szia budapest! igen, nem es koszonom!

choo choo! budapest! (if i didn't mention this before, i flew to prague but took the train from then on)

unfortunately, budapest was a major fail because my cs host wasn't exactly what i was expecting. marton was living on his own, but he had an ex-wife and two children, who were the most adorable things in the world. but unlike the other two hosts, he had my entire itinerary in budapest planned and he accompanied me for all of them. it was nice to not have to plan anything, but i couldn't really do anything that i wanted. so... budapest = fail.

i only had two days and the first, we did a bike tour (which was cool) of all the major sights in pest. on the second day, we ate breakfast at his ex-wife's (weird) and went to see the sights in buda. i think i got to see most of the major sights, but buda and pest each in one day was impossible. oh well, maybe another visit in the future. and so, i have very few pictures from budapest and if i do, it's mostly underground in caves because this guy had some obsession with caves. i practically saw all of buda underground through its caves.

hungary's currency... the forint

shoes on the danube memorial

the most beautiful mcdonald's interior i've ever seen

drinking wine flowing out from the underground caves







yea... comparably not many pictures from budapest.

so as you've all probably heard, this icelandic volcano (which no one can pronounce lol) is potentially ruining my vacation to rome... and possibly my return home. all i can do is wait...

after a couple of nights out on the town this semester, i've come to the conclusion that danes cannot dance. and they let girls in wearing sneakers. that is absolutely unheard of! but i guess it's ok because they're beautiful people... so unfair. and some of their dj's are god awful... how can you play the circle of life in the middle of the night??? how?!

friday was the danish queen's 70th birthday. it is practically a national holiday and the tradition is that everyone stands outside her palace and at noon, she comes out and waves to the people with the rest of the royal family. then she takes her carriage down to the city hall for a reception with the mayor. it was a dose of danish culture but quite uneventful: "there's the queen!" (wave danish flag voraciously) (queen passes by) (everyone disperses) probably a total time span of 5 minutes.

i have bad news. i don't think i'll be bringing any souvenirs. first, because i'm broke. second, because there's nothing really that is "danish" in the way that, say, clogs are dutch. so... sorry!

i am really looking forward to this summer! my major goal is to learn how to cook :)
so you are all welcome to be my taste testers (and i expect brutal honesty)
and as an update, i will be able to finish my last year in school, but i'll be living on one heck of a tight budget. that includes this summer as well. i guess i won't be tan this summer then :(

guten tag wien! ja, nein und danke schon!

next stop --> vienna!

in vienna, i stayed with jascha and nora. they were my favorite hosts the entire trip. jascha is studying to become a filmmaker and nora is a graphic designer. jascha is so creative and his imagination inspires me... he is fascinated with metro maps and the graphic design of urban city maps sooo he is creating his own city, called voranien, and he is building it up via maps. it. is. so. freakin. cool. he basically takes urban planning strategies of cities that he likes and puts them in his own city... like the grid of manhattan, vienna's ringstrasse, paris' boulevards... so. cool. and he created a metro map for his imaginary city :) anddd he also invited me to design something for his city... like a museum or philharmonic hall! i'm going to be a famous architect in his imaginary city lol. my big break... yay!

he was also hosting a cat named felix and it was the funniest cat i have ever seen. he likes to sleep in this tiny little box that barely fits him and he is the biggest attention whore ever! he meows 24/7 and he walks all over the keyboard so you can't type when you're on the computer because he wants you to play with him. and playing with him is quite fun... he loves chasing laser pointers and he gets really sneaky... he hides behind the corner and crouches down and starts prowling towards the laser :)

i couldn't help but notice that the pattern on vienna's metro seats look like pokeballs... hehe.




highlights:

all the impostors of famous composers who dress up in costume, haggle tourists and try to sell expensive tickets to concerts for classical music

johann strauss

toilet of modern art

the hundertwasserhaus!!! my favorite part of vienna :)
the magic of this building cannot be captured in a photograph... you must all just go there

the biggest easter egg sale i've ever seen

the most phallic storefront i've ever seen

cute graphics to indicate seating for disabled, elderly, pregnant or with children on the metro (male and female versions)

awesome church... exterior and interior

and the easter egg that jascha made me :)










so today, in light of the fact that it is carnival at cmu, i did absolutely no work and soaked up some sun with the danes at king's garden. it's so nice to be able to have some beers out in public... something the u.s. needs to adopt :)

the weather has been amazing in copenhagen the past couple of days, but i can feel myself coming down with a cold... boo!!!

