And the travel adventures are in full swing

So I intended upon updating you on the rest of my week as my short blog entry was quickly turning into a short novel and increasing in vulgarity, but I never seemed to get around to it and now I don't even remember my week. So sorry to disappoint all of you hanging on to my every moment, but we're going to have to accept my state of temporary amnesia and skips a few days.

Let start Wednesday...

Wednesday night I cooked a delicious meal for my host family in honor of my birthday. Potato, kale, and leek soup (amazing), bruchetta, and mango cranberry salad followed by my favorite childhood dessert, dirt cups. Unfortunately, the Danes aren't as sophisticated as us Americans and I had to settle for chocolate mousse instead of pudding, dark chocolate cookies instead of oreos, and I just skipped the worms for the sake of my own embarrassment when I tried to poignantly explain why I had just placed gummies shaped like bugs in their chocolate mousse.

Thursday I was off at six in the morning for my study tour to Western Denmark. We drove two hours to Jelling (pronounced Yelling) to stand and look at the two Jelling rocks, Viking historical landmarks in the beautiful Jelling, population 200. One of these great landmarks was hidden in a wooden box for fear that it is "loosing its structural integrity" and the other was an equally exciting rock covered in snow. We then went to an old inn and from there headed off to Ebeltoft. Ebeltoft is renowned for their beautiful beaches, their lively summer cottages, and their wonderful festivities... in the summer. In the winter they are renowned for grey skies, bleak, flat landscapes, and the epitome of stark direness. That's harsh, but true.

We hung out at this folkhjskole which is a kind of a commune of sorts in which students come to take time to study philosophy and the humanities, this particular one focused on film. An although this school is focused on free expression, breaking out of the mold of ordinary life, and exploring the existential questions of life through film, the movie they happened to be showing the night we were there was none other than "Twilight: New Moon". So on my birthday I was forced to watch one of the most painfully horrible films in the history of my twenty years in a school dedicated to preserving the sanctity of film.

From there we went to Odense and visited a museum on modern art and mass media called Brandts and then visited TV2 the largest media group in Denmark. We met the "Anderson Cooper" of Denmark, Johannes the host of News at 7 and were off again to Kolding. We arrived at our hostel and were promptly provided with beer, courtesy of our school (gotta love Europe), and had a lovely, drunken dinner. From there we went out to each of the three bars located in Kolding, only to find that everywhere we went there were either other American students from our school (there were 100 of us in a town with a population of 500, or so it seemed) or middle aged men playing ballads from the jukebox. We ended the night with pizza slices the size of my upper body, literally, and found our way back to the hostel with the help of some seriously inebriated Finish boys who only could say, "America... it's good. McDonalds and Desperate Housewives. That's good, real good. Cheers to America!"

The next day we went to this incredible art museum called Trapholt and saw this incredible artist (check him out at http://www.petercallesen.com/) who makes art out of single sheet of white paper which are beyond incredible. Oh and there was an exhibit on Danish chairs, too. Lots and lots of chairs, none of which you could sit in.

Needless to say the trip was awesome, although gave us all a rather bleak view of the Danish country-side. There was some bonding among communication students (it was a trip designed for each "core class", mine was communication and there were 36 of us) and some breeding of severe dislike as well. Most of my group was great, but I did manage to find three girls who epitomized everything you should hate about the picturesque sorority girls because they were it. They complained about not having their Blackberries, God forbid, and how they were going into withdrawals from not being able to check Facebook whenever they wanted. And they chatted about how they hate the water in ketchup and proceeded to ask the waiter for "less watery ketchup" and "new fries because the ketchup water touched them". Needless to say, it's been good. As we speak I am planning my trip to Berlin, Prague, Greece, Crete, and maybe Istanbul in March and then some weekend trips to France, Budapest, Amsterdam and getting my visa for Ghana! Oh man, this is heaven.