London--

After wrestling with EasyJet, we finally got a flight out of Paris, about 25 hours after our scheduled departure. According to EU regulations they are required to pay for our hotel, in addition to 250 euros for not giving us enough notice of the flight cancellation... i guess we have to file a complaint with the EU and hope for a check :)

Since our flight was delayed, we arrived about 40 minutes late into London Luton. After making our way through customs and finding a bus that we had to wait 35 minutes for, we arrived at London Luton's train station... we caught the last bus of the night to downtown-- and by last, i mean last, they locked the station we arrived in after we left it. It was now about 2am london time, and we still had to walk about 2 kilometers to the hostel-- London is very pretty at night, i was too tired to take any pictures though.

Checked in at the hostel, and got to sleep around 3:30am. We had intended to wake up at 7am, but we forgot to change our alarm clock back one hour for the time zone difference from paris, so we woke up at 6am. I think we got about 2 hours of sleep.

We began our tour of the city after eating some good breakfast at teh hostel. Walking over towards London Bridge, and the tower bridge-- seeing all the sights in between. We then walked to the exact opposite side of the city to see Big Ben, the parliament building, and Westminster Abbey... all of which were astoundingly large and beautiful. We then made our way up to Trafalger (spelling??) square... another awesome place to sit down for a while, although we didn't have time. We ended our 3.5 hour tour of London by walking down by the water and heading back to the hostel. Judging by the map and our constant walking speed, i'd guess we walked 8-9 miles.

We took the tube up to the airport-- and i have to say this... "Please mind the gap between the train and the platform"-- there i did it :) I am writing this on the floor of Heathrow airport... waiting for them to let us check in... i guess they only allow certain planes to check in at certain times... oh well. I cannot wait to get rid of all my luggage and just have a backpack-- i've hauled 2 huge bags and a backpack all around europe-- this is the final leg!

Back to boston soon.. lets hope British Airways is better than easyjet at being on time.


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Paris--

I hate two things, i hate people who hate other people's cultures, and i hate the french.

We arrived in Paris Sunday morning, the 15th of May. Checked into our hostel and began exploring the city. After purchasing an outrageously expensive metro/bus pass, we headed down towards the eifel tower. Walking under it we saw the insane lines to get up it, and assumed it was outrageously priced. We continued down to a street with a lot of sidewalk cafes, looking for somewhere to eat. By this time it was about dinner time, we finally found what seemed like a suitable place and entered. After ordering we received our first course, mine was vegetable soup-- it tasted pretty good. My next course was a cut of beef. The first bite was relatively good, but the second time i cut it, there was blood pouring out. It looked like they had purposly burned the outside and not cooked the inners. When i called the waiter over, before i could even finish my question he took the plate away. He arrived back 30 seconds later saying it had been re-cooked... it was not, it was still the same redness. We are fairly sure he was doing this on purpose. I went across to mcdonalds to get some "good" cooked food.

We kept exploring, making our way past the Arc de Triumph and other places-- the metro here is old and dirty, but it gets you where you need to go. Called it an early night since we were both dead from Traveling.

Monday we awoke with expectations of sleeping in London that night-- that was destined for failure. We checked out of the hostel and made our way around the city, leaving our bags at the hostel's bag room. We must have walked 6 miles, around the city, up to some awesome churches on top of hills, in and out of small streets. We rode a purely electric bus, which was pretty neat. We walked over by Saint Michael's church, they were filming some sort of movie there. We saw some French military dudes set up in formation with large guns outside of a courtroom exit... nothing seemed to come of that though. We kept walking and found a really cool park with a palace in it, we hung out in there until it started raining. Attempting to go to a museum, we failed to realize it was closed on Mondays, so we went to a small sidewalk cafe and sat for a while. Walked by the louve(spelling?) multiple times... that place is huge! We were more or less wasting time until we had to leave for our flight from Charles De Gaul.

Leaving our hostel with all of my bags from my 2 month stay in Copenhagen, we headed towards the Metro station, which were NOT designed for people with bags. We left around 6pm, and after wrestling with the crazy french transportation system where they change which tracks go where without *really* telling anyone, we arrived at teh airport just before 8pm, the better part of 2 hours to get there. We found our way to terminal 3, which by how long it took us to get there was in another country as it was. Arriving at checkin we found a sign that said our flight was cancelled. Apparently these greedy french air traffic controllers wanted more money, so they went on strike. Great. After wrestling with easyjet attempting to get them to pay for our hotel, which failed, we booked a flight for the next day (tuesday the 17th) at the same time as the one we were on on monday. Thank you French people.

We made our 2 hour journey back to the hostel with all of my crap from my 2 months in copenhagen, and booked another night there.

I think this city is out to get me... i attempted to purchase a soda out of the vending machine in the train station, 2 euro for a soda-- expensive but i was thirsty... the damn machine wouldn't even take my money... i hate everything about this city, never come here.

Over and out-- lets hope these French air traffic controllers come to their senses and let us fly tonight. If they don't i think we are going to try to get a bus or rent a car to drive to london.

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In Paris now... will post a full update later.

Just figured i'd let people know i am still alive :) -- flying to London this evening on easyjet, then we fly home on Wednesday.

See you all then

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Munich!

After arriving on the night train at 6am, we proceeded to look for a way hour of the train station and find our way to the hostel. Pop Quiz-- how do you know you are in Germany? Answer: when it is 6am and you see a man taking the last swig out of his 1 liter mug of beer.

Anyways we made our way to the hostel-- Wombats City hostel here in Munich, or "Munchen" as they say here. We dropped off our luggage in the luggage room and headed for the Dachau concentration camp. This was quite a ways northwest of the city, and the trains here seem to run less often than the ones in Denmark. Luckily we still had our Eurrail day from the night train, so we did not have to buy separate tickets. I cannot fathom what it was like at Dachau during the war. The camp is huge-- there were pictures in the museum of the prisoners lined up in formation in the giant courtyard... the courtyard we had just been standing in-- and it was huge. It took a good 5 minutes to walk quickly from one end to the other. The history in this place was incredible, they had reconstructed two of the boarding houses, there were 30 of them total. In the far back there was the crematory where they burnt a lot of the dead, it just gave me the creeps.




Anyways on to happier topics... We headed back from Dachau after waiting a good half hour for a train. Checked into the hostel, locked our stuff up, and headed out into the city. Munich has some of the finest architecture I have seen-- the Glockenspiel clock tower was my favorite... I have a picture of it:




We continued to wander until we hit the nudist park/beer garden. It had a sort of weird chinese/german theme to it. Beer gardens rule. More or less it’s just an outdoor bar with trees and chairs and tables-- they first started when these crazy Germans realized they could keep their beer cold by burying it under trees. They would have to get up from the bar, get the beer and go back to the bar whenever they ran out. They then made the ingenious move to change the location of the bar to under the trees, beer gardens were born.

Check out this panorama of the beer garden we had a beer in -- we sat with in ice cold german beer and listened to the authentic german music coming out of the tower in the middle (caution large file but worth it): www.tomschindler.net/beer_garden.jpg

After the beer garden we continued our walk around the city, crossing some amazing rivers and seeing tons and tons of expensive cars (Porches, BMW, Mercedes, Lamborghinis, lotus, Ferrari etc).. We eventually found our way to the Hofbrau house.. We sat down next to a really drunk German man, a couple of students and some older folks. For those of you who don't know in the Hofbrau house you just sit down at these big long tables next to people you don't know and drink-- it is quite the good time. We ordered our obligatory 1 liter beers which come in a mug that weights about 5 pounds empty... Apparently this one bar goes through about 10,000 liters of beer a day... I’m relatively sure my beer was fresh :)




Some history about the Hofbrau house... the floor is a slight bit tilted towards the entrance. The reason may or may not be obvious... Old German men used to sit around all day drinking here... if you get up, you may lose your seat. One of the reasons they wear those funny shorts with the buttons was so that when drinking they could snap it open, relieve themselves on the floor, and keep drinking. Well the floor started to smell after a while, so whenever the stench got too bad they would come through with kegs of water and wash the urine out into the streets... there are drains in front of the door that still exist today, although I am relatively sure the bathrooms in the back are a more highly used option.

