Lists: Things I Bought that I Love

Time for something lighthearted. My newest blog obsession is the Secret Society of List Addicts where contributing bloggers make lists. Their lists are funny, honest, and touching. I particularly liked People From My Past that I Regularly Googlestalk and Boys I Totally Crushed on for Years Even Though They Were  Unattainable (And Totally Wrong For Me) and wanted to try my hand at such lists. But I decided that it's a bad idea to make my own version of these because this blog is TMI as it as and because with facebook, you can find out the names of everyone of these boys. They would probably be freaked out and you'd think I'm weird. So I'll stick with this safe one.

Things I've Bought That I Love

My new bed

It's my first big girl bed (read: not twin size). I really like it and I get the whole thing to myself. At first it was like I was swimming unmoored in the sea but now I like being sprawled out. 

 Bed: post-assembly, pre-linens.

Pentax K-x camera

Sure it was a brick around my neck when I traveled in Europe. But I've taken at least ten good photos with it. Even one good one makes it all worth it. Too bad I won't have time to take it for walks now that i'm in Medical School. 

My camera, while waiting for a bagel in Amsterdam

The Ishtar Gate at the Pergamon Museum

Northface Recon backpack

North Face brand anything is expensive but my backpack has held up nicely through biking across MSU, stuffed to the seams on Ryanair flights crisscrossing Europe, two transatlantic flights and medical textbooks. And it reminds me of Europe every time I use it now.

White purse with multicolored embroidered flowers

Things you buy are worth it if it's really expensive but you use it a lot, decreasing cost/wear. But you know their real gems if they're cheap and you still use it all the time, like this purse I have. It's the Rorschach test of style. I've been told it looks hippie, modern, and Polish-people-from-the-mountains. Because the flowers are different colors, it matches everything. It was from the clearance bin at Kohl's, that paragon of lower-middle class consumerism. 

Black and white dress for 40 Danish kroner ($7)

This and the purse mentioned below are the best purchases from Studenterhus' secondhand bazaar, where Danish (mostly) college students (actually mostly girls) sell their used H&M and equivalent clothing. Very cheap and pretty trendy. If you've seen my weird tanlines around my neck and shoulders, you have this dress to thank. I love it because it doesn't wrinkle and makes me look really skinny.

Brown purse for 100 Danish kroner ($18)

So the secondhand bazaar sells used apparel, but this Esprit purse was brand new with tag for only $18. I was frequently seen wearing above mentioned dress and this purse when I traveled to warmer climes. It's especially good because I can fit my dslr case into it. I will cry the day the strap breaks, which it's already starting to.

more photos by my trusty k-x: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rainbow11soda/

Travels: Toilets

This is a restroom at Warsaw.  Circle = female. Triangle = male.  Yes, I was puzzled when I first heard about these signs on a travel forum and then I saw one with my own eyes at the National Museum in Warsaw.

Every country I got to seems to have slightly different restrooms.
First, there's the matter of what we even call them. European non-native English speakers call it toilet. It's also the word written on signs for public restrooms. This sounded vulgar to me at first but then I too started to call restrooms toilets.

Then there are the stalls. But all European restrooms "stalls" aren't stalls because the toilets are separated from the adjacent toilet by solid walls -- yes that go all the way up to the ceiling and down to the floor.That "foot-tapping" scandal involving some politician (or was it an evangelical preacher?) wouldn't happen in Europe.

Danish restrooms are unique for having er ... feminine hygiene product disposal bins that are just plastic bags suspended by a piece of metal attached to the wall. I didn't see these anywhere else except, I think, Norway.  Like so:

It's also very common in public restrooms and bathrooms at home to have two water levels for flushing, indicated by the bigger and smaller buttons. Oh I almost forgot! The fact that the flush is operated by a button ABOVE the toilet is different from the States too.

I'll also never forget a discussion among members of bidet using cultures (two Italian and Turkish friends) and non-bidet using cultures (me).

I could detail the restrooms I've seen all over Europe but I'm flying out to SoCal very early tomorrow morning. This also means no new blog posts for about another week.

