culturally disconcerting

This is what I saw at the train platform yesterday morning on my way to school. Lovely, yet extraordinarily depressing and disconcerting. Because soon instead of a lovely sunrise, all I will see is darkness. I am SO not excited for that.

Of course, much more happened yesterday than just a sunrise. In fact, it was a day filled with cultural experiences. I finally have a bike, which I rode to the train station on my way back into the city yesterday afternoon. It's still going to take some time to get used to having a pedal break again, but it's really nice to have another mode of transportation. For dinner I went on a picnic with some DIS kids and interns at the King's Garden. Kongens have is behind some castle and is filled with grassy lawn and sculptures, from the traditional H.C. Andersen one to modern ones. We played this game called Viking. It's a lawn game, kind of like bocce...kinda. There are five wooden blocks standing in a row on each side, and a bigger wooden block with a crown (the king) in between the two lines. Each side stands behind their line and has to throw wooden rods to knock down the wooden blocks on the other side.The rules are a bit more complicated than that, but that's the jist of it. It was a lovely day and a lovely picnic.

After the picnic I headed back to DIS with two friends, and eventually we met up with a bunch of other people and went to Christiania, which was celebrating its 35th birthday. That was even more of a cultural experience, and a lot of fun. We saw the very end of the fireworks from outside of the city. Inside there was a DJ and dancehall lights at the first main intersection. We danced there for awhile, and then wandered around for a bit. The party got a bit scary when someone started throwing homemade firecracker grenade things around, but luckily no one got hurt, just a little shook up and our group got separated. At 11 a concert started with a folksy old hippie band. They were really good, but it got really crowded, especially with Americans (at least with lots and lots of DIS kids). I left when the last person I had come with left (though I certainly still knew a good number of the people in the crowd) and followed him around for a bit, up and down the main street, running into more people we knew and talking to them. At one point, back by the concert, a Danish man asked if a group of us were from Spain or Italy. We obviously weren't Danish, but we didn't look like Americans. It was kind of flattering. A little before 1, after enjoying a cheap falafel sandwich from the falafel truck, I headed home, successfully taking the nightbus to Åvej.

I was probably the least intoxicated person at this intergenerational birthday bash (one old guy splashed his beer on his hair as the concert began, another made my friend do a sort of jig before he let him pass by through the crowd), but I still had a really great time. The communal spirit in the celebrating was awesome--the way the party took over the entire town, so you could be sitting in a café or bar or be at a concert or at a dance or at a bonfire, etc., and still be at the same party.