Hi readers!

This will be my last post until I return from Sweden and Finland next Sunday! I will talk about my last 3 days here and what my big assignment is while I am studying here (I know everyone is dying from the anticipation).

Well--I wrote on Tuesday night I believe, so shortly after I posted that blog, I went to the club for the first time with my friends. It is called the Kulor Bar, which I have now learned later on from my Danish friends and from a bulletin board (in an advice section, a student wrote "You can do better than Kulor Bar") in the DIS main office that Kulor Bar is seen as pretty trashy but on Tuesday nights they offer free unlimited beer from 10-1 with a 60 kroner cover fee (that equals about 10 American dollars) so naturally all of us college kids were amazed at this awesome deal (I don't even like beer so I just went for the experience). It was pretty much the equivalent of partying at a fraternity, except everyone there was wearing sailor caps. Instead of wearing the ugly square hats on our heads like we do in America, Danes wear sailor caps for their graduation week, so the bar was just a large sea of white sailor caps. However, at fraternities, because I live in Indiana, we play country music along with mixture of popular rap music, top 40 or old classics (like Hot in Here by Nelly... yes that is considered an old classic now) but at Kulor Bar, its pretty consistently a mix of hits from like 2010 which was sort of entertaining. But it was dark, sticky and sweaty which is pretty comparable to a majority of large fraternity parties. However, there were no roofies which a lot of my friends here from other schools seem to strongly associate with fraternities. I am glad I go to a school with good Greek life where I am not scared of getting drugged. Anyways.. I digress.

Wednesday, we were assigned our big project for the summer! We are doing design work for a new restaurant being built here in Copenhagen. It has yet to have a name, but the concept of the restaurant is pretty neat and a very new idea. To start from the beginning of where the idea of this restaurant came from, I guess I should explain the water situation in Copenhagen. So, Copenhagen is a canal city (the Danish translation is Kobenhavn--which means "merchants haven") and therefore obviously there are a lot of canals and big boats and shipping and what not. The water was pretty polluted from all of this and not very safe to swim in, up until a few years ago (somewhere between 5-10 years) when the city of Copenhagen decided they were going to clean up all their water and become a green city. I am pretty sure they were named the world's Greenest City of 2014 or something along those lines, actually. So, now the water is all cleaned up and they now have these things called baths here in the harbor which are basically enclosed areas in the harbor sort of like swimming pools but with ocean water in them and things to jump off of and stuff. I have not been to one yet but I am hoping to make my way to one soon after the study tour if Copenhagen weather ever stops hating me. So, long story short--the water here is pretty clean although you still can't swim within like 24 hours of a large rain because the rain stirs up the pollution that still sits on the bottom of the canal. SO--here is the restaurant idea. I don't remember the nitty gritty details but basically these two guys were eating oysters or something fresh out of the harbor as some sort of publicity stunt on Copenhagen's clean water (something along those lines) and this inspired an architecture firm called Effekt to turn this concept of eating fresh out of the harbor into a restaurant.

Effekt is a urban planning, environmentally aware architecture firm in Copenhagen but they do work all over the world. They have done some pretty cool projects which they showed us all in their presentation leading up to their concept for the restaurant. Basically, they want this restaurant that sits on the water (they call it a pontoon) that has a big dock with removable square lids all over the dock in which they can lift up and retrieve the oysters that they want to farm below the dock. They have these stackable bins that are about 60x60cm that they will farm the oysters in which take about 2-3 years to grow and I think each bin contains about 100 oysters. They'll obviously have a lot of oysters from this and they have already made deals with restaurant around the city of Copenhagen to share their oysters with them (including Noma- the world's number one restaurant for about 10 years running--its about 200 bucks a plate). They want to be able to take the oysters from these bins and minimize their time from the water to your dinner plate... which is a pretty new concept. On this dock, they also want to have a small pool for educational viewing to watch how the oysters are farmed as well as space for a small farmers market where others can bring their local produce. They also mentioned something about catching fish and what not under this dock too but I am not quite sure. The concept for this restaurant has been heard of in coastal cities around the world, with many of them asking if they could be the lucky city to pilot the idea. I know two of the cities were New York City and Sydney. More information about the logistics of it can be found here (http://www.effekt.dk/#/oyster/). Anyways, our big project for the summer is to come up with a logo, name, poster, menu design, advertisement, brochure AND web design (no coding...thank the Lord). I am not sure if they will actually be using our stuff since they're still a few years out from the finished product (that'd be pretty cool if they did though). I am very excited as I thrive on having a lot to do and we will begin as soon as we get back from Sweden.

After we were assigned the project, we visited that Effekt studio where they gave us a presentation and it was definitely very interesting. Being from a small town, I have never put much thought into urban planning and all the cool things you can do with it. The city of Copenhagen prioritizes making their city a city for the people and not a city for cars, which is definitely not a concept you see a lot in America. A lot of urban planning firms get a lot of government funding to create really cool public spaces that allow people to interact and live, as well as projects that are helpful to the environment. While I don't necessarily think Copenhagen is the mot beautiful city, it is definitely one of the smartest and most creative from anything I have ever seen.

After the presentation at Effekt, we went to go visit the site where they plan on putting the restaurant where it of course started randomly pouring rain on us while the sun was still shining bright (never again will I ever complain about Indiana weather being sporadic...it has nothing on the weather here). The rest of the day while I was in class was beautiful, so I decided to go to the beach after class. However, as soon as I got to the beach, the sun hid away in the clouds and the temperature dropped about 5 degrees and got very windy. It's pretty much been like that everyday. Sunny and beautiful while I am in class, then chilly and gray as soon as I am done for the day.

Last night (Thursday), I went to Frederik's graduation party. I took my friends Rachel and Morgan and we rode the train out to his house. It was very fun and the party was beautiful. It was much fancier than American graduation parties, however. While we are used to pulled pork, snack foods and cakes, they had multiple courses of very delicious food such as steak, shrimp, potatoes, and vegetables. It was very nice to eat a nice meal that wasn't peanut butter and jelly, since that's basically all I eat here.

Frederik's friends were quite impressed with Morgan and Rachel's beer pong skills (they think that's all we do in American colleges), but my "celeb shots" were less than stellar. I did learn though, that the first things that often come to mind for Dane kids meeting American kids are kegs, selfies and Justin Bieber. When my friend Morgan said she didn't like soccer, one of Frederik's friends said "Oh so you are not a sports girl...you are more like a Miley Cyrus", which I found very entertaining. We were also asked a few times throughout the night how often we do kegs (never), if we took a lot of selfies (nope) and if we were beliebers (We are 20-22, not 12). Seeing the perception of Americans from the outside is definitely interesting, and quite funny. Actually, since they do Nutella instead of peanut butter here (oh yeah, apparently a lot of Danes find the concept of PB&J absolutely repulsive), the most common jar of peanut butter is plastered with little cartoon pictures including the Golden Gate bridge, a football player, a pink convertible (LOL), the Chrysler building and the Capitol building. That's America for ya, folks.

On that note, it is time for me to begin packing for Sweden & Finland which I will write about when I get back. Until then, I hope you all have a great week celebrating Independence Day in the land of the pink convertibles, selfies and kegs.

XOXO,
Not Gossip Girl (Bean)