Travels: Girls and Boys in Denmark

During my last days in Århus, I went to Legoland, probably the most famous Danish tourist attraction after the Little Mermaid statue. At the Legoland gift shop you can buy Lego sets, spare Lego body parts, and these silicone ice cube trays.

Legoland gift shop. July 2010.

The gendering of toys is a worldwide phenomenon, it seems. Even in Scandinavian countries with some of the most impressive levels of gender equality in many areas. It's also a popular subject of Sociological Images, a sociology blog. It runs a series on gendered toys and used this Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal webcomic as illustration of childhood socialization via boys and girls toys.

(source)

A window in Copenhagen. February 2010.

Wrap up: Time and Place

 I've been back in the States for three weeks. It feels much longer, like I've been here all summer. This surprised me. I thought that I would feel more reverse culture shock, that Ann Arbor and East Lansing would feel more foreign. I thought that I would feel uncomfortable driving my car again. I thought the American hypermarts would overwhelme me. I thought I would cringe at American-accented English.

The first three to five days, I felt this way. I wanted to find all the foreign things I had in Europe. Trader Joe's 100% Rye Bread is a close approximation of rugbrød. At a restaurant in East Lansing I had Zywiec beer.

At the same time as the discomfort, however, these were also glorious days of rediscoveries. I finally got a fragel, which I wanted to do the last day before I left in January but the store was closed for the holidays. So I fulfilled a wish I had maintained for six months.

By the time first weekend was over -- I came back on a Monday -- it felt like I had been here in Ann Arbor all summer, which begins for most American college students in early May.

This doesn't mean I've forgotten about Denmark. The opposite: I think about Denmark and Erasmus all the time. Like I've said many times before, those six months were the greatest six months of my life. The people, the traveling, the just hanging out in Århus. But I'm not raving about it to everyone the way I thought I would. I feel like I've entered a different chapter of my life. Denmark exists in memories. For the people I met on Erasmus, we're all post-Erasmus now and that's the way it must be. I feel that if I keep talking about Denmark and exchange that I'll start to have Peter Pan syndrome. As much as I would like to go back to Denmark, I can't because by "Denmark" I mean both a place and a time. Maybe sometime in the future I'll go to Denmark but we've all moved beyond that time to new endeavors.

My train from Århus to Copenhagen airport as it passed Copenhagen central station. July 12th, 2010 approx.12:30am

Wrap up: Flight, qualitatively

A few days ago I listed the flights I had taken and their distances. But today I want to recall the nature of these experiences on budget airlines, mostly Ryanair.

  

Ryanair plane exterior and interior.

"We love Ryan" - My Italian friend (We hate Ryan but still use it.)
The Ryanair legend goes like this: Flights are so cheap that you can hop on a morning flight to London, have lunch with a friend, and hop back home by evening.

In reality, most one-way Ryanair tickets probably cost $50 for intracontinental flights of 45 minutes to 2 hours long. However, there are many many hidden costs of using Ryanair.

• Ryanair uses "secondary airports". These are pretty much cargo airports before Ryan came along. They're often REALLY far from the actual city that Ryanair advertises. Why these airports? They're airport usage fees are lower than those of the well-known passenger airports. There is frequently no convenient public transportation from the city center to these airports. You have to take a bus for an hour and costs anywhere between 10 - 15 euro.
• Ryanair flights extremely early. I bet that the 6am flight at any airport is a discount carrier. Think backwards: 6am flight 4am arrive at airport 3am bus to airport .... 2am wake up and check out of hostel. It's like not sleeping at all. Pretty much every trip I took, there were nights like this for me. Even if the airport is accessible via public transportation, you can be that they don't run at 3am. Instead of taking a city bus/metro to the airport bus stop, you have to take a taxi. Plan on another 10 euro, if you split it with your travel companion. 
• Or they flight extremely late. When I flew Pegasus airlines from Marseilles to Istanbul, my 3-hour flight was schedule for 2am and then delayed until 3am. I arrived in Istanbul at 7am without having slept a wink and spent 1/3 of my time in Istanbul as a zombie.

