still scanning.

most of this stuff is "process work" or as it will be known for the duration of this project, "space filler." we're going for emotion over technical accuracy, here.

hey, it's study abroad.

scanning.

is what i'm doing right now, and since it takes a long time, i'm also telling you a story. and probably making lots of typing errors because

1. i am in a danish computer lab. so when i try to hit the key for the thing with two dots that i can't remember the name for because i haven't slept yet, i get this- Æ. colon, that's what i was trying to say. also, when i try to hit the apostrophe key, i get this- Ø.

iØm sorry, but how are these letters?
(incidentally, the question mark key, also hard to find.)'

2. haven't slept. which is normal enough for grad school and for me, but this time there is a story


and the story goes like this here:


i have this professor named heinrich. he's austrian and he's an adjunct at risd and he's adorable in that sweet old man with the rambling story kind of way, but not in the i want you to give engaging lectures and teach me and make sense and listen and explain stuff kind of way.

this is important for the next part of the story. if you are in design school, skip this part. this is the definition of a desk crit: the part of the project where you work really hard and then the professor walks around to look at what you are doing and tell you why you are stupid, ugly and should drop out of school.


most desk crits are challening, but in a helpful, making you a better person sort of way. desk crits with heinrich go like this. you explain where you left off last time (because he DOES NOT REMEMBER WHO YOU ARE, I PROMISE) and then he tells you a story about this time he went to a museum with his wife or the movie we saw in kolding (inception! so good! everyone on the facebook was right!) and then he takes a piece of paper and draws over your carefully drafted plan like that creeper little boy from the ring. every. single. time.

for two weeks.

and then finally you think you have everything figured out ( and your project is due in 4 days so you'd better, right) so you stay up really late and you spend 18 hours on drawings.


so that when he comes and does the ring thing on your drawing, you cry like a baby, and i don't mean you tear up, i mean you weep. to someone you don't know. in a room full of people you don't know. and it makes you feel super grown up.

and just because i know you think i'm exaggerating because maybe i did THAT ONE TIME i want to show you what heinrich drew on my plan yesterday at 3pm.
























yesterday being friday. my project being due monday. turns out, designers don't sleep in copenhagen, either. school's great. you should defintely go.


disclaimer for my mother or anyone else who might actually be worried: okay, really, i'm finished with my drawings because of the staying up and i'm going to go to sleep and then build a model and i'm great and school's great and heinrich let me cry for an hour and said some lovely things about my work ethic and how he would stand up for me in my crit. total grandpa material.

falling down.

in the midst of our final project, we took three days last week for another study tour, this time to the western part of denmark. naturally, like nearly all things danish, the study tour was fascinating and inspirational, however awkwardly timed it may have been.

we now have one week left before our exhibition goes up, which is, if nothing else, entirely laughable. ask me how many drawings i have completed. or models. or if indeed, i have anything resembling a project.

the answers to those questions are none. half of one. and no, not even a little bit. but i HAVE been thoroughly enjoying copenhagen, although i don't see that on your list of questions.

so obviously, yesterday i deserved a break from the studio, right? ok, no, i didn't. but my roommate caroline called to say she had just enjoyed a delicious salad and coffee from a new cafe we hadn't tried yet and wouldn't i like to come join her? and i would, as it turns out. especially once she uttered the magic words "sauteed goat cheese."

and i do not ride my bike with my computer. ever. because this would be a stupid thing to do. so stupid. how can i rephrase this. it would be really, really dumb.

but i haven't fallen off my bike yet. you know, in a whole five weeks. and there was no one in the studio to watch over my pretty computer while i was eating goat cheese so i had to take it with me. now, the reasonable thing to do would be run the computer home, bike, eat goat cheese, bike home, park bike, retrieve computer.

well, i am stupid. and unreasonable. and so i did not do the reasonable thing, but instead did the stupid thing. [bike, eat goat cheese, bike. all with the computer]. i figured if danes bike with their actual babies (and not just electronics that they love like a baby) i could do it.

