It got me excited about AS3 and 3d in general which brings me around to the point of this post and the black box below. This is my first attempt at 3D in a code based environment. To use it, click once to shoot a bunch of balls up and then press spacebar to pause it and rotate it with the mouse. When in that mode pressing shift will resume the balls falling. It's not much and though I pieced the code together from other examples for the most part, I'm proud. Also it's only 4k. Sweet. Flash is great.



PS. wu-tang put out a new mixtape on the internet and it's awesome. download it!

I was talking to my co-workers about Colbert's attempt to make a fake run for president and apparently they had this happen a few years ago, except he won. A comedian named Jacob Haugaard ran for parliament and was actually elected to serve. When he was preparing one of his issues included that he hated wind blowing in your face while you were riding a bike, so he promised for wind to blow from your back whenever you rode. He also promised things like changing the weather and putting god back in churches. With a little wikipedia digging I cam across the election results here. Most shocking to me is that the voter turnout rate was 84.3 percent! The US had a turnout of about 55% in 2004 which was one of the highest turnouts in recent history. Also, he ran without a party, try that USA. Granted it was just a seat in parliament and not prime minister or anything, but still, look at that turnout. When elected he actually served his term as well. Though it seems he didn't do anything that remarkable while serving, it got people interested in politics which is very valuable and commendable I think. Our 2004 election had about a 5% bigger turnout than the 2000 election and the election that Haugaard ran also had a 5% turnout bump. If you'll remember the difference in getting out the vote in 2000 vs 2004 I think it was pretty significant. Here, the one guy running caused a similar bump (I realize as I'm saying this I have no idea if it's true, I wasn't here to experience if there was any other significant impetus to vote, but it helps my point if I assume there wasn't). I just read that Colbert got denied the chance to appear on the ballot by the South Caroline democrats which I think is too bad. Colbert has a tremendous following and I think it would really get a lot of people to the voting booths. I'm not sure if this buzz will wear off by next year but I hope and think that there will be a bigger turnout in next years election.

Quick Note

A week or two ago the first big project I worked on launched so I thought I'd put up a link. You probably won't get much out of it unless you are Danish and pregnant, but maybe you are.
http://www.vilkenvom.com

Helloween

Halloween is one of if not my favorite holidays. However, in Denmark they don't really celebrate it. Some people will perhaps dress their kids in costume for a cupcake party in school or something, but there is no going around to houses for candy. Even if they did, Danish candy is absolutely terrible. One in particular called a 'Super Fly' is one of the worst tasting things I've put in my mouth, and keep in mind, this is candy. It is basically a stick of salty, bitter, black licorice and when you bite into it, surprise! It's actually hollow and filled with salt! But I digress.

The guys at work felt bad for me and I arrived on Wednesday to a pumpkin on everyone's desk. I think almost no one had carved a pumpkin before so it was a good time and the results were pretty great!


Jeppe is throwing some pumpkin guts into the bucket while Anders says something to him. I don't remember what it was, but he was probably making fun of him as he is fond of doing.


More guts! You'll notice everything is blurry because I forgot to change my camera settings in my pumpkin carving jubilation. Also, I'm lazy and don't feel like editing.


Jo had an idea and immediately went to work finishing before anyone else. Hers looked fantastic as well. Mads and Anders still scooping.


The results! From left to right, Anders, Mads, Me, Jeppe, Jo. Note that I come out looking like the amateur with all the pumpkin space left over. I had planned to put a lot more stuff above but time and technical (my knife was too big!) issues left me with some 'whitespace'. I'm still pretty happy though and it was a blast. Afterwards we went out to eat at the traditional Danish Chinese buffet where I ate kangaroo (delicious). It was the best 150kr buffet I've ever had. Though there isn't much in the way of Halloween here we are still throwing a costume party for which I just started planning my outfit.


Can you guess what I'm going to be? If you can't I don't know why we are friends.

Botanical Garden

This weekend I walked to the botanical gardens near the university. Though I think it's called a botanical garden it is a far cry from the gardens near my old apartment in Brooklyn. This one was much more open, the space was very noticeable.

Where I entered you first come across a large bed of ordinary, but immaculately cared for flowers.


This space is very large and incredibly relaxing but the whole place was pretty vacant. Since it is in such close proximity I expected it to be teeming with people playing soccer or frisbee or anything. The only people there besides me were really couples pushing babies in gigantic strollers as seems to be the fashion here. By a small pond there was a family feeding the ducks. The bread is much heavier here, I bet the ducks fill up a lot quicker. And yes, I'm the creepy guy taking pictures of small girls in park.


I think this is part of the old Danish village that borders the gardens. It consists of houses that were disassembled, brought to this location, and then reassembled. I think of Boston being an old place, and for America, it is. However the houses here are over a thousand years old. Take that America. From what I can tell it's similar to a Sturbridge Village or Plymouth Plantation type of attraction if anyone gets that reference. This is not what windmills look like these days for sure. Wrong shape and certainly scale.


I never really realized how huge modern windmills were until I saw some pieces up close. This is a single blade, easily longer than an 18 wheeler.

I've got a lot of photos I need to catch up on, hopefully more shortly!