MP2, you know, not Marseille Provence airport but the other one. The 2 stands for second-class discount airlines passenger.

"It's like a bus. With wings." - My Vietnamese friend (I've taken nicer buses.)
It's like a bus because you fight for the seats and you should bring your own food.

Ryanair virgins will scrutinize their boarding pass (web checked in and self-printed, of course) and realize that there is no seat number! That's right. You have to fight for your window or aisle seat. Part of the seat-seeking strategy requires calculating whether to board via the front or rear door of the plane. Yup, the plane is always on the tarmac and not connected to the airport proper with the passageway.

They do sell food on the flight by at highway robbery prices.

I have taken very nice buses with assigned seats, free coffee, and seats that recline to almost flat.

The dreaded luggage box (Pack light. And wear all your extra clothes on your body.)
Passengers are permitted ONE carry-on. Purses, cameras, duty free store purchases must all fit within one piece of luggage, which must itself fit in the Ryanair Cage.

source

At Beauvais airport, a young woman in front of me managed to stuff her duffel bag into the box. But while pulling it out, the handle broke off. No emotion from the Ryanair staff looking down at her kneeling on the floor trying to pull out her broken bag.

I am very proud of being able to travel for 14 days with only this backpack, in which I also put my blocky DSLR case and an empty big brown purse. As you can see, it's a school-size backpack, not a hiking pack.

Tips of getting around the luggage restrictions: Wear 5 layers of clothes. Most flights within Europe aren't more than 2 hours long so you'll only sweat for 2 hours... Also carry a coat with lots of pockets where you can put the heavy items and your snacks for the flight.

No customer service.
Some of you may know that my trip to Lisbon was unplanned. This was due to the volcano ash cloud over southern Portugal that caused Ryanair to cancel my flight. While the ash cloud was beyond Ryanair's control, the ticket rebooking fiasco could have been prevented. Ryanair's website screwed up. Instead of allowing passengers of canceled flights to rebook for free, the website charged us as if we just decided to change our tickets. This lead to a two hour wait at the Faro airport where Ryanair did not have a dedicated ticket counter. Instead all our rebooking requests were handled by a single overtaxed airport employee. Because we didn't use the internet to rebook, we were charged a 10 euro fee, even though the Ryanair website screwed up and we couldn't have rebooked online anyway...

Ryanair is almost more trouble than it's worth. 
Ryanair is planning to eventually go transatlantic. It'll be the worst 8 hour flight in the world. But it means I can go visit all my lovely Europeans friends.

Wrap up: Flight by numbers

I've flown a lot in the past few months within Europe, mostly on discount airlines. These are the flights I've taken, in chronological order.

• Detroit - Washington Dulles - Copenhagen (4446 mi 7155 km)
• Copenhagen - Amsterdam (394 mi 633 km)
• Amsterdam - Copenhagen (394 mi 633 km)
• Brussels - Prague (434 mi 699 km)
• Århus - Oslo (224 mi 361 km)
• Oslo - Århus (224 mi 361 km)
• Billund - Barcelona (998 mi 1606 km)
• Faro - Billund (1519 mi 2445) 8732
• Århus - London (500 mi 805 km)
• London - Århus (500 mi 805 km)
• Billund - Edinburgh (485 m 781 km)
• Edinburgh - Paris (503 mi 811 km)
• Paris - Marseille (441 mi 710 km)
• Marseille - Istanbul (1242 mi 1999 km)
• Istanbul - Copenhagen (1266 mi 2037 km)
• Copenhagen - Krakow (484 mi 779 km)
• Krakow - Malmo (461 mi 743 km)
• Copenhagen - Frankfurt - Detroit (4571 mi 7355 km) 

Total distance flown: 19,086 mi 30,716 km 

Number of trips on airlines:

• Ryanair: 9
  The grandaddy of discount airlines, notorious for charging for every service possible and eliminating every measure of comfort.
• Lufthansa: 2
  So luxurious in comparison. 
• Wizzair: 2
  Hungarian discount airlines whose female flight attendants wear hot pink blouses and too much  makeup. The company colors are purple and pink.
• Pegasus: 2
  Turkish discount airlines. 
• KLM: 2
• Norwegian: 1
  A discount airlines too but a nicer one. 
• SAS: 1
• United: 1

Percent of flights on discount carriers: 70%
Percent of flights within Europe on discount carriers: 88% (Gokcen airport in Istanbul is technically on the Asia side of the city, but you know what I mean.)