The Hofbrau house was also where Hitler gave one of his first public speeches before he came to power. He was talking about the things he preached while in power, but to a bunch of people who didn't want to hear it... so these people took their 1 liter mugs and threw them at Hitler, who had to duck for cover to avoid being hit.

After quite some time at the Hofbrau house we headed back to the hostel's bar where we hung out, and I sung karaoke for a while with a bunch of kickass Germans... Bed came later.. I forget exactly what time it was, but I need more sleep.

Saturday morning we got up and had some breakfast-- all you can eat breakfast buffet for 4 euro.. Yum. We headed into the city and walked up towards the Marienplatz, which is the main square in town. We hopped up with the free tour of the city, and our tour guide was awesome. He was an Irish kid who had moved to Munich.. He knew everything! After finishing up our 3 hour walking tour, we tipped him relatively generously (he works on only tips...)

Ben and I then split up, as our interests differed. I headed to the Olympic park-- where I was pleased to find the last soccer game of the season was being played in the old Olympic stadium from the 1972 Olympics. The stadium is very pleasing to look at-- the tents are made of a semi-transparent plastic, and they form many peaks and curves while they cover the stands. I also went to the BMW museum, which I was rather unimpressed with.

The football (soccer) game was crazy, they had so many police lining the sidewalks to keep these rowdy folks from getting out of hand. I was unable to get tickets into the game, so I watched from an overlooking hill with a lot of other folks. You could tell from the noise of the crowd exactly how the game was going.



I headed back to town, where I hung around for a while with all the drunken Germans in the town square, it seems like these people all just hang out and drink all the time, I wonder if they ever do any work.

Well it is currently 8:15 pm, I am sitting in the lobby of the hostel writing this, since there is free internet here. We have to be up early for the 5:28am train heading to Paris through Cologne, so I figure it will be an early evening.

Not sure how much internet I will have, so I may or may not update again.. Keep checking, maybe I’ll be lucky and get online :)




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Berlin Day 2

Today is Thursday the 12th of May, 2005.. it is currently 11:10 pm Berlin, Germany time (Eastern + 6). Ben, myself and Johanna spent the day in Berlin. Johanna is Jaron's friend who just happened to be traveling to Berlin on the same day as Ben and I. We were split up yesterday in Hamburg after she took the earlier train than us. We ended up finding her last night by asking the front desk what room she was in.

We met a nice couple from Hamburg in the hostel last night who were in Berlin to see Blue man group. After talking to them for a while about the cities and such we all fell asleep. We were incredibly lucky with who was in our 8 person hostel room considering all of the yelling and rowdyness that was going on outside our door. I think Ben and I were the last to turn in for the night at around 11pm.

This morning we woke up and were out of the hostel by about 8:30am. We wandered into the train station to get Johanna a ticket for the bus system, then proceeded to look for some breakfast. I had a nice pastry from the train station, then later we stopped at a small cafe and i had a big cup of coffee. Believe it or not Europe has made me like Coffee since it is the only thing these people drink besides beer.

After the cafe we decided to go back to the hostel and check out. The bagage problem i was worried about last night went away when we realized that Johanna was staying another day, so we moved our bags to the lockers in her room.

Out into the city we went, we caught the 100 bus and took it all the way to East Berlin. We stopped at the Cathedral, which was *severely* damaged in the war. We paid the 3 euro entrance fee and entered the cathedral. This place was amazing. The ceilings were decorated wonderfully, the organ was huge, it was so neatly decorated. You could still see the patched over holes in some of the concrete from the war. We saw images of it right after the bombing raid... apparently the roof was more or less gone, the organ was torn to pieces, and everythign was a mess. For one reason or another, while the Russians had control of East Berlin, they rebuilt it to it's current state. We toured around the downstairs for a while, then climbed the 267 steps to the lookout tower. A 360 degree panorama of Berlin, overlooking the 2nd tallest structure in europe, which is a radio tower with a revolving restaraunt in it.

While on our way back down from the top, the organist was playing. Most of the cathedrals we have toured throuhg have a nice looking organ, but it is not used anymore. This organ sounded incredible-- it just filled the cathedral with incredible music.

After leaving the cathedral we spent time wandering around the site of an old castle whose foundation was all that is left. Apperently the Russians did not want to rebuild this.

We headed back towards teh Brandenberg Gate, and stopped for a picnic lunch consisting of penut butter and jelly sandwiches and sodas. Our next stop was Reichsthe, which is the German Parliament. After making our way through the very tight security, we took the elevator to the top. On top of this nice old stone building, there is a giant glass dome, which has a curved walkway going to the top, inside of the dome. The views from up here were very good-- by this time the morning clouds had lifted showing a great view of Brandenberg gate, the holucost memorial, and other parts of the city.

We then went over to the brand new holucost memorial. It consists of a series of stone blocks, which range from a few centimeters high to over 4 meters. They are also tilted at verying degrees. We tryed for a while to find the symbolism in these blocks but failed. After entering the museum we found there was no symbolism-- kind of a stupid memorial but oh well. The museum which was located directly below the field of blocks had a plethora of information about the holucost and its survivors. We spent a fair amount of time, avoiding the creepy guy who was talking to me about Cameras... he also went into depth about skin care and how the lady 20 feet behind us had a model's figure.

We continued on into East Berlin, and made our way to Checkpoint Charlie... this was one of the more famous openings in the Berlin Wall, which was symbolized all over the city by a 2 brick wide path running exactly where the wall used to stand. It was cool to see how the city had changed in the past 16 years since the wall was torn down... the brick line ran right though streets and intersections.. even where buildings now stand, the brick line ended on one side of the building, and continued on the other.

After having a small mix up wtih the commuter trains (going the complete wrong direction), we made it back to the hostel. I showered then Ben and i headed for the Train station. I am writing this on the way to Munich, we have a very nice sleeper compartment... hold on ticket guy wants tickets.... (elevator music)..... ok he's done. I think we are going to get some rest now, hopefully i can post this online soon so everyone can read it.

I will be in Munich all day on Friday the 12th, and Saturday the 13th, so with any luck i'll have some more to write about, not that i'm not writing enough as it is.

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Berlin, Germany -- Written 5-11-2005, 10pm

We arrived in Berlin around 3pm on Wednesday May 11... Hopped out of the train station and it was a short 30 meters to our hostel.. unfortunately it was in the middle of a downpour. We checked in, dropped our luggage off at the locker in our room and went out to explore.

Our first stop was a giant old church that was bombed during world war two. They had left this church in its bombed state as a reminder of the war. The entire wall of the church was all bombed and scarred, the steeple is missing half of the top, huge holes for stained glass windows are left unfilled. It was quite the sight.

We then walked down towards the park and stopped by at the giant tower at the intersection of a bunch of roads.. i can't recall what this place was called, but you could climb the 67 meters to the top of the tower and look out of the top.. some amazing views of the entire city from here. We spotted our next desitantion while at the top of the tower.

