Settling In

Well, I am in my apartment and it is nothing special. Its like a big dorm room...of course its a castle compared to that dump where I lived in SD. My roomate is from Singapore and he is studying English liguistics in Denmark....ok? He seems really nice but I have not really had the opportunity to talk to him much. Apparently this weekend we had a "hurricane" here in Denmark...the worst storm in 5 years. Well, these folks have not seen anything! It barely rained, but I will admit that the wind was crazy...it was hard to walk in.

Nothing really exciting has gone on yet. I have had a couple classes and I have to say that Danish is by far the hardest language I have ever tried to learn. I do not know the people in my class and I am not sure I would like most of them anyway. There is about 12 people in the class and a bunch of goofing around and stuff...we are university students right? I can tell some of the students find it as obnoxious as I do, but in settings like that it is always the lowest common denominator that reigns.

So I have a couple gripes about Copenhagen, at least initially. First of all, it is way too expensive here. I just paid $60 for probably a half a week of groceries. I paid $6 taking the metro to class (this has to be done everyday!). Also, too many people smoke here and they smoke everywhere...of course, few places are as enlightened as CA with the no smoking inside laws...a little proof that I reside in the superior state of the union! Final gripe...there is trash in the streets everywhere. Like people just throw whatever on the ground when they are done. Now we all know the US is a dirty country...and having just left Houston I can attest to the most disgusting city in the US. For the US I have to say that our dirty is from emissions...auto or industrial...and groundwater pollution, etc...regular americans tend to throw trash out and not just on the ground. In SD when the out of towners blow through and leave a mess we pick it up and we give them hell for the mess. Here people walk right by and drop more stuff. I must say that free education and healthcare is wonderful, but if I was paying the astronomical taxes that Danes pay I would at the very least demand some kind of public work to PICK UP THE TRASH!