Wizzair 

Leaving Warsaw. You can tell it's Wizzair by the pink wingtip. You can also see the Palace of Culture and Science if you look very very carefully and other skyscraper of Warsaw city center.

Wrap up: Numismatics

I'm still sorting through photos and uploading them to facebook, gradually. It make me miss Århus and my travels and all my friends.

When I was packing, I gathered my loose change together and took this photo. They are mostly zloty, lira, pound, Swedish kronor, and a couple Euro cents. Oh! I spy a dime too.

(No Danish kroner in this photo. I wrote briefly about Danish money here.)

Travel photos

My most recent and last trip was to Krakow and Warsaw. When I got back to Århus on Thursday night, I looked at the photos I took there. I was taken back by how few photos I had taken in Krakow. I generally don't look through my photos when I'm traveling because I prefer to see them on the computer screen but don't have a computer to copy them onto. This means that I don't know what I had taken until I come home. 

The one photo I took of a landmark in Krakow

I've taken a lot of photos since I've been in Denmark (some of which you've probably seen on facebook). I made it a point to take my camera out with me more. When I'm traveling outside Denmark, I always have it with me. If left to my own devices on a full day, I usually take around 200 photos. Quantity is loosely related to quality. You can't have a good photo if you don't take any so I aim to take a lot. This is why I was somewhat disappointed in my photos from Krakow. 

However, I have a personal goal that in each day of traveling I should take one good photo. In Krakow, I took several photos of friends that I really like. Definitely more than one "good photo" each day. What's more, I got to spend time with a friend of mine taking photos of each other. Really, why did I go visit tourist attractions? We could have stayed at home and just taken photos of each other and I would have been perfectly happy. We'd have the photos and the memories of our photo session. 

Travels: Measures of Tourist-itude

I have no idea how I'm going to catch up blogging. I want to write about Paris and Istanbul even though I've been back from Poland too. And I have yet to upload photos from Istanbul to facebook. 

I found that in Istanbul, you can judge how touristy a place is by two factors: the quality of its bathroom and the admission price.

Best bathroom: Topkapi Palace gift shop. The best part was that it's in the gift shop. since it's not inside the palace, you can go without buying a 20 lira ($13 or 10 euro) admission ticket.

My couchsurfing host and I went to a kebab shop on a side street off Istikal Avenue which had a squat toilet. This didn't surprise me since it was an entirely non-touristy kebab shop.

I was surprised by the squat toilet at the Istanbul Archaeology Museum because I thought it was popular tourist spot. Well, after going to the museum, I realized it wasn't THAT popular... Or maybe I didn't find the one for tourists in the exhibition wings. This was in building which has the museum's offices.

Topkapi Palace: 20 lira. (I didn't go.)
Hagia Sophia: 20 lira. (It's now a museum, not a place of worship, so they charge substantial admission.)
Istanbul Archaeology Museum: 10 lira.

Oh in Turkey they don't do student discounts either.


Oh yes, some photos of things I had only seen in photos before going on this amazing trip:

The famous Deesis mosaic in Hagia Sophia

Alexander the Great, first guy on the left, though not the guy in this sarcophagus.

Very sad women and some gawking tourists.

Travels: Cities

At the beginning of the semester I went to an English class called Literature of the City. I ended up dropping the class but during the first session of the class we had an interesting discussion about cities. The professor asked how many people grew up in cities. A few. And how many want to live in a cities. A lot.

I've said to many people I've met through my travels that I love cities. Istanbul was a city in all the ways that I love cities. It was a city of contrasts. The atmosphere of one neighborhood was very different from another neighborhood. By myself I went to the European side south of the Golden Horn. It's the old part of the city where the old historic sights and where most visitors are. I also went to neighborhoods with a distinctly European feel, historic European quarter and the modern European. 

