Day 2: Esrum Abbey & the Globe

Hi bloggies, I'm back with my pretzels and nutella :)

Not to brag, but today was pretty awesome. I'll try to recount from the very beginning before I forget, because as most of you know, I am great at forgetting things. Soo all the DIS people in my kollegium were supposed to meet down in the 1st floor lobby and my roommate had slept through her alarm this morning so when I woke her up we were already running late. :( By the time we got downstairs we were already like 6 minutes late and I didn't want to get left behind because we were going to catch the metro (the subway thinger) together with our SRA (social & residential advisor) and meet at the DIS offices by 10 am and I didn't want to have to brave that on our own, buut luckily for us I guess three other guys from our group still hadn't shown up either...we ended up waiting for another 20 minutes for them to get their asses down, so all that worrying I did about being late was definitely for nothing. Maybe Danes don't care too much about being punctual? Anyways, so we got to our "opening ceremony" a little late where there were two speakers talking about how we should take advantage of our time in Denmark and a string quartet playing Mozart & some other dead man's music. That's mean to say...but I forgot the composers name, but I remember that he was born in 1863 and died in 1934.

Fun fact: there are five times as many pigs in Denmark as there are people.

Our guest speaker was talking a lot about that & how in Denmark they love their bacon, literally, so the pigs are bred to be larger in the area where they get the bacon meat from...that was a poorly written sentence but again too lazy to fix it. Anyway, he went on to say that the bacon and pork meat that we eat in the United States probably came from Denmark just like the meat in Japan. Its crazy how this small country can have enough pigs to practically feed to world pork and bacon!...That must mean there's a loottt of pig poop. mmm :) lol more about poop later.

After that speaker we were given an hour to hunt for food and then return to the DIS location where buses would be waiting to take us to Esrum Abbey as a continuation of our Denmark/DIS welcome. For that hour, seven of us got lost and turned around looking for "the Secret Kitchen" which was supposed to have good salads, sandwiches, and soups. mm mm goood. After wandering for over twenty minutes we decided that it would probably be best to give up looking for that place and just settle in somewhere nearby so that we would have time to make it back to the bus. Believe me, unlike our SRA, the buses don't wait for anyone. We ended up eating at this super cute cafe by this canal (?) or some sort of little watery stream and I ordered greek yoghurt with mueslie with an orange juice. Myy goodness. Freshly squeezed orange juice never tasted soooo good...and the yogurt was mindblowing itself. I'm not sure exactly what was in it but it was fantastic. These amazing tastes may partly be attributed to my very hungry disposition but it really was delicious.

Walking back to the buses, we passed by some weird posters...there was one with a naked woman above the waist but instead of a head she had a squid on her shoulders. It was kinda weird, maybe it was symbolic of something? I don't think I took any pictures of that yet, but I'll try to do that before I leave. Anyways so we made it to the bus and our group was the first to board! Me! On time!! Early even! lol crazy huh? Speaking of timing, supposedly Danes are never early nor late, they are always on time.

We drove for an hour along a freeway or I guess as close to a freeway as they have in Denmark and got to this old brick abbey. It was alright just looking at it from the outside. It was several floors high and had a play area with forreal old school props? There were those wooden stocks where people would have their necks and wrists locked in place as punishment or for public humiliation, my history's pretty shaky but there were two wooden horses, one horse that you could practice jousting on and another that was intended just for people to climb and sit on. I, of course, decided that I wanted to put my head and arms in the stock and that was definitely an experience. You really feel stuck in those things...and its pretty uncomfortable because you cant do anything while you're locked in there. You're stuck looking down at the ground and no fidgeting or repositioning yourself because it was just so restrictive. We also received a guided tour of the abbey where we learned the history of the building and such, we even saw the kinds of clothes and learned about the duties the different monks of the abbey were responsible for and there was even a skeleton of an old groundskeeper or monk laying out for people to see. After exploring the upper levels of the abbey we were brought outside for some beer tasting. Apparently the reason for this is because even the monks liked to drink ages which helped make consuming aclohol appropriate for abbey behavior.

-Esrum Abbey
-dead body, beer tasting, jousting, archery, "sword fighting" with a pro-knight, old school weight lifting, sheep pooo
-DIS "social"
-the Globe
-the Germans whooped the Aussies pretty good
-travelling on the Metro
-forgot to talk about my shower last night

Things still to do (in no particular order):
-get hit by a car, bus and bike
-trip and fall on the cobble stone walkways
-buy a new outlet adaptor so my appliances can stop buzzing everytime they're plugged in
-update this blog
-sleeeeeeep
-do homework earlier in the day

I guess that's it for now, sorry for the half entry!

from Copenhagen with love,
AY