i guess you could say i miscalculated on they following grounds:
1. i am not danish
1a. i have not been biking every day since i was 2 weeks old
2. i was pretty super nervous about the fact that i had my computer in my basket
3. this particular cafe is located in the middle of a construction zone
3a. with lots of one way streets that i had to bike the wrong way down
4. i was going a little too fast
5. i swerved to not get hit by a car and die
6. i fell and it hurt and i broke my bike

this might be the best time to say "MOM I AM FINE AND SO IS MY COMPUTER AND I WILL CALL YOU LATER, I PROMISE"

that being said, my hands and knees were shaking like dried leaves and i all but ran with my wheezing bike to the cafe so that i could check that i hadn't killed my darling computer (i hadn't), but i do have to make a trip to the bike hospital today. although, i am thrilled beyond words that i rented from a reputable bike dealer instead of buying a bike from the sketchy police auction. because i knew the day would come when i had to walk into the shop and say "here, i'm, as previously mentioned, functionally inept. please fix this"

and that day is today. do i even need to say what i learned here? don't bike with the computer, which i knew already. don't bike the wrong way down one way streets, which i probably knew, too. don't be stupid. stay home. do your work.

oh, but the goat cheese? while i won't go so far as to say "totally worth it," i will say, "delicious."

rocking out-ish.

last night i went to fredagsrock at tivoli, which has nothing at all to do with fraggle rock even though that's all i can think of when i see the sign, but is, rather, a friday night outdoor rock concert at a 100 year old amusement park, which, i must say, walt disney ripped of in some pretty obvious ways.

an amusement park where the mascot is a white clown. we'll leave the entirely too disturbing implications of this aside for the time being.

this friday was a big deal with a capital B (or F?) because the band playing was dune, a young danish rock group. my lovely danish friend maria took me, and she has watched the documentary on them (i'm willing to bet more than once) so she could tell me who has dated whom and where exactly they are from and that now they live in berlin and they are all about 21 but have produced several albums.

in return for this kind cultural gesture, today i dragged maria around to multiple tourist attractions. she was a real trouper, and to be perfectly honest, i think she loved the excuse to actually go see stuff that as a regular copenhagener she would normally be too cool to go see. including, but not limited to, the renovations of the crown prince and princess's residence in amelienborg palace. what makes this renovation so cool is that they invited danish artists and designers to give modern twists (like some truly awesome murals) to the castle, which i think is nice and generally unheard of in other stuffy royal-type places. plus it only took about 45 minutes to walk through and decide that, yes, thanks, i would love to marry a danish prince.

and now i will stop because this is getting eerily close to a recap of my day, which is something i promised you i would never do, ever.

although, i might add that i gave directions to a dane today. sure, it was directions to the street where i live from about a block .5 away, but you best believe i'm still going to brag about it.

let's just say there was a lot of ice cream.

and leave it at that.

last week was spent in a whirlwind tour of sweden and finland. they are lovely places, about which, to be frank i don't remember much because it was a blur of sketching and record high temperatures and candy and truck stops and bus rides and wearing the same damn shorts every day because of aforementioned record high (unpredictably so) temperatures and alvar aalto and definitely not sleeping.

oh, and then there was the ice cream. and even though it was never as good as it is in copenhagen, which is never as good as it is in the south of france, i still ate it.

and while i said let's leave it at that, there is one more thing: someone needs to set a thriller in finland. because if you let it, that place can freak.you.out. there are just so many woodland spots and the language is very elfin and the people all kind of look the same in an extremely beautiful but not entirely un-creepy way and they are all VERY into death metal and during the winter war with russia they wore white uniforms and skied around and hid in the snow and shot people. russians, specifically, but tell me that won't give you the willies the next time you're in the woods in the snow. which probably won't be for a while, but still.

mostly, though, there is this:

one night, our first in finland, we went to this sauna by a small lake and saunaed and jumped into hypothermia-inducing lake water and cooked food over an open fire pit and i wanted to stay forever. from the lake, you can see this ski jump that is not in use, obviously because it is the summer, but some of my housemates and i decided to climb over and see it (because hiking is definitely something you should do at 10:30 pm in flip flops and a bathing suit. whatever, the sun doesn't set there).

i guess what i'm trying to say that it was unsettling in a way that could only come from a semi-abandoned old wooden ski structure that you happen upon in the woods. definitely when you stand on top of them and peer down, but even more so when your new friend greg tries to go open the judge's tower and the door IT WORKS, but only because someone previously broke the lock and like a bunch of idiot teenagers in a horror film, you all go inside and start climbing the stairs until someone starts finding dead bird skeletons and you all run down the stairs and scramble back to the campsite because some deranged, homeless, albino, elfish woodland creature is about to attack you in his white uniform with his skis and his gun.