Walking down the street towards the Brandenburg gate, we were amazed at how the city was so new and green. We then recalled that it was nearly completely destroyed during world war II, so all the buildings can't be more than 70 years old. Arriving at Brandenburg gate was amazing, this was one of hte major checkpoints between east and west Germany during that era. Ben and i both remarked at how easy it was to walk through this once no-mans land. The wall was just beyond the gate, on the eastern side of it. There was now what looked like a temporary memorial to the history of it, called 180 degrees of Brandenburg. It went over the history of the gate, and how it had changed in teh time it had been in existence. Ronald Regan even spoke here when he was trying to get the wall torn down.

I had seen on CNN a few weeks ago that there was a brand new holocaust memorial right next to the American Embassy. We walked over to that to take a peak... it was unfortunately not open, even though CNN reported it was open for business. We could still look through the chain link fence at the small blocks that represented the holocaust deaths-- and there were a horrific number of them.

We headed over to a small cafe for some dinner, where we each tried different German beers.. then decided we'd get lost while walking home. Somehow we ended up in the red light district, where every 15' there was a scantily clad woman strutting her stuff to the cars driving by. By this time it was dark and we were ready to head back to the hostel, so we took out the map and started heading home after realizing we had just walked in a circle. Just when we were on the right path home it started pouring rain-- it was quite the fun time to walk back in the rain.

It is now Thursday morning, we are getting ready for the day. Unfortunately we have to check out of the hostel at noon, but i have a lot of luggage and our train for Munich does not leave until 10pm. I am not quite sure what to do with the luggage, i may see if i can find a locker to use somewhere else. Time will tell.





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Tuesday May 10th...

My stay in Copenhagen is coming to an end. We have our final presentation today at 2pm... after that it's pack and party time.

Tomorrow morning (Wednesday the 11th of May) Ben and I board a train bound for Berlin via Hamburg, Germany. We stay Wednesday night in Berlin, Thursday evening (the 12th) we board a sleeper train for Munich. We arrive in Munich at 6am on Friday (the 13th), stay Friday night, Saturday night there, then board an early morning 5:30am train Sunday (the 15th) that takes us to Paris. Sunday night in Paris, we then fly easyjet from Paris to London sometime Monday (the 16th) afternoon. We have Monday (the 16th) and Tuesday night (the 17th) in London, then we get on our plane to fly home on Wednesday the 18th... i believe we get into boston around 6:30pm.

I may or may not be updating while on the road... keep checking! If i don't post, i'll see you all when i get home.

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Monday May 9th..

Long weekend, Friday night we all hung out around the apartments... we worked on our paper for quite some time... eventually i crashed around 1am..

Saturday a bunch of us (Jeremy, Jenny, Eileen, Caitlin and myself) went back down to the Carlsberg factory. After walking by the horses again we were greeted with the free beer at their bar, always a nice treat. We went into the gift shop after where i bought a nice Carlsberg fleece... its so warm and comfy, i love it. We then went and grabbed some shwoarma, and enjoyed that down on the walking streets.

At night i decided i wanted to take some nighttime photos, so i will put a few of those at the bottom of this message, all of them are available on http://pics.tomschindler.net .

Sunday we worked all day getting prepared for the presentation and finishing/printing the paper. Long day!


Nyhavn Street-- the most expensive bar area of town:



And one from right outside Osterport station:



Go look at all of them here:

http://pics.tomschindler.net

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I just stitched together some of the photos i took into wide angle panoramic images...

For your viewing pleasure...

Zurich:
http://www.tomschindler.net/Zurich_Panorama.jpg


Oslo:
http://www.tomschindler.net/Oslo_Panorama.jpg

Caution these files are large.

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Friday May 6th..

So here is an update of the past couple of days... Wednesday evening a lot of people went out to the bars since Thursday was a holiday. Have you noticed that these danish people have a LOT of holidays? I much enjoy it. Anyways i really didn't feel like going to the bars, so Jenny and i hung out for a bit. We ended up going across the street to the kiosk and getting some ice cream. We then walked down to the lakes for a bit and played with the bats. I absolutely love throwing small pebbles up into the air and watching the bats swoop down like it is an insect to eat.

We realized that it was definitely not T-shirt weather anymore since it was getting dark out, so we came back and got some heavier clothing. We then went back out and continued walking around the lakes. We decided we should make an appearance at the bar, so we walked down to Norreport and the walking streets. Once we found the bar, which was just past the round tower, we (I) decided it wasn't worth going in since there was a 10 kroner (about $1.50) cover charge... call me cheap but still! We left and headed back towards the lakes. We ended up seeing the festival of light on the 3rd lake. Apparently on May 4, they always have a festival, where there is a giant candle with a 6" high flame every 5 feet all around the lake. Mind you this lake is probably half a kilometer long, and about 200 meters wide. That is a lot of candles.

On our way home we were walking by the lakes and in the northern sky all i could see was this flickering and flailing white light... the only explanation i can have for it is the northern lights. I still can't affirmatively say it was, but it sure looked like it.

The rest of the night was spent just hanging out doing pretty much nothing, which is the way i like it.

Thursday, May 5... this was a holiday. So that means we did not have to go into work! Jeremy, Seth and myself all slept in late, until about 11 or so. We proceeded to make a large breakfast, complete with eggs, bacon, toast, OJ, and coffee. After we finished eating that Me and Ben and Eileen went down to the main station to reserve train seats for the trip after the project is over that me and Ben are going on. We were fine reserving seats from here to Berlin, and from Berlin to Munich, but all of the night trains were full going from Munich to Paris. We ended up reserving a day train, so that means we have one extra night in Munich! We also did not reserve the chunnel ticket, since it was really expensive. I mentioned we might want to look into easy jet from Paris to London.. If it is the same price, flying is a lot faster!

We then walked up to the walking streets and succeeded in our mission for Shoarma... yum. For those of you who don't know, shoarma is a mediterranean food.. i think. It is more or less a pita pocket stuffed with meat that comes off a vertical piece of spinning meat. They also stuff lettuce and some special sauce in there. It is more or less one of the most wonderous foods in Copenhagen.

Thursday afternoon i ended up getting to work and busting out some of this IQP paper. Its really difficult since we cannot work at the same time-- with there being only one document, and both of us making major changes to it, it just doesn't make sense. Oh well.. Jenny and i sat here in my apartment and had a beer or two while working on both our separate reports. I got to bed around 1am or so, after watching VH1 after midnight with the roommates for a while.

Now here i am on Friday morning working on the IQP report some more, i figure we should finalize this and print it off sometime today or this weekend.

Other plans for the weekend include some general sightseeing of the city and its surrounding areas, heading back to the Carlsberg factory, and possibly going to a real european football game!

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After a whole lot of discussion, we have decided that our IQP will be a re-working of the proposal we submitted last term. The reason for this is the fact that we more or less do not have a project-- everything we had hoped to do has fallen through.

Our project is now merely a recomendation for what they should do when (or should i say if?) they finally get it working... so... awesome!

oh yeah and i managed to get very flaky wireless internet at the apartments, so we are working from home today :)

Its time to get back to writing and listening to bob seager!



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Oslo, Norway.

We left 9 small homes around 3:30pm on Friday.. and arrived at Nordhavn station shortly after. We all walked like a giant tour group to the boat where we checked in and got our boarding passes. We had been joking that since our tickets were so cheap we would be on the car deck sleeping, since this cruise ship is a ferry as well. We soon found out that we were not on either of the 2 car decks, we were on the only level below those decks. Thats right, we slept below 2 levels of cars, about 8' under the water level of the boat. Check out the elevator map-- we are on floor 2000 level...




After getting settled in our room we headed up to explore the boat. Jaron, Kevin, steve and myself walked around figuring out where everything was. There is an interesting labryinth of ways to get places on the boat-- we had to figure all of it out before we started moving. I think Kevin came to the conclusion that on the top deck we were about 6000 feet above the water level. (exagerration of course).

