Norway yah!

I'm gonna start off by saying Norway is the most beautiful country in the world. Everywhere you look there are trees and hills. It's phenomenal. A cruise through some fjords was one of the coolest things I've ever done.

On top of the awesome site seeing, we gotta party with a bunch of cool Swedes we met on the boat. Hopefully we can have a little reunion in southern Sweden. This potential awesome party in southern Sweden completely makes up for the broken/dislocated/sprained/I-don't-want-to-go-to-the-doctor-to-find-out thumb. All-in-all, it was an exciting weekend. It was so fun I forgot that I was actually supposed to be at Oktoberfest with the Ryan Schmidtman.

So anyway, Friends is an absolutely awesome TV show. I never really watched it before tonight, I might have picked up an episode or two here and there. But I was never into it. I just randomly hopped into the beginning of one of those apparently classic Friends marathons in the middle of season two. I planned on just sitting down for an episode while I waited for my chicken Parmesan to bake, but I went through six and ended up missing almost the entire Vikings game, which was probably for the better. When I first started watching, the group was arguing about money and how half of them could afford shit and the others couldn't, Ross was with Julie the Asian chick, and Joey and Matthew Perry were losing a baby on the public bus. I went through the whole Rachel-Ross fiasco and I was hooked. I am absolutely watching this show from now on. I want to cry for Ross right now. I will no longer be productive ever.

/endrant


Anyway, here are three of my favorite albums of all time:

Kind of Blue
Cracked Rear View
More Than You Think You Are

Peace.

FM Belfast plug. And other stories.

So I've been working on travel plans and things of that sort, and it's actually really quite the pain to get all the details hammered out. I really am understanding the purpose of travel agents. Trying to book two weeks of travel, with planes, trains, places to stay, and things to do is kind of an overwhelming task. Luckily, we have a group together, and we were able to break it down. Britt, Emily, Ryan (perhaps???????????????), and I are gonna have an unreal two week break. Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, Barcelona, Rome, Florence, Venice, and Prague is a pretty solid goal at this point. The first few spots are still a point of contention, but this is basically what's going down. Before I even go on this trip, I have a week in London, and weekends to Oslo and either Stockholm or Krakow. I've been in Denmark for a month, it's bout time to do some serious exploring. That's all I got on this front.

But last night.. Last night I have things to discuss about. Alright, so it was a Thursday, and on Thursdays I have seven hours of class. I know, it's hell, because I can't even skip one or two like I would normally back at GAC. So Thursdays are incredibly long typically, but this week it was even longer. We had a field study for a class where we went to VEGA Concert Hall and watched a free concert and got free beer. Maybe field study isn't the best word they could have used to describe this. But anyway, we saw FM Belfast. To put it bluntly, it was probably a top three show that I have ever seen. I've never seen any band this energetic on stage, and I've never seen a concert where literally every person standing at any spot in the room was 100% all into it. The point of this paragraph was entirely to shamelessly plug this awesome band, whom everyone needs to get on. There music is almost misleading, because they sound kind of trippy on their CD, but live they just rock so hard. It is quite the change up, and it is definitely for the better.

Other than this, I still had a noteworthy Thursday. This week, Thursday was election day. Denmark was getting a new prime minister and a new parliament. I have a political rhetoric class on Friday mornings at 8:30am (my only class of the day). My professor for this class works as the campaign manager for the Social Democrat Party, whose candidate was leading the polls for new prime minister. As soon as it looked like the SDP had locked it up, he sent out an email saying that we won't have class tomorrow morning because he is going to be too drunk from the victory cele (much paraphrasing of course). So in one day, I had a professor bring us to a night club for class and another cancel class on account of him partying too hard. Reasons #123897 and #123898 why I love Denmark.

That being said, it's the weekend. Time for some brewery tours. Peace out.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xf_GTbcSlc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=km2iAAxb9is&feature=related

Everybody loves a good field trip.

I just returned from a few nights away from internet and Copenhagen. We had this study tour thingy where we visited businesses and banks, and while it was great fun and involved lots of alcohol, I learned lots! First, we went to Nordea Markets, which is some big investment bank. The main thing I took from this is that investment bankers are scum. The presentation consisted of the guy bitching about hating his job and how everyone he works with is an asshole who competes with everyone else to see who can have the hottest wife and nicest car (I might have paraphrased/took a few artistic liberties for the sake of storytelling). That was before he told us about all his early twenties co-workers who all got 2000% bonuses last year. You are the root of all financial evil, presenter man.

After we went to SaxoBank, which is some giant bank as well. I don't remember the last time I've been so bored. That place sucked. I don't even want to write about it.

Then we went canoeing and got to our hostel. We drank lots. On a related note, going to Europe was the greatest thing that has ever happened to my beer drinking ability.

We got up at 6am the next day to go to Bang & Olufsen, which if you don't know about it, look it up. It's rated the 5th coolest company in the entire world, ahead of Apple. I saw a 103-inch TV. It was nuts. After this trip, we went to the cheese caves. Yes, it is as awesome as it sounds. The entire situation of it is pure comedy to me. We spent all morning at the headquarters of some super high end company, all wearing business attire (which means girls wearing heels), and went straight to a cave, where we walked around on incredibly janky paths for like two hours on the way to this theater in the cave that plays movies on the walls of the cave over an underground lake and a storage room containing 300 TONS of cheese. So just to reiterate to preemptively combat any potential miscommunication, we had 30 Americans in formal attire in a cave in Western bumfuck Denmark trying to climb around a giant limestone cave on our way to a room filled with hundreds of tons of cheese. I personally find that entire scenario to be completely hilarious. I hope I'm not alone. But then we went to a hostel, out to some bars, and sang karaoke with Danes all night.

