Denmark? Bikes? Socialism? Yes!: The Return: Part 1

I'm back.

To Copenhagen, and the blog. Hopefully that'll go better this time around.

Anyway, I'm here for 14 months, working an IT internship, living in an apartment with two young Danes on the north side of Copenhagen, and just generally bumbling around the city. Pretty sweet stuff.

So I flew here. On a plane.

Look! Clouds! The flights were pretty relaxing. I got some reading done, some napping, listened to a few podcasts, and watched some Sherlock. Good movie, would recommend.

After landing at CPH, I collected my bags and box, and the stressful bit began: somehow getting a 55 pound bag; a 35 pound bag; a bike box packed with tools, a tent, and sleeping pad; and a carry on bag -- all onto the bike. Oh yeah, and I had to put the bike back together first.

It's funny, I had actually planned to take a picture of it once I got it all strapped on, but once loaded that heavily, the bike had an annoying tendency to flip over backwards it I weren't actively pinning it to the ground, so... no picture. Just imagine it looking as awful and hilarious as you can - that's pretty much spot-on.

The Apartment

I finally made it to my sublet, a charming little apartment on the 5th floor of a building in the north side of Copenhagen, a district called Østerbro. I have two roommates, who I thought were Danish, but it turns out they've just lived here for a few years, having immigrated from northern Germany, a few miles from the border with Denmark. Am I still getting the 'authentic Dane experience'? Close enough? Anyway, some pictures:

My bed. I did steal this from the apartment listing though, so it has the subletter's things on it.

My desk and a look out onto the patio.

View from the patio. All the buildings on the block form a sort of hyper-tall fence that creates a courtyard. It's a pretty standard layout in modern Copenhagen, originating maybe 40 years ago when most buildings not actually on the street (inside what is now the courtyard) were torn down, in a massive urban renewal wave. The remaining buildings are perhaps 100 years old, perhaps much older.

The living room.

It's a nice place, clean and recently updated. It's a bit small -- the shower is the floor of the bathroom, leaving only the toilet and sink outside the curtain -- but mostly functional. As expected, it is rather daunting to walk the entire way up multiple times a day (there's no elevator), but it's a fraction of the stair-climbing I do at work, so I guess I'll count that as a win.

Here's a map:

I live at the A, and I go just about straight south to get to work, somewhere around that big red dot. I'll prolly get bored and write about the commute, specifically, some other time. For now, I think it's enough to say I go between the A and the red dot at least 10 times a week. It's about 6 kilometers between them, not bad.

The Job

The reason I get to live in the aforementioned swank apartment, of course, is that I've got a 14-month internship at DIS, the program I studied abroad with two years ago.

You might be thinking, 'Why Nick, why settle for an internship when you've got a totally awesome liberal arts degree?', but this particular one has plenty of perks that make the title more than worth it. You'll get to hear more about those perks when they happen.

One quick example, though -- see this desk? See how it's got two legs on it? Yeah, those legs are motorized, so I can stand, sit, up, down, whatever fits my fancy.

Anyway, so I'm here doing IT work for my internship, mostly. That means, often, that I'm running around helping staff members with whatever ~~stupid~~ legitimate problem they've got this time. Yesterday, I had to explain to one staff member why his USB stick, plugged into an ethernet port, wasn't working.

I'm also tasked with becoming the in-house expert on SolarWinds, which is a fancy monitoring program that monitors our entire system and alerts us when it's messing up -- or, it will once I learn to configure it.

In a few weeks, the department will be setting up two new buildings for DIS, which means I'll also get to learn how to wire an entire building. Pretty bad-ass, I'd say.

And I repair personal computers as well, mostly software stuff but occasionally we replace some hardware too. Right now, my big project is re-imaging and generally repairing the roughly 20 spare laptops we have in the office. Scintillating stuff.

The Not-Job

Now, I'm only working around 40 hours a week, so I've got plenty of free time. The first week, I spent a lot of that getting a bank account, my immigration documents, all of that fun stuff. Now that I have all that squared away, I've been able to spend more time doing fun stuff like biking around the city, sitting around and reading in the parks (Joe - I think your book put me over the weight limit, but I brought it anyway. And it's a fantastic read!)

I've also been working on setting up an alternate operating system for myself on my laptop, but that gets jargon-ny so I'll just leave it at that.

I haven't been carrying my camera quite everywhere I go, so there's only 4 pictures of 'adventure' from these two weeks. BUT if you imagine parks, and roads, and stuff, you'll get the idea of what I've been up to.

My first Friday here, I went to an Afro-Cuban jazz concert. I'm not certain why, but it seems Copenhageners really love jazz. So, from the 5th to the 15th, Copenhagen hosted this wild, city-wide Jazz Festival. Most events had an admission fee, but this one did not. Freakin' sweet concert.