Peanut Butter and other "Canadian Delicacies"

When we first arrived in Denmark, we were completely shocked by the limited selection of products at the local grocery store. There is no Loblaw's, Superstore, or Costco in Denmark. Instead, there are dozens of small stores (about the size of a Canadian convenience store). In our local Netto, there are four aisles, as well as a small cooler section, and some fruits and vegetables.
On our first shopping trip, we noticed the lack of peanut butter. There was also no frozen juice, pasta sauce, tortillas, or beans. We were unable to make many of our regular recipes. We went into almost every grocery store we passed, hoping to find these "staples.”
Our menu soon adapted to the limited choices. And, after much searching, we would eventually find the ingredient we were looking for, in one Copenhagen's many small, ethnic grocery stores. (When we found peanut butter, we bought 15 jars).
Still, Marieke will not be satisfied until we can make every meal we could back in Canada. Every time we head for Copenhagen, she has a new list of "common" ingredients we need to find. So far, we have found: garam masala, bok choy, balsamic vinegar, sesame oil, tahini, wasabi powder, coriander, tempeh, tofu, miso, poppy seeds, black beans, chick peas, rhubarb, whole wheat flower, real maple syrup (Canada no. 1, medium), rice noodles and basmati rice.

Elections

I hear Canada is set for another election, so I’ve decided to write about my experience with Danish elections. For whatever reason, the Danish government decided to let me vote. In Denmark's last election, there was a swing towards right-wing, anti-immigration parties. Since this is having a direct impact on us (as “immigrants”), I figured I should take a stand.

Not knowing much about the political parties, I turned to the internet for guidance. Finding no English content on the parties' websites, I entrusted my vote to Wikipedia.org. There, I learned some interesting things (summarized below mostly for Berner’s benefit). Based on this research, I chose the Socialist People’s Party (not really communists) because they seemed to hate immigrants the least and support environmental initiatives.

At the polling station, I was handed two enormous ballot papers (about 1m long and 50cm wide). For the municipal election, there were 120 candidates and on the regional ballot, there were 340 choices. Thanks primarily to my votes, a coalition of the three most left-wing parties won both the municipal and regional elections.

For Berner:

• They have no senators (or other “second chamber”)
• They use proportional representation.
• There are seven large parties (listed from left to right): Red-Greens, Socialist People’s Party, Social Democrats, Social Liberals, Liberals, Conservatives, Danish Folkparty.
• The Liberal party is called “Venstre” in Danish, which means “Left.” They haven’t been left-wing for about a century, but they haven’t bothered to change their name. The Social Liberals (“Radikale Venstre”) are also not very left-wing.
• Since there are many parties, they always have minority governments. The party with the most seats does not necessarily get to lead the country, if a larger coalition is formed.
• The current federal coalition is between the Liberals and Conservatives. They have succeeded in implementing several anti-immigration policies, like tuition fees, language requirements for work permits (you have three years to become fully fluent in Danish) and restrictions on foreign marriages (you have to be over 24 to marry a foreigner).

Windmills, Windmills, Windmills

Over the past two weeks, I have not gone to much class. And not for the same reason I skipped class at Queen's (I'm not at home watching Law & Order). Instead, I've been on a series of field trips:

• I visited a large offshore windfarm in Southern Denmark. This is considered to be the future of wind energy, since the wind blows stronger and there are fewer complaints from the neighbours. This allows the wind farm to be much larger and produce power similar to a traditional power plant. However, the added costs of construction at sea are still way too high at the moment.
• The next day, I attended the Copenhagen Offshore Wind conference (COW). There were some interesting speakers, a bunch of flashy displays and they even arranged for interested students to meet with recruiters from Vestas and Siemens (mostly, to help us find thesis projects).
• Then last week, we visited Siemens to see how they fabricate nacelles (where the blades connect to the generator). I also visited Vestas to see how they make fibreglass blades. Both trips were interesting, but since both factories were over 3 hours from Copenhagen, we spent most of our time on the bus. It also highlighted the fact that working with wind turbines often means working in the middle of nowhere. (Another note: on the way back from our field trip, the bus driver made a stop for us to get beer, and the prof even joined in.

There's plenty of pictures of windmills in our photos

Christmas Beer is Here

Once again showing great confusion about when they should celebrate holidays, the Danes are already preparing for Christmas. The grocery store has a sign saying "Welcome to Christmas," and has started selling Christmas trees, decorations and "Christmas chickens."
The upshot of all this is that Tuborg has released its Julebryg (Christmas Beer). It was released last Friday at exactly 9pm, in a celebration called J-day. This is an annual event and it is a huge party. The beer is a bit stronger than usual (5.6%) and has a unique flavour. And, it is only available for the next two months.
After that, it's back to regular beer (Carlsberg or Tuborg) until the Easter Beer is released.

'Halloween'

Until yesterday, I had not truly experienced culture shock. I think it all really sunk in while we spent a quiet night watching TV. That’s right, on Halloween. No huge parties, no ridiculous costumes, no big bags of candy, no fun at all.

About a month ago, everything seemed normal: there were pumpkins on sale at the grocery store. I began to plan my trips to the Salvation Army to find costume material.

Then, on October 13 (not a typo), they celebrated ”Halloween.” From 5-8pm, children wandered up and down the main street, completing a scavenger hunt at local businesses (the strangest was pumpkin carving at the funeral parlour). There was no candy, no “trick-or treats” and few costumes (those who did wear costumes wore a cape and a pointed hat – either a witch or wizard).

