While we haven’t yet had Thanksgiving (in either the United States or Denmark – more on that in a second), it is now definitely Christmas season here in this little Nordic country. To the Danes, Christmas is almost entirely a secular holiday, called jul, which is where we get the word ‘yuletide’ (juletide), but not pronounced quite the same as in English. Some of the city bars have been decorated with garlands and fake snow for a few weeks now,…
Mālõ lava! Presently, I have no fun excursions to write about. That’s because it’s time for independent research! Yay!!!!!!!!! We have three and a half weeks allotted to conduct research and write a 20-30 page paper about a subject or organization of our choice. I’m doing my research on the Museum of Sāmoa, known in Sāmoan as the Falemata’aga. My paper focuses on the challenges that the Museum of Sāmoa faces in terms of preserving and interpreting tangible and intangible…
This brief pause to reflect upon the last two weeks since I’ve blogged is welcome. As soon as I finish this, I will hurry to my last class of the week, where I will then hurry to the airport and begin a weekend in Dublin, though I just fully unpacked from last weekend’s trip to Amsterdam yesterday. I still can’t believe I have the opportunity to do all of this; saving all year and working full time has paid off…
Ni sa bula! We left the country for the last time, until we leave for good. Our excursion, this time, was to the extraordinarily beautiful and diverse country of Fiji. Fiji is comprised of over 300 islands, many of which are uninhabited. The main island, Viti Levu (Greater Fiji) is where most of the population and economic activity takes place. We spent most of our time there. Our group took a hop, a skip, and a jump over the 180th…
Fall has come to Denmark. But as the locals warned us Americans upon our arrival, it’s a swift descent toward winter. While the temperatures are still quite mild (40’s to 50’s in Fahrenheit), the wind and rain are beginning to have a bite and the hours of daylight are waning fast. After all, it is November, though I thought I was hallucinating when I looked at the date a few days ago. Didn’t we just get here? Didn’t classes just…
After a long flight and travel, we stumbled off the bus with our unruly luggage and filed through a short, narrow entrance between two buildings. Inside, a labyrinth of streets unfolded before us; blues, reds, and purples lined the walls, interrupted only by murals, tile fountains, and storefronts. We established our home base in Rabat, the capital city, with classes held at the Center for Cross Cultural Learning (CCCL) located in the Médina. Médinas are the old, walled-in cities and…
Experiencing Halloween while abroad in the UK has probably been one of the more interesting times of my life. Since people here usually go out to pubs nearly every night, there have been events happening with different clubs for the past week. But it has also been the equivalent of midterms here (they call it Reading Week, most classes have papers due so they cancel those classes all week so that you can focus on writing your paper) and as…
York is an amazing city. It’s not massive, but it is a beautiful northern English town that is always buzzing. I can’t get enough of the cobblestone roads and the cute shops, and I think I could live here forever. It just has personality. I’m learning a lot of things in England, with perhaps the most egregious being that what the English call “lemonade” is basically Sprite. I can forgive that, though, because I’m only here temporarily. The only thing…