You know you are taking a great class when you get to go on a field trip to a brewery to do some major beer tasting with your professors. Just another part of my weekend.

So anyway, now that the whole boring story part of the weekend is out of the way, I want to share a list of lessons learned, in a randomly assigned order. So for those of you who braved through all that rabblerabblerabble, here we go.

1. Always take the scenic route.
2. Sleep is a waste of time that could be spent on seeing awesome things and meeting cool people. Starting my bare minimum sleep cycle immediately.
3. Beer is great. Cheap beer is greater. These two elements united is greater than the sum of its parts.
4. Since they don't really have Mountain Dew in Denmark (whenever you can find it it isn't real good), I initially felt bad about replacing my regular every day Dew consumption with beer, but after some deep thinking, it is definitely more healthy.
5. The financial industry is full of scum bags who would ruin the world for an extra bonus (apologies to anyone's family if this is directed at them, I generalize).
6. I had a professor tell me today that when he goes to bars he leaves his drink open when he goes to the bathroom because he has a twisted dream of getting roofied. I don't ever want to get roofied obviously, but someone I was able to derive a lesson from this, and that is to live life on the wild side. It is super cliche, but I am gonna extrapolate this from the roofie story and apply it here.
7. If you aren't good at Sudoku, you probably won't be good at them after you've been drinking.
8. I hope whoever karaoke is sitting on their own private beach in the Caribbean with a cold beer and a beautiful woman right now, because they deserve it.
9. I wish the exact same for whomever decided to put a 3rd and 4th wheels on the rolling suitcase.
10. If you have karaoke and don't have "Don't Stop Me Now" by Queen, the Miller High Life guy should confiscate your machine.

I might add more later if I can remember all the others I meant to write. Peace out. Tunes.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rH6Chrd6QPo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EEW-9NDM5k

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgzGwKwLmgM&ob=av3e

Just a check in

I haven't written anything in awhile, as I've been pretty busy doing Denmark things, like going cod fishing in the Baltic, going to futbol games, and drinking. It's all good fun. Again, I might not come home, just gonna invite all my friends out to live with me here. That would probably be best for all parties involved. I just wanted to check in so everyone knows I'm alive. Very much surviving and thriving. I figured I would share some of my gourmet meal recipes that I have developed with my culinary genius while over here. The first one is called a grilled sloppy cheese sandwich.

- One pound hamburger
- A bunch of ketchup
- A little less barbeque sauce than ketchup
- A plop or two or three of mustard
- 6 slices of cheese
- Two slices of bread
- Butta

Cook the hamburger then mix in your sauces into the meat to make sloppy joes. Then wrap up a whole bunch of the meat inside the 6 slices of cheese. Butter the outside of your bread, put the cheese ball of goodness between the slices, and grill it. Let cool. Dip in Sriracha..



The second is the grilled hot dog cheese.

- 3 hot dogs
- 4 slices of cheese
- 2 slices of bread
- Butta

Figure it out. And then dip it in Sriracha.



The third is stir fry.

- Rice
- Chicken
- An assortment of veggies
- Soy sauce

Cook the rice. Cook the chicken. Cook the veggies. Smother in soy sauce. Smother in Sriracha.





So that's about the extent of my cooking. It's a work in progress. As my skill increases, which it will rapidly, I will share the best. Even thought they will all be awesome.


And my tunes for the day are the last three songs that came up on iTunes shuffle. Deal wit it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqAvR5epLeI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ei3tyzbS0aw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJXv2qBuLIk

The places you will go, the people you will meet.

So I had class this morning, so I made the responsible decision and went out and didn't party. Instead, me and some dudes opted to hit some local microbreweries and check out the best taps Copenhagen has to offer. After a few hours of doing this, we decided to get back home at a decent hour to get a decent night's sleep, because we are just oh so dedicated to our academics. But we missed our train by like 30 seconds and had to wait an hour for the next train, que horrible! The greatest thing about Denmark is the lack of open container laws, so we just grabbed a few beers and parked outside the train station and chilled for awhile. That is all fairly irrelevant build up to what I actually wanted to talk about, but now you get the context.

The phrase "nothing good ever happens after midnight" is normally true. But sometimes the people you meet after midnight are the coolest. We were sitting on some steps drinking beer and some random homeless African dude came up to us preachin the Lord's word, "Brothers, God will save you, as you remember the most important thing in life, and that is brotherhood! Will you, my brothers, join me in a prayer?" And how are you gonna not join this dude in prayer? He went into this super deep prayer about the stars and the rising sun and your shadow, it was pretty neat. Then some dude we were with had a fifth of vodka and offered him a pull. He goes "The Good Lord knows I would never say no to such a thing!" So he drinks it, asks for money, and walks away. That is sketch dude #1 (the homeless African priest).

The second guy we randomly started talking to was some weird looking Finnish guy. After talking for a minute or two and him drinking most of my friend's vodka, he mentions something about how he hopes the cops don't see him there. Obviously sketched, we asked him what the hell he was talking about. Well, apparently he used to be a hitman, like ya know, the kind that gets paid to kill people. He was running from the cops because sometime within the last 48 hours, this dude stabbed a guy, but he wasn't sure if he killed him or not. I didn't want to believe him, because he was a super nice guy so whodathunkit? But this dude had a hood up, and was constantly looking over his shoulder, kind of bugging out watching out for cops. Then he finished my friend's vodka and speedily walked away. And this is sketch dude #2 (the Finnish hitman fugitive).

So this is why I might start hanging out around the train station late at night. Actually, this is probably why I won't. That might be the safer option.


Tune.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvDQy53eldY