around denmark in 3 days

so it has been quite a while, and so much has happened. morten and i celebrated our 6 month anniversary (cheesy, i know), but it is always nice to sit down to a home-cooked meal made by your danish lovah (and blog editor). dinner was devine -- baked salmon with a light breading with butter, parsley, and garlic, a delicious spinach salad with blue cheese, walnuts, pears, chives, and a homemade honey vinaigrette, and roasted "hasselback" potatoes and jerusalem artichokes. oh, and don't worry, if i wasnt spoiled enough, i got to accompany the meal with a 2003 amarone di valpolicella and top it off with homemade brownie and ice cream. nom nom nom! so good! here is a delightful picture, pre-feast:


smiley wiking

so the next day was our final day together for 10 days, as i was off to a short tour of denmark with the students (hence the blogpost title), while morten was headed to malta (yes, people go there) for a work/vacation, or wacation. our last meal was my very fancy idea of bbq chicken pizza. first time making it and it was pretty delish. just wish there had been some cilantro to really top that baby off.


mmm pizza... nom nom nom...

a little added bonus to my job at dis are study tours -- basically an opportunity to take the students on an academic trip outside of copenhagen. short tours stay inside of denmark, while the long ones head across europe. despite denmark's tiny size, i almost always wind up somewhere new each time i go on a short tour, which makes it pretty exciting and educational for me as well. i won't go into the boring details of tour, but just give you some highlights.

this time i headed out to the great cities of århus and aalborg, both on jutland. our day in århus was primarily academic, but we definitely met some very important people associated with heart valve transplant research. this visit also included pig experiments and surgeries, which i know is controversial, but considering the amazing progress these researchers are making, and the fact that the pig would have wound up as bacon otherwise, i think it is ok to keep up the projects.

speaking of pigs, our dinner that night was an awesome rack of babyback ribs at a local microbrewery. seriously. devine. i love ribs and i could go for a rack right now.

the last city/town brought us to a more cultural side of denmark. aalborg is pretty small, but it is the hometown of jørn utzon, who you may know as the famous dane and architect who designed the sydney opera house. anyway, we visited the utzon center in aalborg, which was built to honor his works, and to provide local architecture students with studio and library space.

the roof of the auditorium at the utzon center

the next day we ventured out to the amazing viking burial ground of lindholm høje. over 700 graves have been found here along the hillside just outside of aalborg. i am sure you all think that vikings are pretty cool, but trust me, after 4 - 5 viking museum visits, things tend to get repetitive and boring. did you know that vikings didn't wear those hats with horns on them? they weren't christian so they didn't realize that raiding monasteries was a bad thing. yada yada yada. anyway, this museum was pretty awesome. it came with all kinds of preserved viking graves and skeletons, including items they were buried with, plus a preserved human body that had been sacrificed into neighboring bogs. i think that is pretty BA. the day we visited the burial site it was insanely windy so photo-taking was definitely difficult, but i did my best.

from the highest part of the burial site

we wrapped up the tour with a very danish lunch buffet packed with fried fish filet & remoulade, leverpostej, little baby briny shrimps, assorted mashed meats, and a selection of cheeses most likely marked illegal in the states. outside of the "kro" (or "inn" in english), they had these sweet deer fenced in...

which i later found out were for eating... what happened to the hunt?

lastly, to wrap up my 3 day danish adventure, the storebælt bridge, which connects the island of fyn with the island of sjælland, which is here copenhagen is located. couldn't help taking a photo. it just looks so picturesque and danish with both the modern bridge design and the classic lighthouse to the side.

almost home...

ok. those are the highlights of my trip wrapped into 1 lil blogplost. i guess i should end this post with a positive note. now that i have a blog, i feel like i can keep secrets here that i can't post on facebook. so please help me out by not posting anything about this on facebook :)

i am happy to say that i have been accepted to the rollins school of public health at emory university in atlanta! i am so excited about it as it was my number 1 pick (tied with UNC), and i really can't believe that i got in! woohoo! i can't wait to celebrate and to receive the packet in the mail so i can read more about the little details. as my roommate fraze said last night, omg! you're going back to college! and that is EXACTLY how i feel :D