I’m in Ribe right now, in Jylland in Western Denmark.  It’s a quaint little provincial town with lots of buildings dating back to the Middle Ages and before.  And there are tons of adorable Danish houses.

Anyway, the tour is lead by Carsten, one of the Architecture & Design program professors, and he is an expert on Danish history and architecture and lots of other stuff.  He’s full of info, and he’s been one of our tour guides.  We did a short scavenger hunt where we wandered and explored Ribe on our own, and we sketched in the Ribe Cathedral, which is quite a magnificent structure considering the size of the town.

The best part of the trip, though, is when we were all sitting at dinner in the Mongolian Barbeque.  (Yes, we ate at a Chinese place in Denmark.  Apparently it’s pretty popular because it was very crowded tonight!)  At the end of the meal (which was 150 kr for the buffet, AKA almost $30, yikes!), we were waiting for the check.  We patiently hung out for awhile, and eventually our intern on the trip, John, raises his hand to get the waiter’s attention.  He has his hand up for quite awhile, and the waiters just seem to be avoiding us.  They’re not making eye contact, even though they’ve walked by multiple times.  John’s had his hand up for awhile, and just as we’re getting antsy and frustrated, Carsten breaks out with:

You know, this reminds me of a famous battle in Danish history…

Everyone starts cracking up.  Only our professor could get away with saying this and have it be funny, and  completely genuine at the same time.  Carsten goes on to explain that there was a battle back in the 1200’s where someone (I didn’t catch the name) had to hold his hand up to win the battle.  Someone else apparently helped him keep his hand up high so they could win, and they did win.  I tried googling it and found a Biblical reference, but nothing about Danish history, so I don’t know what the exact details are.

I keep getting spam comments on my blog, and it’s really annoying but I haven’t bothered to fix it yet by installing one of those nice spam comment blocker plug-ins.

Oh!  That reminds me.  I had more problems getting my Service Learning class volunteer assignment, and this week I finally found out that I’ll be working with Studenterhuset, apparently helping develop a new or updated website for them.  I’m gonna haveta dust off those web design skills.  I hope I can work with PHP (and preferably Wordpress), because I really don’t want to have to deal with too much newness.  I also imagine a project that involves web design taking a lot more than 4-6 hours a week, but we’ll see!  This would be good experience for me; I was actually hoping to do something with design development – something where I can contribute my own unique skills.  Then again, I’m a little disappointed that I’m not working on an integration project, just because studying immigration in Denmark has opened up a whole new world of interesting topics for me.

In conclusion (AKA tl;dr), Ribe was great, my professor is funny, and I’m conflicted about my volunteer position.  Sarah is conflicted about what she wants; nothing is new.