September -rest of the study tour

Hello everyone! Its been a hectic past few days...  But enough about that, you'll hear soon enough. For now, back into the study tour!

Day TWO of study tour

Friday morning I struggled to wake up...  not enough sleep and the lingering effects of my cold made getting up difficult. I hurried through my morning rutine, and finally made it to breakfast. It was surprisingly good concidering how spartan the hostel we were at was (basically a bunch of camp cabins built in a continuous row) breakfast was pretty good! I ate with Flemming, our bus driver. We chilled over coffee and talked Danish news. Good time that was...  after breakfast we boarded the bus as a class and, as one, all fell asleep again.

When we finally arrived at our destination, we all groggily stepped out into an even larger Danish navel base.  We saw a destroyer along with several corvettes...  was quite an amazing sight. What wasnt, was the lecture that followed. We were brought into a war room (with a large circular table, it was awesome) and were presented with the most tedius two hour slide show I've ever seen. We now all know the logistical repair procedure of every missle tube in the Danish navy. Huzzah. We all (including our teachers) made fun of extended ranged ammunitions and economical designs until we finally arrived at our last lecture of the trip. We stopped at an army base, and had a long discussing with the army branch of the millitary police. While their job was the same, they had a very different mentality than the naval branch. These guys were just as interested in treating prisoners well, but they were a lot more aggressive in when they would accept detaining people. I guess it came with the territory. You spend your time on a terrifying warship, you don't really have to be that afraid of the people your capturing. The army branch served in afghanistan, so they clung much tighter to millitary gung ho ideology. Was a very good and enlightning lecture.

After we finished the academic portion of the day, we went over to the nearby city of Aalborg to explore. Myself and a few friends, after being very clearly ditched by our teachers, got some delicious shwarma, and wandered around for a while, before we took a class tour of the Utzon Center. This building was designed by and then later named in honor of Jørn Utzon, archetect of the sydney opera house and inhabitent of Aalborg. It was a fascinating museam, which included a small exhibit on cybernetics research, an amber making studio, and a number of other interesting exhibits. The archetecture of the place itself was fascinating...  a mixture of practicality and art. For example, many of the rooms had towering, pinched top ceilings, which I later discovered were acustically designed for specific tasks. In a large showroom, they were designed for anyone in the room to hear anyone else perfectly. In the library, they were designed so that the conference area could not be heard anywhere else. All and all, I had a lot of fun!

After all of this, we went over to our hostels, picked up bikes from a rental place, and had a wonderful dinner at a little dinner on the outskirts of town. Got to know my classmates quite well, and I was surprised by how much the teachers interacted as equals with all of their students. I talked to Ulric for quite a while... I'm really starting to like our professors a whole lot. After dinner we biked to and waded into the sea. After wading into the water (and maaaaybe sampling an authentic danish bitter to warm up a little bit) we went into a woods, where we had a bonfire and spent time as a group. We cooked dough on sticks (ever had white bread on a stick? not quite as good as it sounds...) and swapped jokes for most of the night. When we finally got to bed, we pleasently discovered that the hostel we were staying out was MUCH nicer than the one before, and included modern amenities such as couches, television sets, even windows that closed all of the way. After a game of ping pong and some socializing, I went to bed and fell asleep.

Day THREE of the study tour

On saturday, we all woke up, got out of bed, and met in a small dinning room for breakfast and to pack lunches for the next day. By some miracle, I was one of the few people of the group who actually felt pretty well rested! I had a quick breakfast, packed a lunch with the available cold cuts and little poppy seed rolls, and explored the hostel a little bit more. I found and used the trampoline. Extensively. But pretty soon everyone else came out, and we set out on our first event of the day...

We were going to go biking. Our destination were some bronze age barrows, but we swung by a few other interesting places on our way, including the beach again, a historical garden, and a large forest preserve. Biking was actually really fun! The bike I had rented was reletively nice, and it was a great way to get some excercise and see the Danish countryside. We never found the tomb mounds, but we did make it to the beach. We were almost back to the hostel when it started raining, but we just took shelter in town and had coffee until the rain stopped. It was a really great way to spend three hours...

We dropped the bikes off, hopped back onto the bus, and drove to our final stop on our study tour: a botanical garden near Aalborg. We look around for around half an hour (it was beautiful...  I'll try to find the name and steal someone's pictures of it off facebook) and then ate lunch and had an academic QandA session with our teachers. Completing it, we got back onto the bus for the final time, and stared the long journey back to copenhagen...   It took a long while, half of the day. I spent the time watching two movies on our bus's tv system (our bus was awesome): Babel and Munch. Both depressing, intense, and very well made. When we finally got back to Copenhagen, I discovered that no trains went to and from where I was and home for three hours, so I took a long walk, found some fellow students, hit a bar a tried Fisk (a wonderfully mentholish Dane drink) before heading home, walking through the dark to the house, and crashing in my wonderful bed. It was an amazing three days, and I can't wait to find out what the long study tour to Kosovo will be like.

Next time...  the week that followed!  Hope to hear from everyone soon!