i am getting really attached to my danish family and i don't know how i'm going to say goodbye...

ahoj praha! ano, ne a dekuji!

i'm back!!!
home sweet kobenhavn... i love thee :)

so my first stop was prague and i flew into their airport... except i had a 5 hour delay. wtf. but my cs [couchsurfing] host was so understanding! so instead of 10pm, i arrived in prague around 6am. i am never flying this airline ever again!

in prague i stayed with a guy named tomas. he is a 30-year-old banker and lives a little bit outside of prague but still close and easy to get to by public transport. he had a really nice place on his own and he had a hidden talent in playing the piano. here's the first couch i have ever surfed!

unfortunately he was quite busy so i explored prague on my own but i preferred it that way. but we went out to drink some czech beer and eat traditional czech food at night. prague is dirt cheap! and the beer flows like rivers... really. here is a restaurant that is completely lined with pipes from its brewery to each table where everyone pours their own beers... it's never-ending-beer... bottomless beer glasses!


so here are some highlights:

currency = czech crown

pretty metro stations

john lennon wall

babies on the tv tower

gehry's "dancing building"

bone church










so while traveling alone, i realized how lonely it really is to be alone and it made me reconsider my views on marriage. it might be nice to have someone in the end when you're all alone...

a lot of shit is going on at home and i will be returning to a completely new environment... i don't know what to expect.

on the other hand, i have about 1500 pictures so whoever's coming to my house to catch up, you guys may have to sleep over lol. woo slumber party!

so back to school but not loving it at all. i can't wait until i go back on vacation to rome :)
next week i'm taking a day trip to sweden (not stockholm, but malmo) since it's so close and i will post again each time for the other cities.

also on another note, i have a job for the summer! i won't be dirt poor after all! but the future of my last year in college is looking a little hazy right now... it may or may not happen...

red carpet affair

god, i'm so sorry everyone. i'm such a terrible blogger. i've been here a little over two months and i've only made 13 posts. i'm so pathetic. other people have such long, detailed posts everyday. i don't know how they do it. how could they find every painstakingly mundane detail of their life worthy of publicizing? hmm...

:( i only have 7 weeks left!!! i don't want to leave. EVER.

of course the most amazing weather in copenhagen so far falls on the day i have to prepare two papers, exam, and presentation. of course.

so i've been pretty busy this last week before spring break, but i am super excited to leave on my eurotrip tomorrow!!!

and then i also met some famous people :)

i saw rome's emperor, marcus aurelius :)
i didn't mean to choke him, it was just for scale purposes so you could see how massive his head was

anddd napoleon bonaparte...

anddd homer :)

and then the jesus room with jesus and his people...

and then i met jesus... he was so dramatically large. this is my view from below...

i was actually eye level with his feet... my finger for scale again :)

anddd pope pius vii...

and good ol' copernicus who told us that we revolve around the sun :)

and hercules! hercules! hercules!















so i am leaving for prague tomorrow! i'm excited to see europe, but equally excited about couchsurfing! if you don't know what it is, check it out: www.couchsurfing.org

i have decided that i will not post my pictures on facebook. instead, i want to invite everyone for a nice dinner where we can all catch up and i'll display all my pictures at home :)
it's what i've learned here... hygge (look that up because it's hard to translate). it's the danish way!

spring awakening

hej! (hi in danish)
how is everyone? i hope everyone is doing well. i miss you all dearly.

spring is finally coming to denmark!!! it was so warm today (relatively speaking) and i absolutely love the feeling of swapping my winter jacket for a spring jacket. yay for breaking 50 degrees!

saturday night, partied at vega, which is a really famous concert venue (as well as a discotek aka club). sorry but forgot the camera so no pictures.
sunday night, soccer game!!! f.c.kobenhavn won 2-0. and check out these beer holders! so efficient.

my view. directly across is brondby's (opposing team) fans. and you can see KBH for f.c.kobenhavn on the left

so exciting! can't wait for world cup

monday, went to the beach to visit a bath house and had the fortune to see a naked man dive into the ice cold ocean. (sorry no picture of naked man)

monday was also jakob's (my host brother) 21st birthday. unfortunately 21 is not a big deal in denmark but woo for danish layer cakes! (sorry no pictures again)
wednesday was katrine's (my host sister) 28th birthday. woo for danish cakes again! (but still no pictures) god i eat so well here.

