Something Truly Hip

It may sound cliche, but one of the first things that impresses itself upon you when you arrive in a foreign country is how much you stand out from the locals. It's incredibly easy to tell a foreigner from a Danish local - the tight jeans, perfectly styled hair, fashionable leather shoes, and general air of urban ennui make the Danes all look uniformly cultured. Copenhagen really is a city of hipsters - enough to put me to shame.

On Wednesday, I made it to class early and was extremely proud of myself. For lunch, the guys in my class and I discovered a schwarma restaurant close to the DIS buildings - where the food was solid and the prices were very reasonable. Our class was cut short, though, when everyone broke into groups and walked around downtown Copenhagen making observations of the Danish people. After all, Denmark is the highest-rated country for happiness - so it makes perfect sense that studying the Danes would give us a unique perspective on the study of positive psychology. After browsing around several shops in downtown Copenhagen with a few classmates, I went back to Hoffmans, listened to music for a while, and chilled with Kyle. The two of us, along with the two other guys in our Kollegium (Ryan and Hirsch), then went to a free dinner sponsored by DIS; the food and drinks were some of the best we'd had yet in Copenhagen. Before the evening wound down, Kyle and I tossed a disc at a local park, and he coached me on my Ultimate skills; then, we spent the rest of the night hanging with a few girls down the hall.

 A Public Park in Downtown Copenhagen

The next day, I arrived at the Positive Psych classroom to find that class was cancelled for the day - so the few classmates who hadn't gotten the memo and I decided to take a tour of the public parks in the downtown area. At our second stop, we visited a greenhouse that housed a ton of exotic plants - none of which were familiar to us. We then decided to take the S-tog (the Copenhagen subway system) to an old fortress in the northeast sector of town. It proved to be a HORRIBLE decision though, since we had no clue how the S-tog system worked and ended up having to backtrack several times. At one point, a girl from my class and I got separated from the others in a different station, but thankfully we managed to make our way back without too much trouble. The fortress was pretty sick though, which made up for all the commotion. After returning to Hoffmans, I got some cleaning done and chilled in our common room with my hallmates for a while.

 A Heavily Graffiti'd S-tog Station