After fully exploring quite a bit of the ship, we decided it was time for some food. the food on the ship is incredibly expensive, so i had made 5 penut butter and jelly sandwiches, and packed juiceboxes before hand. I had a sandwich, Jaron and Steve both bought some food from the ship. We then went exploring in the duty free shop. Man do i love those things. After a long look through all of the stuff, Jaron and i decided we would spend some money and get a bottle of Bailey's irish creme.... it was about half price of what you would have paid in copenhagen, so we decided it was worth it. After we had left the store we intended to go downstairs and put the bottle away since we didn't intend on drinking it. As we turned around to go down the stairs we saw a coffee machine. I commented on the fact that it was far too convinient... so we all had some irish coffee. As we wer sitting there having the coffee, we were watching this orange ship move at an incredible rate of speed in the opposite direction as us. He hooked a sharp 180 degree turn and pulled alongside us... we were boarded by someone on the boat. I later found out this was a harbor guy who aids the captain in getting the ship into harbor, as we stopped in Helsingor to pick up more people. Here is a picture of that boat:


That night we all went down to the bar and hung out. There were 2 "bar" areas... one was the old people bar where all the old people hung out and listened to music. I rather enjoyed this bar since they played music i actually liked. The bar upstairs was a dance club called "heaven 11"... they played all the techno music and had the younger crowd up there... it was cool and all but the music was horrible.

We finally made it to bed around 3am Saturday-- i crashed for a while then woke up at 5am to watch the fjord go by as we neared Norway. As i was heading up to the deck, there was a drunk kid passed out fully clothed in the hallway, key-card in hand-- what a hilarious thing!:


Well we were quite a bit early, the fjored was further north.. so we ended up just sitting at a table talking and watching the sun rise through the clouds. The best part of this is when i said i saw a lighthouse-- which i did. But apparently nobody else could see it, so they were all making fun of me... fun :)

The Fjord started coming into view around 6:30am... we were greeted by the most magnificent towns and villages nestled onto the rocks. It looked as if the buildings and houses had been formed there naturally... There were a ton of really awesome windy switchback dirt roads that wound their way up the steep fjord banks. Jaron and i were on top of the boat literally running back and forth from side to side trying not to miss anything. At one point we saw the most incredibly scene-- they were dredging the fjored... 2 boats, one which had a steam shovel on it, the other was just a boat for the dirt that was picked up. Very cool to watch this thing work.



And two pictures of the fjord!





We arrived in Oslo at about 9am on saturday the 30th. We hopped off the boat and started walking around town. We first stopped by the main train station to look at the town square, we then walked up a central walking street. The town hall of Oslo is the place where they award each year's Nobel Peace Prize in December, on the day that Nobel died. I sat on the actual steps where they award it :) -- After a while we ended up on this amazing castle which was built by Christain the 4th in an attempt to defend the city, which was then called Christiana.. This castle was built into a hill next to the harbor area, and had big cannons lining the edges. Quite the sight!
Here is me up on top of the castle looking down at the city:



We continued walking around and realized we were incredibly hungry... We attempted to find a cafe but failed miserably... So we ended up walking a lot. Eventually we came to a small bar/restaraunt where we sat down in. I guess it was an italian place, but it was really good-- Expensive but good-- i think i paid $30 USD for a beer, and a plate of spaghetti. Glad i don't live in that city!! Here is a picture of the inside of the restaraunt.


After the lunch we walked really fast over to the tour bus company. We had 7 minutes to make it from the restaraunt to the bus which as a few blocks away. We made it just as the bus driver was pulling away, but he let us on. We listened to the tour about the whole city which was really incredibly interesting. Here is a view from the bus down a walking street:


After the tour we went over and got some ice cream at a small Deli.. then layed on the grass in the town square for a while as there was some sort of musical event going on-- very relaxing.

We finally headed back to the ship at about 4pm, where we happened to look into a small alley. There was 3 people in there, 2 people laying on the ground passed out in a fetal-like position... and one who was kneeling holding his head looking disgraced. We were so sketched out, but we ended up calling hte police. They didn't really take us seriously, so who knows if they sent any police out.

After getting on the boat we were hanging out on the top of the ship and asked a guy to take a picture of a bunch of us. Apparently this guy had no idea how to hold or use a camera, since the shot came out like this:


We all continued to look around until about 6pm, when Steve and i went for some dinner. I had a small plate of Veal and steve had lamb. One of the best meals i have had in a LONG time!

After dinner we went down and asked for a tour of the engine room and the engineer down there complied. We saw all 8 of the diesel engines on the ship which put out about 26 megawatts of power-- amazing!! We stood right next to the two driveshafts that were spinning at 130 rpm for the propellers!... so insane!

After we got out of there the man suggested we go up to the bridge-- so we did. Standing on the bridge of a 200 meter long ship is amazing.. the captain showed us his radar equipment, along with some of the other navigational aids.


About that time the sun was setting, so we stood on deck for a while and watched the sun go down. We then retired to the bars for the evening, but i didn't end up drinking much of anything, i was already too tired and didn't feel like spending money ;)



We went to bed relatively late, and slept til about 8am where i got up and ate penut butter and jelly while watching the ocean go by... so relaxing! Here is one more picture of me on the fjord:




Later that day it was May Day here-- Happy birthday to Karla!! May Day here is apparently a big political/drinking event. Apparently everyone goes and sits in a field by the football (soccer) stadium and drinks until they are silly. Quite the fun time! Jeremy, Seth, Jenny, Kris and i all went down and met Tor and Niels there... we had some fun just chilling. We ended up leaving around 7pm since we were hungry and wanted to make some dinner. I stayed up really late talking to people about all the crazyness going on, finally making it to bed around 1:30 am or so. I am incredibly tired, time to go for a nap :)


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Friday April 29

The past few days have been relatively intense writing wise. We had a meeting with our advisor and the sponsor yesterday. They more or less said that our "data gathering" phase, which consisted of 3 days work should be over. So we now have the awesome task of writing a paper and giving suggestions based on 3 days data... great.

Anyways, i hate complaining so i will get on to better things. Copenhagen is an incredible city. I am doing my best to see as much of it as possible, but there is just too much to see. I've been doing a bit of running here and there, whenever i am not feeling lazy... Usually it is around the 5 lakes, actually there are really only 4 lakes, since 2 are connected under a road. Check out this map... where i am staying is in the upper right corner, where it says 9 Smaj Hjem. THe lakes i run around are the long ones just southwest of us. I think its about 4 miles to go around all of them, takes about 50 minutes (45 on a good day).




So tonight a bunch of us are boarding a cruise to Oslo, Norway. Oslo is at about 60 degrees lattitude, so it is the furthest north i will have ever been. We leave at about 6pm Denmark time, so noon eastern time. The cruise ship heads north through the straight between Denmark and Sweden. These waters are still some of the most dangerous in the world... but they were much much worse when the Viking ships were sailing them. The winds in this area of the world are so great that many ships ended up running aground on the western coast of Sweden. Apparently some ships still have this problem but most are able to power through the wind.



If you look at the map above, you'll see a small island south of Sweden called Bornholm.. it is just above where it says 15 degrees. I think i may take a ferry over there for the last weekend of the term. I hear that it is full of white sand beaches towered over by granite cliffs... hopefully i will have time. I was reading that the best way to see the island is to rent a bike and ride around it... so maybe i can do that. Time will tell.

Sunday is May 1st... So happy early birthday to Karla! Over here May Day is a big celebration in the town square. I hear it is a giant beer festival, so it should be an interesting spectacle to witness. On another note, i am planning on heading down to Tivoli soon... i was going to buy a season pass, but that was a few weeks ago... and since i only have a bit less than 2 weeks left here it doesn't seem worth it. I'll go for an evening.. it should be fun.

