The cursed holiday

New Years Eve is a cursed holiday for me. Every year something always happens to make it a train wreck of a night. What better way to welcome a new year? Not that I want to get into it, but in the past couple of years there was the time we thought my friend Justin was dead, the time I accidentally mixed prescription medicine with alcohol (sidenote, turns out I'm deathly allergic to amoxicillin), and then the fist fight between my two good friends; just so you know what we're dealing with. My friends and I have learned to look back at these and laugh (oh Justin, remember that time we thought you were dead? har har har), but I don't think I'll be laughing about this one for a long time. (The rest of the entry is me whining, so feel free to stop reading here).



The story is a simple one though. My family is nice enough I suppose, but being around each other for more than a few hours at a time begins to cause a lot of friction. Someone decided we had to go down to the Champs Elysees (though later there would be much arguing about whose stupid idea is had been with nobody eager to take credit). We sensibly decided that we would be able to make it across Paris in 15 minutes on New Years Eve and get over there with plenty of time to admire the Arc De Triomphe before the corks popped. During the four days we were there we typically spent as much time planning our route as actually in transit, however, this being our first night we argued 20 minutes prior to setting off and then the whole time on the train. It quickly became apparent that we weren't going to make it, and decided we didn't want to spend new years on the subway so we jumped out at the nearest stop and tried to follow the crowds hoping it would lead to some festivities. So now here we are, Paris, the city of love and fine wine, except we are under a bridge in the middle of nowhere because it started raining. We rung in 2008 much like we would spend the rest of our trip, arguing over a map. We looked for the train station we'd just come out of but couldn't find it again. Also being unable to locate a cab we began our long walk home shooting mental daggers at anyone smiling.

God Jul!

It's Christmastime in Denmark and I was lucky enough to spend it with Jeppe and his family. I don't know when I've felt more welcome, especially at the holidays.


Note the real candles on the tree. I guess I've always thought of this as pretty dangerous but I was assured at the most there has just been a little smoke and never any real fires. Sweet! Anyway safety is probably the last thing you're thinking about while dancing around the tree and singing songs.


The food was also pretty amazing. Traditional Danish cooking is sort of weird just in that it's pretty straight forward, but also pretty delicious. It almost seems equal parts taste and tradition. Kind of like drinking schnapps at julefrokost, it's gross, but you keep doing it anyways. Here is the classic mother and daughter generational cooking method.


This method is called "drink until it tastes good".


And here's what's cooking! Just look at that pan full of sugar. That's what I call cooking.


Now the meal winds down with lots of wine. And it's almost time for...


Rice pudding! Now there is a tradition in which somewhere in the giant serving bowl of rice pudding (which really was quite large) there is hidden a whole almond. If you end up with this almond, then you get a prize, so it is in your best interest to eat as much pudding as you possibly can so as to increase your odds. Now the tricky part, if you get the almond the idea is to hide it as long as possible so that everyone else gets sick trying to eat all the rest of the pudding too fast. Just to you know, add a little injury to insult.


And this is what it looks like when you win. I've played this game twice now, and have won both times. I figure the odds of this are around 1 in 64 so I pretty much rule. The first time I won I didn't know the hiding the almond thing but this time I made so to hold on to it as long as I could, but trying to hide an almond under your tongue is only comfortable for so long.


After dinner it was time for a visit from santa! It was met with joy and a little confusion, but in the end it works out for everyone.






Glædelig jul!

Thanksgiving

Well its a bit late so now I'm playing catch up. There is of course no thanksgiving in Denmark so this was just a little something to remind me of home. Happy thanksgiving!

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.