Denmark is Good Eats

Hi All,

I got a head start on feasting season with an epic Thursday-Friday doubleheader this past week. Considering my usual three meal rotation of rice and beans, noodle stir-fry and lentil stew, I was pumped for something a bit more substantial, and Denmark delivered.

On Thursday, the Fulbright Commission invited all the scholars to an (early) Thanksgiving dinner at their new Copenhagen offices. It was great to see everybody again after being scattered around the country for the past two and a half months. I was reminded again how diverse are projects are: iron-age swordsmaking, modern digital xylophone, Kierkegaard's concept of love and torture in the contemporary context, just to name a few.

The dinner featured 3 turkeys (albeit smaller than normal) as well as staples such as stuffing, green beans, and potato casserole. We also had more Danish fare such as tuna cakes, salmon and rye bread.

On Friday, all the students in my department at the university had a "Julefrokost," which literally translates to "Christmas Lunch." Julefrokost is a big Danish tradition and one has many of them throughout the Christmas season with different groups of friends and finally one's family. The "lunch" is a classically large meal with many courses that can last several hours.

Our Julefrokost featured several salads, breads, cheeses, herring, frikadeller (Danish meatballs), red cabbage, falafel (?) and one of the best pork tenderloins I have ever had. The eating and talking was broken up on numerous occasions by schnapps toasts and the singing of traditional Danish songs that I couldn't understand a word of. After thoroughly stuffing ourselves, I expected some equivalent of the post-Thanksgiving dinner ritual known as falling asleep while watching football. Nope. Turns out the post Julefrokost tradition (at least among university students) is to dance wildly to Euro-pop.

I'm back to cereal and PB&J for the time being, but here's hoping I get invited to more splendid meals in the near future. I'm off to the Netherlands (Leiden and Amsterdam) next weekend so next blog post should have reports and pictures from my first extra-Danish exploration.

Daniel

Denmark is Only a Few Hours from Berlin

Hi All,

Today is the twentieth anniversary of the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. There are celebrations in Germany and a plethora of articles in newspapers and on the web about the significance of that spectacular visual monument to the end of the Cold War. I wish I'd known it was coming up so I could have arranged a trip to Germany to see all the festivities.

The Wall coming down (and the Wall itself) has always been a strange phenomenon for me. It happened before I was old enough to remember it and signaled the end of an era I never experienced. At Rice, one of the "cool things" on the campus was a piece of the Berlin Wall. I mostly remember how little significance it held for me.

In my perspective, Germany has always been one country and the Soviet Union something that I never feared. I remember being very little and playing some sort of submarine game at our local pool in which all the participants had to pick an army to be. When asked, I answered that I was the U.S.S.R because U.S.A. had already been taken and I assumed that because they sounded similar they must be almost the same thing. A kid yelled "Ah, he's the Russians," surprising the hell out of me. U.S.S.R. meant Russians?

I was a party last Friday and found myself talking to some Germans from Berlin. It never occurred to me to ask them what they thought about the anniversary, but I now I really wish I had. If it feels weird for me to reflect on the end of an era I never experienced as an American, what must it be like for them? I imagine if I had asked, they would have avoided the subject. It must be hard to see all the evidence of East and West for your whole life without ever experiencing what it was really like.

While the anniversary of the end of the Cold War is important for the significance it holds in the minds of those who lived through it, for me it is a chance to reflect on the post-Wall world that I have lived in for almost my entire life. It is my hope to spend some small portion of my year in Europe traveling through the former Communist Eastern states. I am positive that should I go to Poland or the Czech Republic or Hungary, there will be McDonald's there to greet me. The people there will probably gripe about how the Recession has affected them, just as they are doing in Copenhagen or Durham.

The Wall coming down was a triumph of people over oppression and a moment of immense hope. But what have we made of that moment? A couple of articles I read today lamented the missed opportunities. A great op-ed by Slavoj Zizek in the New York Times talks about how former Communist leaders in Eastern Europe quickly learned how to play the capitalist game so as to maintain their power and riches. This piece by Matt Taibbi outlines, with a sensationalist bent, how investment banks gamed the American political and economic process to make billions in bubble after bubble. It's almost as if after Capitalism won, it had to flaunt its victory by assuming its most evil form.

And, despite the triumph of '89, there are still walls. Not even just figurative ones. As my good friend Clint pointed out on his facebook profile, Palestinian youths celebrated the anniversary by tearing down a section of the wall that separates them from the rest of Israel. Until they got tear-gassed and rubber bulleted into submission.

Denmark is Fundraising

Hi All,

As most of you know, I've been selected to be a member of the Sierra Club's student delegation to the UN Climate Change Conference taking place this December in Copenhagen. Myself and 19 other young people from around the United States will be able to attend negotiation sessions in which governments will attempt to reach an agreement on how to combat climate change.

I'm in the fortunate situation of not needing a plane ticket to Denmark or a place to stay while I'm here, but the same can't be said for the rest of the delegates. With that in mind, I'm helping the group raise money to offset their expenses. A plane ticket costs anywhere from $600-$800 and the group will need to pay for accommodations and food as well.

If you would like to help a wonderful group of young people realize their dream of preserving the planet for future generations, please make a contribution to this group.

I've created a website:

http://danielhc.chipin.com/sierra-student-coalition-delegation-to-cop15

that will allow you to make a donation with your credit card. Considering my location, I think this will be the easiest way to do things. The donation goes straight to my PayPal account, and I will then transfer the money to the group.

Thank you so much and I promise that I will post a *real* blog entry in the near future.

Daniel

P.S. I'll probably be sending out an email with a similar message, so I apologize in advance if you have to read this twice.