Paris is a great European city, perhaps The greatest European city. I was in Paris a few days before going to Istanbul. But unlike Istanbul, I feel like I only saw central Paris. It felt fake to me because I saw the parts of the city mostly for tourists even though the buildings are original buildings, not reconstructions. I didn't get the feeling that real, average Parisians lived here. It was all palaces, Haussman-design apartments, and manicured gardens. Maybe Paris had become too famous that I could only see it as a series of postcard-worthy monuments.

Travels: You Know You're not in a Christian-majority country when...

One of the funny things about China in recent years is the arrival of Christmas as a most commercialized and  generally good-cheer consumerist holiday. People living in countries with a Christian tradition know Christmas as a once-a-year holiday on December 25th. The Christmas merchandise goes on sale on the 26th and you shouldn't have your Christmas tree up a couple weeks past New Year. But most people in China know Christmas as a time of general celebrating and shopping so the date isn't so important. In China it's not uncommon to see images of Santa Claus when it's not the holiday season.

I was delighted to find similarly out-of-season Santa Claus in Istanbul! Istiklal street was the main road of the historic European-influenced district. It's across the Golden Horn from the historic Ottoman district. It's now a very crowded and lively pedestrian shopping street. 

Above the street were these lights.

Travels: Istanbul is for lovers?

I don't know where to begin to talk about Istanbul. I've seen so many interesting things in three short days.  I guess I'll start where I left off at my last post. I previously blogged about Paris' renown as a city for romance. While in Istanbul, I went for a walk in Gülhane Park. It's located in the old city next to the palace where the Ottoman Sultans lived for several centuries. Here in the park, it seemed to me more like lovers' lane than parks I went to in Paris. 


In particular, there was a path parallel to the main one running the length of the park where there were wooden pavilions with benches. They provided (a sense of) privacy. Pretty much each one was occupied by a PDA-ing couple. I think I remember only one where there was a family with toddlers. 


I'm not a creeper, I swear.
  

Travels: Return

I've been dreading this day. Today I took my two suitcases from the corner of my room where they were upright and laid them down in the middle of my floor to begin to pack up my life.

Travels: Paris is for lovers?

Paris is known as a city for lovers. I think every TV program about Paris shows couples kissing on the grass, walking along the Seine hand-in-hand, looking out from the steps of Sacré Coeur. My travel companion, who went to all the same places in Paris with me, thought our trip confirmed this fact about Paris.

But I didn't see more lovers than other European cities. I think I saw the same level of PDA that I would see in Århus. People see what they want to, I guess. I saw something that highlighted the silliness of romantic love.

The Pont des Arts bridge over the Seine between the Louvre and the Academie Française is a popular spot for love locks. Securing the lock to the bridge and tossing the key into the river below symbolizes enduring love. Well the tour guide pointed out that some of the locks on the bridge were combination locks. Instead of the river keeping the key that would undo your love, all you need to do is ... come back to the river, put in the combination, and take off the lock. I think this undermines the purpose of love locks.

Dreamlands

At the Pompidou Center was a banner for an exhibit called Dreamlands. The photo on the banner shows replicas of European landmarks in Las Vegas. Certainly Vegas seems a mirage in the desert. But my experience in Europe the past six months feels to me like a dream.

Danishize: Shower

I think every shower I've seen in Europe -- with the exception of one hostel in Lisbon -- has detachable shower head. This really surprised me when I first arrived. It's out of habit that I always keep the shower head on the wall even though I can take this one off. I don't see how it's that useful.

I told this to my German housemate who shared a bathroom with me and she was very surprised. It's so useful, she said. Indeed sometimes after she used the shower, the shower head would be resting on side of the shower stall the instead of put back on the holder. She does use it all the time.

My shower:

What also bothers a lot of students here are showers without a shower curtain or glass separating the shower stall from the rest of the bathroom. Thankfully I don't have this problem because I have a shower curtain.

Danishize: Old Money, New Money

The design of the small denomination coins are pretty lackluster but I think the hole in the middle makes up for it. I don't know how many currencies have coins with holes in the middle. Is the Danish krone the only one?