Well i should get going, i have to be at the offices of a company called Euman at noon, and its almost 11 now. Want to wish the entire family back home a good weekend of celebration... for those of you who don't know it is my Grandparents 50th aniversary, so congrats to them!

Look for the story of the weekend and pictures on monday!

email is fun too -- tas246 (AT) wpi.edu


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Wednesday April 27th.

First of all, i have put all my pictures of amsterdam up on http://pics.tomschindler.net .... go take a peak!

This week has been fun so far. We celebrated Seth's birthday on Monday, the car share office threw a nice party for him, with cake an coffee. I haven't mentioned it on here, but i used to hate coffee back in the USA. I am now relatively fond of it. I by no means drink it everyday, but since the danes have it all the time, i feel obligated to drink it with them once in a while.

So anyways, Seth's birthday party went well... a couple of us went out after. It ended up being Thor, Bjorn, Niels, Neel (spelling?), Seth and myself. We all went down to Nyhavn, where all of the really nice bars are. This street is located right along the water, with a small canal right next to it.. Instead of going into the really expensive bars we bought a few beers outside, sat on the ground and chilled. Eventually we headed into the bar and ordered some dinner. Thor was insane and picked up the whole bill... we'll have to do the same for him sometime.

From there Thor, Seth and I headed down to some more bars downtown. It was seth's 21st birthday, so you can figure out where we were going wtih this. We spent until around midnight or 1am just walking around having tons of fun. We then headed back to Classensgade. Seth was beat and tired, so he fell asleep in bed. Thor and i decided that the night was still young so we headed back out. After walking around the walking streets for a bit we ended up going to a few more places and spending a fair amount of time at each one. Eventually we sat in this last bar for a while, just talking and having fun with all the crazy danish people. We decided it was time to leave when the bartender said he was closing... an headed for the door. We opened the door and were blinded by the brightest sunlight i have ever seen. Apparently it was 7am... who knew? Oh well we had tons of fun.. and i had to spend one night out to experience what these danish people do all the time :) I decided that it was a good time to take the train home, sleep for an hour or so, then head to work.

Work on tuesday was a long day.. we attempted to do some surveys of the people at the museum but failed miserably-- everyone hates doing surveys! I got back home and let the guys upstairs borrow my laptop to watch a movie on... i retired to my bed as i was dead tired!

Today We actually completed some real surveys... and i created a nice database to hold all of the information in. I did some quick analysis of the data, and made a few nice charts. We have our status meeting tomorow so i figure we should have something to show :)

Time to get back to work, we need to complete a few status documents and prepare for tomorow's meeting.

Don't forget that i have my pictures up from the Amsterdam trip-- http://pics.tomschindler.net

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Monday April 25..


Long and awesome weekend.

Thursday evening Ben and I hopped on an overnight train that took us to Duisburg, Germany. The train left just before 7pm, which forced us to use our punch cards to buy a ticket to Hoje Tasstrup, which is 6 zones away. This allowed us to only use one eurrail day, since overnight trains leaving after 7pm only use one day.

So we board the train, and settle in for a nice long ride.. It was just under 12 hours on the train. We had the 6 person car to ourselves for the first hour and a half, until we reached Odense, where an older gentleman joined us. This guy was going to Germany to buy a brand new Mercedes... he was purchasing it in Germany to avoid the 180% tax here in Denmark. Most likely this is illegal, but he said he did t 6 times a year and was a "hobby" of his. He also explained to us why Friday the 22nd was a holiday. Apparently the Danes used to have a lot of half days and quarter days off, the reason for which was they were praying for different things. The eventually combined all of these days into one full day off and called it "prayer day". It worked out well for us since we got a 3 day weekend out of it :)

So back to the train.... Try sleeping at your kitchen table, in those hard uncomfortable chairs, yeah this is what it was like for 11.5 hours. I had a hard time sleeping for most of the night, so I mostly stared out the window into the darkness. Every once in a while we'd stop at a station, sometimes for longer than other stations. We stopped at Hannover HBF for just about an hour.. We finally got into Duisburg, Germany around 6am. Ben and I checked our connecting train, which left around 9am, and figured out where it was leaving from. We then went out and explored.... we found a small bakery, where we ordered some breakfast. It is always an interesting experience trying to order from a place where you aren’t familiar with the currency, you don't speak the language, and the food is all different. I think we ended up just pointing and hoping. Duisburg was either really beautiful, or the fact that it was full of green trees and an awesome sunrise made it look beautiful.

We finally got on the ICE (Inter-City-Express) train headed towards Amsterdam. By this time I was incredibly tired... and the comfort of this train is unmatched. I fell right asleep.. Ben claims we stopped on the track for 45 minutes, but I have no recollection of this event.

Arrived in Amsterdam around 10am.. We hopped off the train and into the city. I cannot get over how awesome European cities are... Amsterdam has such awesome small walking streets, had I tried, I probably could have touched the buildings on each side of the "street" at the same time with my arms outstretched.



We found our hostel, which was a Christian youth hostel called "shelter of Jordan", they offered bible study every night at 7pm. It was relatively nice to know that for the most part the people at the hostel were good natured. Except for the guy who slept naked we really didn't have any problems in the 20 person dorm room.

Here is a picture of our hostel:


We spent most of our time walking in and out of the canals. There are over 1000 bridges in the city, and over 100 kilometers of canals. Boats are zigging and zagging out of the canals like crazy. All different kinds of boats, some were canal tour boats, some personal boats. I liked the personal boats that had 4-5 guys just chilling and riding around with a few cases of beer:




The city was very relaxed. The open air market was a really cool place to walk around in. By the time the evening had arrived, we had been offered cocaine, marijuana, ecstasy, heroin and a few other random drugs... it was quite the interesting experience.

We met up with Seth and Jeremy once they had arrived in the city, and we continued wandering and stopping at a few random places with them. We headed back to our hostel around 1am.. But not before doing some night-time photography.



Saturday we woke up and had a few things on the agenda that we wanted to see. The "golden bend" -- it is a section of one of the canals that has the richest houses in the area.. We walked through there. We also sat down in front of some of the old sea-locks and watched boats pass by. Ben and I had spent some time attempting to figure out why the canals were not tidal... It was interesting to find out that the city has 19 sea locks, all of which were in use until the early 1800s, when they dredged a 20 kilometer long canal in the harbor, and set the locks up on the outskirts of the city. The entire canal system is inside the locks, therefore is not tidal.

We then went and did a canal tour. The tour ship was amazingly maneuvered in these small canals by the captain. The tour gave us some insightful knowledge about the city, such as how the small hooks atop each house are used to move furniture in and out of the house with ropes. Or the fact that the whole city is more or less sinking on its soft ground, which causes many houses to lean in crazy directions. We saw at least 10 houses that were being held up by trees that had been chopped off at the right height and propped against the house.



On the tour we also went by a recreated trading ship. The original ship had sunk on its maiden journey off the cost of England. The ship that was so colorful was on display for tours had been recreated voluntarily by the unemployed people of the city... talk about a weird thing to have the unemployed people do!



After a long day we eventually headed back to the main train station Saturday around 6pm, where we learned that we had to use 2 eurrail days to get home-- that was not a huge problem since I had one extra day to use anyways, but it would have been nice to use that to go elsewhere.

