December 13
Lots of stuff happening. But first let me backtrack a bit. On Friday, the day after the Klovvika premiere, I went along with Christian, Nora, and Laure to the Franz Ferdinand concert in Copenhagen. We went there early though, to visit the Tivoli amusement park. This park is located right in the heart of Copenhagen, and while it doesn’t have the huge rides that an American theme park would have, it has a nice atmosphere. We walked around there with Helene, Marion, and Kahina until it was time for the concert. We discovered upon boarding the bus that our train ticket is valid for the bus, so that was a rather useful and expense-saving revelation. (randomly running into Paul as well). We arrived at the KB Hallen, which was actually more of a small sports stadium. A lot of younger students mulling around. We went inside and gave our backpacks and jackets to the garderobe and went inside. The website claimed it was a sell-out crowd but that wasn’t the case. We found a spot in the center and tried our best to hold on to it, but as always in concerts people think they can push and shove their way to any spot. One Danish guy rudely pushed his way past and stood literally right in front of Laure. This guy was maybe 6′5” and Laure is around 5′7”. Fortunately he left after the opening the act, which was a young UK band named the Arctic Monkeys. They would be wise to learn from tips on how to work a crowd from Franz Ferdinand, because the Monkeys came on stage, started playing, said “thank you”, played a few more songs, then left. In fact, if Franz Ferdinand hadn’t said some nice things about them during their show, I would never have even known who the opening band was, for it wasn’t printed on our tickets. At around 9pm Franz Ferdinand took the stage and the whole crowd started going crazy. Now, Franz Ferdinand isn’t really the kind of music I normally listen to. I was aware of one or two songs by the band, and I knew they were energetic, but I wasn’t quite prepared for the near-constant jumping up and down that the crowd started doing. The only thing you can do is to go along, or else you’ll get swept aside. Halfway through a jump I actually caught a glimpse of Yuko sitting in the stands. She and Masao had come along because Masao’s corridor was making a joint trip to the concert. The concert was good, the band did a fine job at interacting with the crowd, and later played a five song encore. As we were leaving Christian wanted to buy a shirt but the poor guy was virtually invisible to the salesman. Christian had to stand there, right in front of the guy for nearly 15 minutes before getting his order. We took the bus back to the train station and then boarded the train back to Lund. On the last stop before Malmo, the train was stopped for an unusually long amount of time. I got to talking with one of Masao’s Swedish corridor mates, and this was helpful because he translated what the conductor announced: the police were on their way! Later, looking out the window, I caught a glimpse of what looked to be someone getting arrested. Strange. We finally made it back to the Lund then biked back up to Delphi.
I woke up late on Saturday and rather than actually lengthening my essay, I spent the time doing even more reading for it. The sad part is that while I’m current on other literature for the essay, I don’t remember in much detail what is in the book we’re supposed to reference in our essay; namely because unlike the rest of the class, I finished it nearly 3 months ago. But on Sunday I reached the halfway mark of my essay so I’m pretty pleased with. That night we also watched Pirates of the Carribbean.
On Monday we had our last class of Role of Religion in the Middle East Conflict. We were to discuss our essays so I went out at 2pm to the E-huset computer labs to print out what I had. One hour later, I had nothing. In two rooms, some jerks were holding up the printer printing out a whole BOOK, in the other Windows room none of the open terminals were working, and the printer in the UNIX room was disabled. After one of the guys had left, I discovered he left the printer out of paper, and there were no extra reams or a sysadmin to restock it. An extremely irritating experience. Oh, print.ncsu.edu, I could have used you! The class was nice. Dr. Åberg brought these St. Lucia cakes, pepparkakor, Julmust, tea and coffee for us to enjoy. We discussed our papers in small groups, and it was a nice discussion. Most people haven’t even started theirs yet, and Vaibhav actually finished his and submitted it the day before because he’s leaving for Stockholm/Kiruna on Wednesday. He read maybe five chapters of the book then sat down and 7 hours later had his essay. Clicked sent w/o any proofreading. Heh. Afterward we watched this late 80s film about an Israeli soldier who gets captured by a Palestinian guerilla group and they eventually find a common bond through their love of football. Neat story, but absolutely dreadful execution. All I could think about while watching it was how much BETTER Frieder and I did with our movie. The movie had terrible keyboard synthesizer music that never matched the mood of the scene, the dialogue could have been much more revealing, and the pacing was bad. Oh well.
I’m happy to say that as of 6:20am this morning, Klovvika has ‘gone gold’! The DVD is finished and now we just have to start burning them. I went to bed at 7am and woke up at 10:15am, because I thought I had my laundry time at 11am. Turned out it was at 3pm. So I got ready, had a small lunch then biked down to the city center to look for the DVDs. After visiting several stores, I found one that sold the DVD+jewel case for 10kr a piece, came back to Delphi, and now I’m writing this entry.
Tonight at 6pm a group of us is going to the St. Lucia choir concert at the Allehegona Kyrkan, which should be nice. I will also work on getting Christian’s Lund map ready for his student guide project, and work on my essay a bit more. Busy night, will check back later.