A Kollegium of One's Own
Or, celebrating settling in by recounting a day
So much has happened in my first week here. I’ve met so many people and repeated the sentence “I’m May I’m from California no not from LA have you ever heard of San Luis Obispo no of course not its sort of in the middle yes great to meet you too” more times than I can count. Trying to shove every interaction and meal and coffee and adventure and mishap of the past week into a blog post is daunting and probably almost impossible, so I will tell you about Monday. Maybe if I give you an outline of a day, the rest of my life here will sort of color in around the edges.
rain or shine baby, or most likely both because Copenhagen weather has never met a forecast it couldn’t complicate.
I woke up at 7:15 sharp. It was more axial tilt’s fault than mine, because we have a wall of glass that we keep the curtains off of to let all the morning sun in. Everyone keeps telling me (in a tone usually kept for scaring a child around a campfire) how the sun is going to disappear forever come November, and with it most of my drive and will and personality, so we are soaking up the morning sun while it lasts.
I live in Mønten Kollegium, the former Royal Coin Mint, built in 1921. Apparently there is still a big old safe near our mailboxes. I share a room with Clara from Minnesota and I love her. She is very friendly, a powerful swimmer, extremely neat, and a regular coffee drinker.
Every morning we wake up in the kitchen–and also the living room and also the dining room because our apartment is, well, a room. (Save the bathroom, but it's determined to join the one room party because the door handle fell off and now we cant close it #roomatebonding). Still, our little Kollegium apartment is a sweet space. I look forward to coming back to it at the end of the day.
It has been warm in Copenhagen, a condition worth its weight in gold. The beautiful blonde Danish ladies walk around in flip flops, which are super popular and fashionable here. I find that hilarious because flip flops have been all the rage in California I think since the gold rush, so I am not new to this flip flop game and my inter-toe callus is firmly established. To make the most of this late summer heat, I decided to start my day with a yoga class at Absalon. Absalon is this rad community center in an old church where they hold huge communal dinners and movement classes. This is their website: https://absaloncph.dk.
I hopped on my bike and made to go across the bridge off my island, and quickly learned that here you should always leave 20 minutes before you have to be somewhere, because apparently bridges split in half for boats moving through the canal. It's wild to see, but I was filled with delusions of downward dogs slipping away from me and was blind with rage to the massive feat of engineering before me.
A whole crowd of bikers began to pile up at the edge and wait. I got caught in the bike traffic jam, watching the minutes disappear, and arrived so embarrassingly late and sweaty to yoga that they had already closed the doors. It had the same sort of feel as lighting a 10 dollar bill on fire and watching it burn.
Defeated by the bridge and turned away from yoga, I went to the grocery store to regain a sense of control over my life. There, in the very first basket I saw, were bell peppers labeled Product of California. It was the first thing I’ve seen that made me feel very, very far from home. I think it was because a small, ordinary piece of California can arrive in Copenhagen while I cannot casually return to it. It was then, standing and getting a little weepy in the produce aisle, pepper in hand, that it hit me: I was not going home for a while. I missed my mom. I bought the pepper and ate it later for dinner. It tasted like it had also traveled 5,590 miles.
After coming home from that bit of self indulgent produce aisle reverie my day started looking up significantly. On Mondays I only have one class (epic) and it's Norse Mythology (epic). I love the teacher, she is loud and wild and richly funny, the exact person you’d want bringing the myths of Snorri Sturluson to life. We talked about pop culture perception of vikings, and the creation myth of the island of Zealand, where Copenhagen is located.
To continue my making the most of Copenhagen summer campaign, I met my friends after class at La Banchina for swimming. The dock was packed with pretty people lying out, drinking wine and smoking. The sky was filled with wispy clouds like cream rising in a cup of coffee, and the sun kept darting behind them. When it was shining we jumped in and swam. When the sun would disappear our skin would raise in goosebumps and we’d sit on the dock chit chatting about everything and nothing, our friends back home, haircuts abroad, who is visiting whom in Berlin, what we are making for dinner.
Unwillingly I left the dock to attend my DIS Student Media Team training. I was worried everyone there would be weird or anti social because what normal person would want to keep a blog but I was delighted to meet four rad girls with whom I clicked instantly, and we left the meeting to go get ice cream and learn more of each other. I have found that friends crop up when you’re least expecting it here, and I am already excited for all the adventures I know we’ll have together.
By the time I biked home, Copenhagen had turned gold in that late-summer way, and I felt a little less like a visitor (mostly because I didn’t need to check my map to get home). I still miss SLO, still get lost, and still do not understand why bridges are allowed to betray people’s commutes like that, but I think this California pepper is beginning to find her rhythm here.
May I love you