We got to Duisburg, where we all treated ourselves to Bratwurst and beer... I love the German diet! We boarded our sleeper train to go home, and we started talking to one a nice guy from the UK... he had just gotten his masters degree in electrical engineering, and was taking a year off to tour the world. He was on his fourth day and looked dead already. After about 5 minutes of talking to him he looked oddly familiar. I finally figured it out, so when we had a break in the conversation I asked him how he liked the pancakes at breakfast that morning-- he looked surprised... but I told him that we sat next to him at our hostel's breakfast. Very coincidental.

The sleeper train was awesome this time, we each had our own little bed, I put my head down and fell asleep-- a solid 11 hours sleep!

We arrived back in Copenhagen, and in my utter stupidity and tiredness from just waking up I left my camera under the bed on the train.. I didn't realize it until we were back to Osterport too. I ran back to the station but unfortunately the train was gone. I went to the station office and talked to the lady there, she made a few calls, as did I. She said she would do her best to locate it. I went home, took a shower and called her-- they had already found it. Talk about being lucky... The last thing I lost was my Mount Washington Auto Road fanny pack that I got when I was like 8... left it in the bathroom at White lake.

The rest of the day we spent just hanging around and being utterly lazy, since we were all tired from traveling. Well congratulations if you made it this far in the entry, it’s a long one, but it was fun :)

Oh-- and here is a picture of me in Amsterdam-- just so you all can see my smiling face :)





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Thursday the 21st of april...

So we have more or less just been hanging around copenhagen this week. We all went out to a really nice dinner at the "riz raz" restaraunt last night. Some insanely good mediterranean food buffet style (read: all you can eat for 70 kroner). Yum.

Headed for Amsterdam tonight, we'll get there tomorow. We are taking a sleeper train, which should be interesting. We arrive at 6am Friday morning, then we have all day friday and all day saturday in amsterdam. We take a sleeper train back Saturday night. For those of you who think i'm skipping work on friday, it is a national holiday :)

Have a good weekend everyone.

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A bunch of people requested a picture of the kids in the snowsuits...

Here you go:



Awesomely cute eh?


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Monday April 18...

This past weekend was awesome. Friday evening Steve Jenny and I went out for an awesome steak dinner... it was probably the best steak i've had in quite some time. Thanks to Steve for the steak! After that we all just hung out and did more or less nothing. We were all relatively tired from the week.

Saturday morning Jenny and i woke up insanely early (4:40am)... and headed out for the main station. Now remember these denmark people are insane, as we were walking to the train station we saw at least a couple of people just coming in from the night out. We were both surprisingly awake as we stood there in Osterport station waiting for any train to come... unfortunately at that hour they only run once every 10 minutes or so, and we had just missed one. We arrive at the main station, and we head over to the track. The trip was rather uneventful until we started heading west and the sun rose. It was quite possibly one of the awesomest sunrises i have seen ever... The fog was just starting to lift off the ground, there were small rolling hills and windmills all over the place, and this giant orange sun. I attempted to get a picture of it, but through the window of the moving train i couldn't hold still enough.

Fast forward about 3-4 hours, we are heading north out of Aarhus, Jenny just woke up from her nap, so we started listening to old 80's pop music. She has some songs that i don't think i've heard in years... it made me so happy that the last 3 hours of the trip seemed like 20 minutes.

We arrived in Frederikshavn, and we walked down to the Tourist information office, which was surprisingly far away from the train station. The man there helped us out quite a bit with maps and such, he even went so far as to print us the weather from an online site. We then walked around the walking streets for a while, and grabbed some lunch at a pretty good pizza/burger joint. We also found a vending machine that sold porn... yeah that was interesting. We then took a walk around the port area. Some awesomely huge ships, a few random piles of junk, we even saw a submarine that was being held up in the air on a giant release ramp.... really wierd! In the pile of junk we saw what looked like a large bush, just random brown branches going every which direction. Jenny pointed it out and i stated i thought it was a bush. She had to investigate further and we found that it was a pile of steel rebar. Wierd!! We also found a number of auto transmissions and random other things.

We headed over to the beach from there-- We ended up walking on a small well-worn path that looked like it went through somewhere we werent supposed to be to get to the beach. We spent some time looking at shells and more or less just relaxing... we then started walking north, we found this cool sandbar which we had to climb on a rock breakwater to get to. We walked around for a while on the sandbar until we realized the tide was coming in and the sand was becoming softer and softer by the minute. A bit further north we found a really cool ice cream place that the man at the turist info booth had suggested... we both indulged in some good ice cream.... and we both got it all over our faces like the 4 year old that was eating near us :)

We wandered back to find our hostel, and checked in. I am relatively sure we were some of the only people staying there that night... this place was a ghost-town. I slept on the top of a bunk bed for the first time in my life... i was a bit afraid of falling off but it all ended well.

Sunday morning we woke up really early and headed for the train station. As we were walking there we saw the sun coming up for the second day in a row. One of the coolest things that morning was the sun that was shinging on a building was being interrupted by the spinning windmill. you could see this rotationg shadow on the building, i guess you had to be there but it was really cool.

Once we got to the train station we realized that "Korre Kun Londag" means "only runs saturday", so we had to wait another 2 hours for our train to Skagen. We took off and walked down to the Bangsbo Botanical Gardens to look around-- i think it was a 3+ kilometer walk each way... but the gardens (though not in bloom) were really pretty.

Once in Skagen we walked up towards the tip of Denmark. The buildings were all painted the same color... this pale yellowish color. We read somewhere the reason, which was because the area was so far "out there" that they only got shipments of paint once in a while... they mistakingly got the wrong color one year, and it stuck.

For the 99% of you who have no idea where Skagen is, here you go:


We found what looked like a very large trebuchet standing on top of a hill. We had no idea what it was, so we took some pictures and moved on. I ended up showing the pictures to the curator here at the National Museum, who described to me how they used this device as a primative lighthouse. They would put tar in the bucket, light it on fire, then raise it up high in the air. The light could apparently be seen from Norway.

It is seen here:



We hopped onto this awesome white sand beach, where i immediately took my shoes off and headed for the water. I got in to my ankles and realized that i had lost all feeling in my feet-- the water was SOOO cold.

Me and Jenny in the water:



We took some pictures of us being in the North Sea and kept on going north on the beach. We ran into these large cement artillery areas. They were absolutely huge, 10-12 meters tall each, just enormous things laying on the beach like whales. We climbed in and out of them. Apparently when the Germans occupied Denmark in the early 40s, they were afraid the British would use Denmark as a landing area for an invasion of mainland Europe. They completely armored the area up and defended it. They built these defenses so well that it is nearly impossible to get rid of them. They can't even blow them up!

The incredible German Concrete things:


Further north we went, we are now above 57 degrees lattitude... we get to the lighthouse that we had seen earlier from the trebuchet area. For 5dkk (about 75 cents) we could hike the 44 meters up the 210 steps to see an incredible view of the very tip of Denmark. We were nearly as far north in Denmark as you could possibly go.

The lighthouse:


We realized that we had about an hour to get back to the train station.. so we turned around and walked the road back... stopping at the teddy bear museum for a very quick look.

The entire ride home consisted of some music, some talking, a lot of boredom.... that and a little kid right next to Veijle station decided that instead of waving back to me, he would moon the entire train... that was quite entertaining...

We got back around 9pm to 9 Small Homes... I called it a night pretty early, trains make me tired.

That brings us to Monday-- nothing has happened to note so far today, besides the fact that i went out in the museum to play with the GPS cell phone for a while.. with any luck happen tonight or tomorow night to write.

As always-- there are a lot more pictures available at http://pics.tomschindler.net

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So Eileen and some other people were coming up with a list of things that were different over here in Denmark... I have posted a few of them, along with a lot more of my own

--Bikes are everywhere. Studies suggest that there are literally more bicycles in this country than there are people to ride them, excluding babies and those who are not physically capable of it (really old people) You can't go anywhere without seeing bicycles. They have bicycle lanes on every road.