or maybe his rollerblades, since it is the summer, and, for whatever the reason, rollerblading has yet to go out of vogue in the nordic region. because, if not downright popular, there at least does not seem to be any sort of social stigma attached to the sport.

of course, it always was supposed to be good exercise.

back to the tale at hand, we were spooked. i never really felt at ease in the country after that, particularly not after seeing some of the art that fins create (my personal favorite being a wall of old doll babies and with exchanged heads) and i'm dropping out of school to write a best-selling novel that takes place in the endless finnish forest.

but first: ice cream.

i've been dreading this post.

because, well, it's embarrassing. really, though, it's because i've been trying (with little to no success) to come up with a spin tactic that makes me not sound functionally inept to a handicapping degree.

we'll call this one: managing expectations.

i don't know if i've said this (and it is almost wholly irrelevant to this story, but worth mentioning because it happened a while back), but i moved again - on my third day here, actually, which was now quite a long time ago- to a lovely shared house in the center of copenhagen. i live here with about 30ish other students (10 on my floor, let's say) and it's quite nice and we share bathrooms with radiant floor heating and a truly beautiful and modern kitchen and if you want to see photos, please check facebook because i'm too lazy to post them twice.

speaking of my kitchen, and this is not, even the slightest bit related to my story, but is in fact another story entirely, which we will hereafter call: yogurt roulette, i'm eating yogurt that i bought today. with an august one expiration date. no problem, except that when i went to open it, i found that it was already open.

which is bound to happen in a house with 20million residents. but on the off chance that it was opened by a lunatic poisoner at the grocery and not by one of my housemates, know that i love you a lot.

yes, megan, i did still eat it.

the relevant thing about this is mostly that my new home is super convenient and within biking distance of everything, which comes into play later, in the retrieving part of the story.

here is the not retrieving part of the story. about 2 weeks ago or maybe a week and three quarters, we went on this day long bus field trip to various sites in northern copenhagen. we went to this residential place (in denmark it's called co-housing, and i think it used to be kind of commune-like, but now it's basically like living in a condominium complex and is therefore only exciting and interesting in that it is in denmark and not, i don't know, south florida).

and then we went to this church the most beautiful church i've ever seen. designed by jorn utzon (who designed the sydney opera house). and i'm having this whole experience and thinking this. THIS would be an awesome place to worship. and also i need to go to the restroom. and then the professor comes around and says we're leaving soon and so i go to the restroom. and when i go i SWEAR TO YOU that there were dozens of people milling around and i come out, what 2 minutes, maybe, later and they have all vanished.

with the bus. it always takes forever to load up that bus. but not this time. it was like the magic school bus with the red headed lady and they up and left me. and while bagsvaerd is not a terrible place to be left, generally i don't like to be forgotten, especially not in foreign countries and when i've been promised other beautiful places to see.

the short thing to say is they came back and my professor thought i was dumb.

but not as dumb as she thought i was later.

because later i realized that my bag seemed rather light, which normally would be nice, but not when it's because you've left your giant 35 mm camera here. incidentally, another gorgeous church, where, in my haste to NOT BE LEFT BY THE BUS AND SO I WILL JUMP UP IMMEDIATELY WHEN YOU SAY THAT MAYBE WE MIGHT LEAVE SOON, i left my sweet darling film camera sitting on a chair next to me. and i hate to admit it, but there was a small moment of weakness in which i thought "well, maybe i'll have to get a nice digi to replace it", but then i cried.

this is the retrieving part of the story: i called the next day and they had my camera. so i picked it up. this part is not very exciting, excepting that i rode my bike for a long time all by myself.

i guess what i'm trying to say is that both my camera and i were lost and found. and while camera has stayed relatively safe since, i was lost again, later, in finland. when i went to the bathroom.

so i guess if i've learned one thing, it's this: hold it.

this one's for you, colleen madigan pratt.

new skills:
ability to almost die

ability to almost kill others
signaling
changing gears

curb hopping upon
multi-tasking (e.g., able to hyperventilate WHILE avoiding head on collisions)

needs work:

bum muscles

ability to remember not to flex or otherwise abuse aforementioned muscles

ability to work keys

left turns

right turns

going straight

stopping

ability to mount/dismount without falling and/or being exceptionally un-ladylike

guess what i got, colleen.