A genuine danish Julefrokost - Held in the states!

Since Andreas danish boyfriend Kristoffer was visiting, we decided to try throwing a danish christmas party. The party was to be held at her place and we had invited a lot of her friends.
The menu was supposed to consist of whatever we could find in the local supermarket combined with some stuff Kristoffer and Morten and Nicholas had brought from Denmark. (A special thanks to Nicholas and Morten who didn't get any food in return for their efforts, since they left before the lunch date.)
The guys had brought three bottles of Snaps and some red cabbage (Rødkål).



Having done all the shopping we started cooking. This took us all day, but when we finished, we could present the following dishes:
Pork roast (flæskesteg) with a brown sauce, sugarpotatoes and the red cabbage. We also had Smoked salmon on home baked bread and danish meatballs (frikadeller) plus a couple of different salads. And for dessert we served rice porridge (risengrød) and rød grød med fløde (there is no english translation for this one).



To our great surprise, people enjoyed everything we served - even the sugarpotatoes (which lots of danes - including myself - never learned to cope with).
We had thrown a little honey into one of the bottles of snaps, and chilled them in the freezer. This really helped people getting over the infamous 'snaps barrier' and they all yelled 'SKÅÅÅL!'



After way too many shots of Snaps, we moved on to another party. I think most of the Americans were surprised by the sudden effect of the snaps, because most of them left the second party early.

It had been a great night. It was very nice to expose Americans to such a weird part of Danish culture, and succeeding as well as we did. I can only recommend throwing an event like this if you are staying in a foreign country during christmas time.

More pictures of the Christmas lunch

Crap - my trip is almost over

....and I have really not been writing on this thing nearly as much as I had planned. There are several good and bad reasons for this.
First of all, my laptop got stolen and I was computerless for a couple of weeks. Secondly, I have been so busy all the time that I rarely have had a moment to sit down and focus on this thing. My tight schedule has mainly been because of me being in the lab all weekdays from 9 to 7-ish. Besides this I have also been 'socially aggressive', trying to get out as much as possible; seeing as many people and places as possible. This has of course been really good for me, and I feel that so much has happened since I posted the last time.

I feel that it's going to take a long time for me to describe everything that has happened since my last update, so first of all I'm going to give a short summary of my experiences. Later on I will try to update this page with specific posts about some of the different stories.

Ok, let me think... The last time I wrote, my girlfriend had just left to go back to Australia. The week after this, I was contacted by this girl Andrea. It appeared that she had studied in Denmark during the spring, and she even had a danish boyfriend who was coming to visit. I have seen a lot of her and her friends since.
A couple of weeks after this I moved to a new house, where I'm currently living. The house is occupied by three biology students and a biology postdoc. All of them have been really nice to me, and I have been hanging out with them a lot.



Two weeks after moving in here, I went to New York to visit Aske and Julie (who I of course know from Denmark). They were there on vacation for two weeks. We had a great time, but unfortunately our house in Providence was robbed while I was there, and I lost my iPod and my brand new macbook pro laptop. This didn't stop me from going to New York once more though, so I went another weekend to visit Jim, who is married to a friend of my family. I hung out with him and his friends, and he showed me around town. The more time I spend in this city, the more I like it.



Some time after my second NYC trip I got the money to pay for a new laptop, and I was plugged in yet again. So nice.
The next big thing that happened, was when my friends Nicholas and Morten came to visit me during thanksgiving (3rd week of november). They stayed at our house in Providence for a couple of days, and then we went to New York for the holiday. Since Jim was going to Denmark to see his wife, he had lent us his apartment. We had the best five days together there.
The guys left last tuesday, and since then I have mostly been working. Though, I did have time to plan a danish julefrokost together with Kristoffer (Andrea's boyfriend) who is currently here.

Things at the lab have been going well, but slowly. I have learned a lot, but we didn't progress as much as I had expected, but this is probably a typical thing.



To wrap things up, I have had a great time the last couple of months. I'm really looking forward to getting all this written down, so that I will be able to remember it. On one hand, I feel like the stay has been too short and that I should have planned it to be longer. But on the other hand, I already feel like I've experienced so much and I'm really missing everybody back home. (Especially a certain somebody!)

Bye for now,

Tobias