--Then there are smart cars. For those of you who don't know what a smart car is, it is a really small hatchback car that is highly efficient.. it can't be more than 6 feet long.

--In Denmark you're never more than 50 meters from a full sized Post Office. Unlike the US where you can search for one all day without finding it.

--As far as leisure time, the Danes take it very seriously. Reservations well in advance are needed for everything, movies included.

--Never try to cross the street without waiting for the little green man to tell you it is safe. This is a bad idea.

--The latest that a store will be open is 8pm... which is surprisingly early. A lot of the bars around here will close at like 4:30am, which is also surprisingly early :)

--These people love to drink. On our orientation, one of the lunches that was provided to us consisted of a few sandwiches, and a whole lot of Carlsberg

--a lot of unisex bathrooms, which is a bit awkward at first. In addition to the whole trough style urinal... very interesting.

--"Good Food" in Danish is "Gods mad" Why is God mad???

--You must bring your own bags to the grocery store, and you should be prepared to go to the store every 2 days or so

--hardly any prepackaged or processed food. everything is fresh and without preservatives so things go bad quickly

--nothing can be bought in bulk

--they don't drink spring water. only mineral water

--a bakery is on every corner. Literally.

--the word for "danish" as in the pastry is "weinerbrød" in Danish

--They claim the public transportation is ALWAYS on time, except for that one day where there was a fire, a suicide, a transport worker strike, a signal failure and a power failure all within a few hours of eachother, then the trains were 5 minutes late.

--Bars are way too expensive. Even more so than in the US. Be prepared to drop $10 us dollars on a drink.

--little kids wear snow suits, all the time. Walking around town, at the park. They are all in snowsuits. And if there is more than one of them, they are holding hands in snowsuits. it is quite possibly the cutest thing in the world.

--everyone smokes. As i am typing this, there are a bunch of middle schoolers outside waiting to come into the museum, most of whom are smoking.

--They don't sell 2 liter bottles of soda. They sell the much more drink-able in one sitting 1.5 liter bottles.

--Deposit on the bottles is insanely expensive. If you buy one of these 1.5 liter bottles, the deposit is 3 kroner, or about 50 cents. We don;t buy our staple foods (milk, eggs, butter, bread etc).. we use our bottle deposits to buy them

--Apparently stealing wireless internet is a crime... steve was out with his PDA trying to check his email and had the police called on him.

--the police drive ford focuses, and the dominos delivery guys drive mopeds with pizza holders on them.

--if you don't want your furniture, you throw it in the lake. Last year there was a whole bar set-- 4 stools, a bar and everything found in the lakes. In addition to over 400 bikes... (see the first difference in this list)

--get on the bus in the front door, leave through the back. DO NOT break this rule.

--a vehicle over here has 180% tax on it. Yes you are reading that correctly, 180%

--people will tell me not to even try to learn their language. They say it is too hard, and i agree :)

--All of their streetlights are strung by wires, not poles. They are located directly over the CENTER of the road... none of this lights on each side like the US has.

--i LOVE the sirens over here. They are so much less intrusive than the ones in the US. If you don't know what i'm talking about, turn on Fox and wait until one of those police chase shows comes on.

--TONS less security. We were able to get into an active session of parliament by just walking through a single metal detector, and if it beeped they let oyu go anyways

--When you get off a bus, in the US you expect to be on the sidewalk. Here you ahve to look both ways to be sure nobody is coming in the bike lane, since bikes WILL and DO mow people over. The Danes apparently fought really hard to get these bike lanes, and get really mad when they are obstructed.

--the money is very colorful, and all of the bills are different sizes. The coins are also wierd, i can have a few coins in my pocket and have $5 or more. I felt like i was playing a big game of monopoly for the first week or two.

--the text messaging service over here is kind of wierd. It will send you a message when you come to a new country. I get a "welcome to germany" message... it was so nice

Thats all i can think of for now...

I may have more later


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Monday April 11...

This weekend was a fun one. Friday night we all more or less hung around and talked for a while. We ended up watching Bruce Almighty up in the 6 person apartment... it was very relaxing. So much so that i fell asleep in the chair and they all just left me there.. i woke up a little bit after the movie was over and went to sleep downstairs in my room.

Saturday we all got up relatively early for our expedition with Mogens. We took the train out to Roskilde, which is on a fjord in central Zealand. There is a museum here about viking ships. They had used these old viking ships to defend the city back in the viking age. A few of them had sunk and been relatively preserved. They actually excavated the entire shipwreck site by building a barrier around the ships, then pumping all the water out. The had then taked all of hte pieces of wood and preserved them. the reconstructed boats were on display at the museum. It was really cool!

Saturday night we all went over to the Car share group's sponsors house, then to a party that was going on over there. There were so many awesome danish people there it was crazy. We got there around 7, and the party was still going strong well into the morning. A good time was had by all!

Sunday, after everyone slept in because of being up late the night before, Jenny, Ben and I hopped on a train and headed west. We stopped in Odense (pronounced "oden-say"), and walked around there for a while. This town is where the birthplace of Hans Christian Andersen is. We walked by his house but were unable to go in as it was closed. We also toured around a really old cathedral. There were the skeletal remains of a king and someone else who had died defending the altar of the very church we were in. It was very historical.

We then more or less ran back to catch another train that kept heading west. We got off at Veilje Station, which is just south of Aarhus. From there we hopped on a bus that headed even further west, and took us out to Billund. Billund is home to a lot of fields, some cows, more or less a lot of nothing, oh and it has LegoLand!

Legoland was 10 times more interesting than i ever expected it to be. They had models of everything there, all built out of legos. They had airports, realistic models of downtown Copenhagen, all different cities around the world, Castles that we had been to. The stuff they can do with Legos is insane. The coolest part was they had little lego trucks and 18-wheelers that would drive around autonomously, following preset routes on the pavement... but there was no visible track... they just "knew" where to go. They also had boats that would float around in water (all made of legos) that would go through a working lock system to get up to a higher lake!

I have some good pictures of this place:






I updated my pictures site completely... there are tons of new pictures of legoland and the viking ship museum... see then only at http://pics.tomschindler.net

I also figure i should post a picture of the entire group over here in Denmark... there are 15 of us total, and one advisor. Here we are:



This morning a few of us went down and reserved our tickets for a cruise to Oslo. I love traveling.


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Friday April 8th...

The weather here is rainy/cloudy. It was pretty much the same for parts of yesterday. As i was walking back from the train station it got incredibly windy almost instantly. It started absolutely pouring out. I was so soaked by the time i got back to the apartments.

When i arrived at the apartments my day turned into an incredible day. The staff at 9 small homes will deliver mail right to our room. So there was a box from home sitting there. I eagerly ripped it open feeling like a 5 year old at christmas. Oh. My. God. The first thing i saw when i opened it was reeses... and being in a country where they refuse to mix chocolate and penut butter.... it was heavenly. Seth and i sat there in utter amazement as to how much my mom could fit into this one box. There were 2 large packages of reeses, 4 packs of 4 cadbury eggs, a bottle of maple syrup (which is nearly impossible to come by over here), a thing of lays potato chips, chocolate chip cookie mix, a small container of altoids, a few random garnola bars, and a note... how incredible!

We all sat around last night and had a reeses each.. it was fun :)

More or less... THANK YOU MOM & DAD & KARLA :)

For those of you who want to make me happy as well... my address is on the right side of this page :)

I was intending on going running again this morning, so i set my alarm for 6:40.. We were going to leave at 6:45. So when my alarm went off i hopped up and changed into my running shorts. But apparently i sat back down on my bed cause i woke up at 8am wondering what happened. Oh well, i can always go this afternoon.