another new obsession... somersby :)

you've been a very bad girl, a very very bad bad girl gaga ;)

 i can feel the work piling up and my life slowly disappearing again...

alice in wonderland was a disappointment that i should have expected. this is just not what tim burton is about. he can't waste his creativity on already existing characters. even if this wasn't just a retelling, but his fabrication of the story after, it didn't have enough tim burton ness. it wasn't creepy enough in the way tim burton usually is and needs to be in order to really understand his sick genius mind. however, johnny depp and helena bonham carter never fail to amaze me. and i liked the special effects, especially of her head. but this will probably be the first and last movie i ever watch in copenhagen. it is so expensive... almost $30 but it was nice to choose seats beforehand. no waiting in line to run for a seat.

i went back to christiania with my danish class for a guided tour. i didn't realize how large it was and pusher street is literally a speck on the map of the whole. the guide has lived there since the beginning of christiania so she gave us the whole rundown of what went down over the years. it still amazes me that a self-governed community can exist in today's society. i thought you couldn't take any pictures, but that's only on pusher street... obviously.

infamous mural at the gate into christiania

this is a map of christiania. pusher street is a speck in the lower right hand corner, which is also where the mural and the gate is located. it used to be old army barracks and the reason for the shape is because it used to be the city's defense border.

so the bad rep that christiania gets is a pretty unfortunate story. it was meant to be like a hippie community of people who wanted to live freely and peacefully. they are what they call a consensus democracy, so majority does not rule. there must be a unanimous consensus. they collectively pay money to the state of denmark for garbage disposal, water, electricity, and also pay to sustain and maintain their own community. i will have to go back and take pictures of the houses because everyone builds their own house however they want so it should be an interesting sight. but when heroin started to appear on the market, the city of copenhagen didn't know how to deal with the junkies so they dropped them all off at christiania's gate... a conspiracy to destroy christiania in hopes for it to disappear. and it just went downhill from there. gangs began to appear in christiania and violence escalated. it's so sad because people try to raise their kids and such in christiania.

christiania's laws. break it the first time, 3 months exile. break it the second time, 1 year exile. break it the third time, exiled forever.

christiania's skate park (this is the fun factory i was talking about last time)

infamous christiania bike to drive around your babies

i also had the chance to see an opera. unfortunately not at the new opera house, but at the old royal danish theater. "the magic flute" composed by mozart. it confirmed my dislike for operas, but at least i felt cultured. it might have been a little bit worse because both the singing and the subtitles were in danish, but i recognized some of the music.  

i'm going to a soccer game tomorrow! f.c. københavn vs. brøndby. this is one of the biggest rivalries... like yankees vs. red sox big. check out the song i need to learn so i can jump up and down with the crowd!

and on a final note...

trust is like a mirror. you can fix it if it's broke. but you can still see the crack in that motherfucker's reflection.

germany and the netherlands

i'm back!

it has been a long week touring germany and the netherlands. we visited so many cities and so many buildings that everything is starting to blur...

the entire trip felt like a walking pilgrimage across europe. in one week, i went to: hamburg, cologne, dusseldorf, neuss, arnhem, amsterdam, utrecht, rotterdam
this is what the danes call "the american way" of traveling, meaning that we try to do one city a day. it's just impossible to truly experience a city in one day, let alone a week. you need at least a month, just like the way danes do it with their six week vacations. 
i like to think that this week was just a preview so that i can return for a longer duration. but i absolutely fell in love with utrecht... it was my favorite city in the netherlands. maybe because i got to see my favorite building that i've been dying to see for two years. and of course, being that i have the worst luck in the world, i finally get to go inside and my camera dies. wtf.

amsterdam ♥
so the conclusion is that canals make a city beautiful. we need to get some of these...

being that we traveled from city to city by bus, i saw a couple of new movies. volver (which was just simply strange) and black book (or zwartboek in dutch). black book reminded me too much of inglourious basterds which makes me wonder if there was any cross pollination between the two. they were released only 3 years apart from each other. but nonetheless, both really good movies.

i also succumbed to my biggest consumerist weakness... books with pretty pictures. this one is a monograph of BIG architects' works entitled "an archicomic on architectural evolution." they are denmark's newest (and youngest) innovators in architecture... check them out at www.big.dk



change of itinerary! i will be going to rome instead of paris at the end of april / beginning of may. yay!!! pizza!!!

last night, i made dinner for the family. eggplant parmesan, which is beginning to become my specialty. tonight is alice in wonderland with the fam :)