Øre is the equivalent of cent. Now in Denmark only 50 øre coins are in circulation. All transactions are rounded to the nearest whole krone or 50 øre.

New paper notes are starting to be issued. The theme is bridges and archaeological artifacts. The new fifty kroner note was in circulation when I came to Denmark. Sallingsund Bridge and an earthenware vessel. 

[I was going to show you a fifty kroner note that I got as change earlier today, BUT I LOST IT! I hurriedly put it in my pocket after getting it at the cafeteria. By the afternoon, it wasn't in my pocket anymore.]

But the new one hundred kroner notes just appeared about a month ago. They show the bridge and a flint dagger.

The nerdy cool kids go to Danish National Museum in Copenhagen to see these artifacts on display. 

The Danish krone (plural kroner) is the currency of Denmark. (We say Danish krone to distinguish it from the Norwegian krone.) The exchange rate of the Danish krone is pegged to the Euro where 1 Euro = 7.5 kroner. This means that currently, $1 = 6.24 kroner. This is the lowest the kroner has been since I came to Denmark. In January, it was around $1 = 5.5 kroner

To give you an idea how much the things I most frequently eat cost
1 L milk = 5 kroner - cheapest 15 kroner - organic
1 cucumber = 5 - 8 kroner
1 little cup of quite bad drip coffee from the cafeteria = 5.5 kroner
1 loaf of rugbød = 15 kroner
deposit on one plastic bottle or aluminum can = 1 - 3 kroner, depending on the size of the container

New 200, 500, and 1000 kroner notes will be issued in the future, but I won't be around in Denmark to see them...

Travels: What's the daily recommended number of egg yolks?

Number of egg yolks consumed in 1 day: at least 4 or 5 ...

I don't eat well when I travel except that day in Seville that I already blogged about. Basically I eat breakfast at the hostel, a lunch of a sandwich and fruit, and come back to the hostel for dinner of another sandwich or pasta or something equally of no nutritional value.

Sometimes I sample local sweets. In Lisbon I had pasteis de Belém, egg tart pastries made from a lot of egg yolks, from the bakery that supposedly has the best ones. They were delicious with a sprinkling of cinnamon.

Unfortunately during my two days in Lisbon, I decided that I would buy half a dozen eggs because my hostel had a very nice kitchen (for a hostel) and an omelette or hard-boiled egg would be a welcomed change. The day that I ate two pastéis de Belém, I had also eaten two eggs earlier in the day...

Travels: Literacy

It must be the season for book fairs in Spain and Portugal. I saw booths set up in parks in Madrid, Seville, and Lisbon. I wandered through them but didn't buy anything as I don't know any Portuguese and minimal Spanish and I couldn't bring back any more luggage due to flying Ryanair. 

Lisbon

Lisbon

Oriente train station, Lisbon

While in Spain, I realized just how much Spanish I had learned in high school. Of course I had forgotten a lot of it since but I managed to buy bus tickets in Spanish with some gesturing and ask for directions too. I mean, I know more Spanish than I do Danish and I'm living in Denmark. I was hopeless in Portugal...

Travel: Papa Bento

The day before I went to Lisbon, a girl at my hostel in Faro told me that the Pope was going to be there at the same time. Indeed Lisbon was very excited for the visit. Portugal is the second most Catholic country in Europe, after Poland.

I guess in Portugal they don't have bento boxes because the Pope is called Bento.

Nearest distance to Pope Benedict: 50 feet. He went by in the Popemobile but I didn't get a picture of him at that moment. But there he is, very small in the chair.

People attending mass with the Pope: LOADS including me. I read somewhere that there were 80,000 in the square and 200,000 along the streets. 

Average mass attendant: old lady in her 60s. 

Banners, posters, flags with the Pope's face: LOADS 

Bank of the Holy Spirit, appropriately, has a banner of the Pope. 

At the end of mass, a lot of priests came amongst the crowd to give communion. I got a funny look from the old lady standing next to me when I didn't go up for it. 

No thanks.