Day 41 - February 10

It’s been over a week since I updated. Oops! We got another half inch of snow yesterday, but today some of the ice on the canal has melted, so I don’t mind as that means it’s actually been warmer here.



Back to the Wednesday before last.

I talked to Danish Immigration Services (who also deal with residence permits) – no extension of a visa for me. It took me about a week longer to get a final, definite answer that there was no way for me to stay in Denmark and/or return to fly out of Copenhagen after my field school in August. However, though my visa expires July 15, I am allowed in the UK, because it is not part of the Schengen Agreement which most of Europe is in, so there I will stay until August 15, when I return to the states (if Alaska can be considered “the states” ;-) ). No real complaints here, except that they could have been more straightforward in giving the answer. However, there are plenty of areas in the UK I have not explored, and plenty others that I would return to, so I would say two weeks of travel and two weeks of digging in the dirt is not too bad of an option.

I took a trip out to the botanical gardens to see what they looked like in the snow. Still very pretty. There was also a party of little schoolkids walking in the garden. Now, I think small children are universally cute, however, small children in cold climates win the contest for cuteness. It’s the bundling up, and Denmark takes the cake. The children here all wear full-body snowsuits, and trumping two-by-two, hand-in-hand across the garden was a cuter sight than anything in the snow-covered garden.







Getting home, I was excited to find a slip in my mailbox saying I had a package. It was, to my surprise, located at the farther post office, but I dutifully took the metro and then walked to the post office, showing two forms of ID (one with my address, one with my photo), only to learn that it had been a mistake and my package was supposed to be stored in the closer post office. They were, at that moment, probably going to my kollegium to attempt to deliver it again, and then it would sit at the closer office. So I get back, no slip in my box – and I wait for it to come…but it never does. Turns out if a person is not home, they mail the pick-up slip to them…so my excitement at receiving my first care-package diminished and was disappointed by learning that it’s not just the U.S. Postal Service that has problems.

To cheer me up, however, that night we had a Danish Christmas dinner, cooked by the lovely Bo, our resident-Dane. He had never actually cooked one before, but it turned out wonderfully. I did not perform my usual taking of photos, but we had pork roast, potatoes, carmelized potoatoes (I need to learn to make these), and cooked red cabbage. For dessert, we had risengrød, which is rice cooked until very soft (about the consistency of grits) with butter, and cinnamon sugar on top. So good.