For the next few days, there were pumpkins on some doorsteps, but they were discarded long before the 31st. So that was it, and yesterday night, we just watched TV and “celebrated” Halloween with pumpkin curry.

In memoriam of my Halloweens of Yore, I have set up a photo tribute.

The pull-out couch passes the test!

Two weekends ago, Maral (a friend from Queen's) visited us! She's doing her masters at KTH in Stockholm so she thought she'd come to visit and see København. Anthony and I had done some sightseeing and exploring in København in the last two months but we definitely saw a lot of new things with Maral.

We spent about 6 hours doing a walking tour of København on the Saturday, starting off at the little mermaid statue and ending up in Christiania. In Christiania we saw a lot of things that we hadn't seen before. We went in to an art gallery, saw a few shops we'd never seen and walked around a residential area that had really unique architecture. At the end of our tour (after we ate our what we considered obligatory Christiania falafels and 'dromkager'/'chokoladekager' we ended up sitting around a bonfire talking to a very friendly, drunk Christianite. We then headed to Nørreport station to meet up with a bunch of RUC friends. We ended up going to this quaint pub called The Elephant and the Mouse, but the three of us were exhausted after a long day of walking and left before 11.

The next day we decided to tour the Carlsberg brewery. Since Maral didn't have her bike with her our trip involved some sketchy doubling up on bikes (which is a 500 kr fine if you're caught). This was especially interesting since we only ended up getting to the end-of-tour bar at 3:30 (they close at 4:00). With two drinks each and annoyed bartenders demanding that we leave we ended polishing off our drinks in about 10 minutes (we spent some time taking pictures of the beer). I think we were actually the very last patrons to leave. The bike ride back downtown was interesting nonetheless (try chugging beer on a Sunday afternoon and then riding double on a bike). At least we didn't have to cycle all the way uphill back to Gentofte (I had my monthly train pass so Anthony and Maral cycled home).

I definitely a fun weekend! On Monday and Tuesday and Anthony and I had school so Maral did some touring around on her own. Tuesday evening Maral left to go back to Stockholm.

So...ya...the couch works so if any of you are in the area you have a place to sleep. (There are new photos of Christiania and Copenhagen).

Marieke's school

So...This is my first entry. A combination of our lack of internet connection at home and the poorly maintained computers at RUC (and I use to complain about the Dupuis cluster computers!) have sort of made it difficult to find time to sit down and write blogs. Usually when I'm at a computer, I'm in a hurry and I only have time to check email.

Anyway, right...I don't think that we any entries about my program (Teksam - stands for Institut for Miljø, Teknologi og Samfund). Just to give you a bit of a background, my school, RUC (Roskilde Universitetscenter), was built in the early 70's. Oddly enough when the land was sold to build the university, it belonged to my neighbour's daughter's fiancé's family (and by neighbour I mean my neighbour of 15+ years back in Ancaster). Small world? RUC is a different kind of univerisity, in that it was founded by the free-spirited hippies of the era who were tired of traditional lecture-style learning.

The department supports bachelor, masters and doctoral levels and offeres programs in both English (through the International program) and Danish. For the most part the Danes and the international students takes classes separately but they've been attempting to integrate the groups in the elective courses. So...My program is so incredibly different than Queen's engineering. First off....I have NO written exam!!! As for the structure, the first two months I
pretty much had class 5 days a week. I had a main course (which unorginally enough is called Main Course I), an environmental social science course, a problem based learning course and an environmental management field course. These serve to give you the tools to be able to work on your year-long project, so three quarters of them are pass/fail. The biggest differences for me have been having to do readings, having classes where participation is expected and having classes where attendance is taken (I guess they need an incentive for people to attend the lectures since the evaluation for some of the courses is so wishy-washy). For the rest of the year I had to choose some electives. So next month I'm taking a weekly course on transportation planning and in January/February I'm taking a weekly course on globalization. The rest of my time is devoted for working on my project.

For my first year project we've chosen to look at the sustainability of computers in terms of life cycle assessment. I'm working with two other people, a girl from China who has a law degree and a guy from Iceland who has a sociology degree. It's going to be really interesting working on a project like this with group members who have completedly different perspectives.

Kultur Natten

Kultur Natten (Culture Night) is an annual event in Copenhagen. With the purchase of a pass, you get free entry to museums, palaces and many other buildings. There is a huge variety of things to do, all over the city. There are special exhibits, shows, tours, performances and access to some areas that are usually not open.

We visited:

• a submarine - it looked huge from the outside, but was so cramped inside (how surprising)
• a frigate - Marieke loved the industrial-sized kitchen
• the parliament buildings - where we had a very entertaining explanation of Danish politics: "We are all Vikings, you know." Our guide explained why they don't have a senate, "since two chambers are less efficient" and apologized for only having 30% women in parliament.
• ruins beneath the King's palace - lit with small candles everywhere, and narrated in completely-incoherent Danish (for us at least)
• a Swing Dancing performance
• a sculptures museum, with all interior lights off, lit entirely by spotlights from outside
• a "recycled" art exhibit

It was all very interesting, and it seemed like everyone in Denmark comes to Copenhagen for this one night. Click here to see our pictures.