So thats the happenings on this side of the pond... anyone back home and reading this shoot me an email and let me know whats happening over there!

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So today is Thursday the 7th of April.

Our group took a trip out to Aarhus yesterday. For the 99% of you out there who have no idea where Aarhus is, it is in the eastern coast of Jutland. Denmark is divided into 3 main areas, the "eastern" island called Zealand, the "middle islands" which has Odense and a few other cities on it, and the Mainland called "jutland". Copenhagen is in Zealand. To get to Aarhus we had to take a 3 hour train ride west, over some incredible bridges. One of the bridges/tunnels combined must have been 5 miles long!

Steve and I took the early train because Caitlin was not ready for the 8am train. We arrived in Aarhus around 11am. We walked around for a bit getting adjusted to the area, then found a small sandwich shop. This place made a really awesome ham + cheese sandwich. The mustard they put on it was a bit wierd. It tasted like regular mustard that someone had squeezed an orange over the top of. Very wierd.

We then had to walk up to the outskirts of town to get to the Natural History museum where there is a system much like the one we are working on in use already. We played with the system and gathered data for a while then left.

Steve and i decided we wanted to walk back to the train station, which turned out to be an excellent decision. We walked down by the shipping ways and saw the boats and harbor. We then started wandering back to the train station. Out of the blue on this random back street was what seemed to be an awesome bar. Well we couldn't pass that opportunity up, we went in for a beer. I had guessed that we'd just have a beer and be on our way, but i was completely incorrect. We met this Dane named Henrik in there... what a kickass guy! Steve, Henrik and I talked for what must have been 2 hours or more... we walked out of there (more than one beer later) and headed back to the train station to go home. The 3 hour ride back was uneventful, i did a bit of reading and watched a movie.

We get back to Copenhagen, i went up and talked to Jenny for a bit.. we are thinking about heading out to legoland some weekend, that should be a good time..

I will have pictures of The trip soon... look for me to post them by tomorow.



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So it's Tuesday the 5th of April over here in Denmark...

I'd like to make a few observations about the drivers over here. I have come to the conclusion that they are as aggressive if not more aggressive than the drivers back in worcester or beantown.. with one exception: they will beep at you and raise a hand with a particular finger, but then merrily drive off on their way without keeping that aggression for further road raging. I think this can be attributed to the fact that the only drivers who are on the road are drivers who either really want or really need to be there. Most everyone else uses public transportation or bikes.

This weekend was so relaxing. On Saturday, myself, Jeremy and Seth ended up walking around on the walking streets, then over down by parliament, then back to the walking streets by the Main Station. Seth and i took another trip up the round tower, which was built by Christian the 4th backin the day. The round tower, if i havent explained this to you before, is a tower thats probably 50' in diameter. Inside there is a spiraling ramp that circles 8 times before reaching the "top" at which point there is a regular set of stairs, and a tightly wound spiral staircase that places you on the top of the viewing area. This tower is not the tallest thing in the world, but in a city like Copenhagen where there are strict regulations as to how high buildings can be, you get a 360 view of the city looking down on rooftops. The tower is awesome, i'll post some pics later.

We found a cheap meat market, we picked up 10 really good chicken breasts for 100 kroner, or about $17.50. Using the McDonalds cheeseburger exchange rate, we really paid about $8.75 US for the meat. Quite the deal in downtown Copenhagen! For those of oyu who are unfamiliar with the cheeseburger exchange rate, a mcdonalds cheeseburger at home costs about a dollar. Due to the fact that there are no "easy" ways to make exactly one US dollar out of the kroner coins, the cheeseburger costs about $2 US dollars. This is the common exchange rate we joke about, convert the amount you spent to US dollars using the exchange rate, then assume it is twice as expensive as it would have been in the US. It works relatively well!

On Sunday we went down to Christiana. For the most of you who have never heard of Christiana, it is a section of Copenhagen that is more or less gated off and the police just turn a blind eye to pretty much everything. There are rules, however. Photography is banned, hard drugs are not looked kindly upon, and respect eachother's property. More or less there is a giant cloud above this section of town because everyone is smoking one thing or another. We walked through and enjoyed seeing all of the people just hanging out and relaxing. The section of town is filled with a bunch of free spirits.. since Photography is banned, i did not take any pictures, i have relied on Google Image search to do the work for me:




That last picture shows the exit gate from the area, it has a sign that says, "now entering the EU" as if to say that this particular section of town is not in the EU.

Monday morning we woke up and found that Caitlin had left for work without us, earlier than our scheduled time. So Steve and i wandered our way up to the museum, which is about a 5 minute walk, then a 20 minute train ride, then a 10 minute walk from home on Classensgade.

I spent a good chunk of the morning preparing for an interview i had with a company downtown at 2pm. At about 12:00, right before i was preparing to grab lunch and leave, we got a call from the company asking us to reschedule. Great. More or less we can't do much of anything until we talk to some people and figure out how the technology works and what it does. Today we have an interview with a guy from the Heritage Department downtown. He is one of hte people who is in charge of developing all of the information that will be put into a new tour guide system. We should be able to get some information from him.

When we were on our way home from work yesterday around 4:30pm or so, the train was just going incredibly slow, stopping every few hundred meters. We had no idea what was going on except for the few Danish words i could catch, of which i heard Norreport station, and something about evacuating. I was "reading" the danish newspaper on the way to work today and saw pictures of blackish smoke and a bunch of police... and then i found this:

http://www.cphpost.dk/get/87012.html

So yeah-- i'm glad i wasn't in the station!




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So i'm back here at the black diamond ( a library in copenhagen) again....

It is the easiest internet access around, after you get through the painful registration process.

If you want to see where i am, here ya go...

Pretty cool place actually, right on the water... its nice and warm out, i really love this city!

So today we actually got to sleep in late for teh first time in a long time, i woke up around 9am, did some dishes from last night, then hung around until 10:30 or so. We had to grab Professor Vassallo from the bike group downtonw and take her to a meeting at the National Museum. The meeting went fine, and i am now officialy a Danish National Museum employee-- awesome!

After the meeting our Liasion Klaus took us out for beers... good time, man do these Danes drink a lot! It was 1:30 on a friday afternoon and the bar/cafe was packed!

We then took Prof Vassallo down here to get herself registered for the internet.... i think she appreciated that, as she is typing away at email as i write this...

So i don't think i mentioned the most awesome modification to our apartment/room that Seth and i made.. We can't live without music (obviously), and the only radio station we get is some crappy danish pop station. It was unbearable. The radio that we have in the apartment is pretty nice, a CD player/Tape player/radio combo unit. But there were no inputs so we could hook our mp3 players up to it. Seth and i took it apart the first week we were here and rewired the headphone jack. So insteaad of plugging headphones into the jack, we plug our ipods into it, and the sound comes beautifully out of the speakers. Ah i love being a tech student!

I think we want to go back to the parliament building shown here:#



When we toured it a few weeks ago we had the most awesome tour guide. This man was so passionate about the building and the country it was insane... He was famed for saying things such as, 'It's written in the constitution... it can be read in 28 minutes. I know, because i have done it' ... so we want to go find him and take him out for drinks... lets hope we can!

I should be heading back to the apartments on Classensgade soon... The weather for the weekend is looking great, i hope to spend some time outside!

Happy April Fools Day!!

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So we are at work... not really working much. Yesterday we stopped by the national museum downtown, we took a tour of that taking notes about how their audio tour system works.

We got back, Jeremy and i headed over to the open market to get some food for dinner. We made some futile attem