cimorene

I was there with six female classmates, our teacher and the school's dapper little vice president, and our Finnish co-participants from two other community colleges elsewhere in Finland from our collaborative anti-racism project.

( The ranting about the wasteful, stupid scheduling and the misleading advertisement of the trip )

We were given our freedom at dinnertime Tuesday and Wednesday, from 2-7pm Thursday, and up until 1:30 on Friday, so I think that by visiting Christiania and one museum we actually did pretty well. Stuff happened:

Had vegan food from a homecooking potluck restaurant thingy place in the hippie independent region Christiania on Thursday afternoon. My graphic designer classmate and I both wanted to go there, and several of our other friends tagged along, but two of them got scared because they had somehow failed to grasp from our numerous explanations in advance that there would be a lot of pot and hippies, which are apparently ~super scary~ things. The food was delicious.

Saw the Little Mermaid statue.

Visited the Danish National Museum on Thursday. Wandered around inside by myself and was really impressed by the Danish history part. There's a room full of enormous Viking runestones and a lot of other archaeological things going back to Denmark's prehistory - Viking longships and human sacrifices and now-extinct animal species from a bog, weapons and armor and coins and a ton of stuff from medieval churches, an awesome statue of St George and the dragon where the dragon is making a hilarious face. Also saw a couple of temporary exhibits which were cool. Then I went to the "ethnographic" wing - not on purpose, because I expected it to be enraging just from the name, but I kinda got lost, and it was. Also a bit smelly and a lot of stuff severely poorly labeled. I get the feeling there may have been some budget cutbacks in the museum, and the Danish history part is really the only part that's been safe.

Was severely underwhelmed by the hostel (Generator, a chain). Our 6-person room was very small; my mattress & duvet had suspicious stains. There was a faint smell. There was NO SOAP. The reception desk, which is staffed by young foreigners from all over whom I STRONGLY suspect are underpaid, sells things like toothpaste and soap for an extremely steep price. They also rent hairdryers for an extremely steep price. They also don't rent hot water kettles, but offered to SELL us hot water, one cup at a time, from their bar, at a cost of 5kr, around 66 cents in €. The bar is open all night and there's a terrace attached which was under our window, and it produced wall-rattling horrible eurodance music and really loud conversation all day and all evening till quite late.

( Surprise hookah bar + nobody expects the surprise butthurt racists! )

( Went to bed in single-sex hostel room with my classmates. Woke up with a strange man in the empty bed that we had in fact already pre-paid for. In conclusion, what the fuck, Generator hostels? This is some potentially dangerous, definitely illegal, highly sketchy, extremely fucking stupid bullshit. )

After that I went to Designmuseum Denmark with my Mexican classmate. It was amaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaazing. I am now a big fan of Danish modernist designer Hans J. Wegner, whose life's ambition was to design "just one good chair".