Well it's been a month since I arrived here in Copenhagen and I'm absolutely loving it. There are two very important traits that every business major should have that I was lacking when I first started out at Shidler, being a people person and being able to interact with other people and being open-minded. Being an exchange student has helped me to do both. Now that a month has gone by I've met tons of new people, finished my first week of class, mastered getting to and from class using the metro, learned to buy groceries, and have just been having a blast.
Classes are very different from back at UH. Classes are usually once a week for 2.5 hours. This is both a good and bad thing. The bright side is I only have classes on Monday to Wednesday so I can travel on the long weekends. The downside is with really long classes it becomes a struggle to remain focused. This may be a personal problem for me but going from 50 minute or 1.25 hour class to 2.5 hour class is tough.
CBS is absolutely great in helping students get the most out of their exchange. This past weekend I went on a CBS organized trip to Berlin. For about $300 I got transportation, 2 nights in a hotel, 2 days of lunch, entrance to 2 night events, dinner in a restaurant one night, a guided tour of the city center, and a guided tour of Sachsenhausen concentration camp. This was an excellent deal to meet more exchange students and see another country. At the end of the month I'm going on trip to Oslo which was also arranged by CBS.
Aside from how much I love Copenhagen and CBS so far I do have a two things I'm not happy about. While this might sound like complaining I feel that it is important to know for prospective exchange students. First, housing here is an absolute nightmare. Being a naturally reserved person I definitely wanted to live in student housing where I would be surrounded by other students. This would have given me even more opportunities to meet new people. The whole point of the exchange is to meet and get to know new people and make international friends. While I wasn't able to get student housing I was fortunate enough to get private housing. My landlord is very nice and I can't complain. There were however, some students who were posting on CBS's facebook group for this semester's exchange students that they were still looking for housing. There was a good deal of people living in youth hostels until they found their own private housing. I'm not sure if MIX can pull strings to guarantee you student housing but it's probably worth asking if you're like me and need to be exposed to a lot of opportunities for interaction.
Secondly, you need to have a lot of patience in regards to not knowing when your finals will be. CBS is still organizing where and when finals will be held. It's not like at UH where you know is one week, monday to friday. At CBS your finals could be in November or I was told as late as December 23. Not only will I have to pay a good deal amount of money for two 1-way tickets, I had to agree to pay an extra month of rent just incase I needed to stay until Dec 23 and I still don't know when I'm going to come home or if I'm going to have time to travel before coming home.
Again, as much as I love CBS and Copenhagen I feel that prospective exchange students need to be aware that it, like everywhere else, isn't perfect.
Now here are some cultural things that I found very interesting:
Elections are not set for every 4 years like it is in the US. They can't put it off forever, but the party in office decides when elections are held. It can be a year after being in office or after 4 years. Therefore when the election date is announced there's heavy campaigning for only a few weeks. I thought that was interesting in comparison to the way we do it.
There are lots of Danish dads that take time off to raise their infant children while the moms go back to work. I was confused because I thought there were a lot of men walking around with strollers and carrying babies all over the place but I found out that it's common for the dads to watch the baby after only a short while of being with the mom for breast feeding.
Danish people are very timely. While I was raised to always be on time if not 10 minutes early, the Danes as a whole are always on time and it's a nice change from getting upset at my friends being late for everything.
That's all for now and I still can't believe I've already been here for a month, time is flying by!
Monday, September 12, 2011
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
The First Week
During my first week here at CBS I enrolled in a "Danish Crash Course"(DCC). It wasn't too expensive, maybe $300 and another $100 for the evening social events. This is definitely worth while in my opinion. In the DCC a language teacher teaches you the basics of Danish. You really can't learn all that much language in a week but I still think I learned a valuable amount. The real value in this class is meeting other exchange students who are just as new and unfamiliar with Denmark as you are. The creators of the DCC also setup social events at night for you to participate in if you want to signup and pay for it. This is even more worth your time than the DCC itself. The most notable events were the canal tour and the bar and club events. On the canal tour you get to see a good deal of Copenhagen from the water and see a lot of interesting places that you'll likely want to visit again on foot. There were two nights that people signed up for the social events went out, once to a bar and once to a club. I won't get into too much detail but it is definitely a different atmosphere and pace from the scene back home in Hawaii. These events were great to meet other exchange students and the exchange crew (volunteers who help exchange students adjust) and get to see some social activities popular in Denmark. People drink a lot in Denmark. It doesn't take much to figure that out seeing as how they have beer in the cafeterias on campus.
Here are some random useful hints: Bring extra passport photos, if you're planning on getting a monthly train pass you need one and you also need two for your residence permit. Bring a suit and dress shoes or a nice dress, you'll need it. Make sure you have good walking shoes, you'll likely be walking a lot. If you plan to use your credit card in Denmark you need to get a PIN code for it. Yes, your credit card, for some reason you need a pin to use it here and I had to get my dad to pretend he was me and call my credit card company and get it for me. Call your phone company to get your SIM unlocked before you go, they won't let you do it once you're overseas, well at least Verizon won't. If you like drinking coffee in the morning I would bring instant coffee from back home, while it isn't as good as fresh, you won't go broke buying coffe every morning. I have yet to find a place that sells regular drip coffee. Mostly everywhere sells expresso drinks but if you buy those regularly, like I said, you'll be broke before you know it. Also, I haven't seen a coffee machine in the stores and my apartment only has an expresso machine.
Being from Hawaii I don't really have much winter clothes but if you have any you should plan to bring it. We went down to the beach one night and it was freezing. Luckily I had a good windbreaker because without it I would have been miserable, the wind went straight through my jeans and sneakers and my face was frozen. Weather here is very unpredictable. In the morning it might look gloomy and cold but by the time you're on your way home in the afternoon it might be sunny and making your wish you wore shorts in the morning. I'm sure I'll make an update sooner or later on how cold it gets. I'm still in the process of finding warm clothes for the looming winter ahead.
Ask for student discount when you're buying stuff at cafes and bars, some places give 10% off and that 10% goes along way when everything is so expensive.
Another friendly bit of advice, if you don't like to cook make sure you bring LOTS of money to eat out and if you don't know how to cook, there's no better time than before coming to Denmark.
Here are a few pictures:
Most of the first week was very glum and overcast so I was very happy to see the sunshine again. This is right off a metro stop near one of the CBS buildings.
This is the royal palace from the canal tour perspective.
There are these painted elephant statues all over the city. I took a pictures of most of the ones I came across but I don't want to upload them all so here are just a few of them.
This is the opera house. If you're into architecture there are tons of very very cool buildings here in Copenhagen.
There are these archaic looking statues all over the city and this is one of my favorites so far.
Some old church.
Another statue
I forgot to explain that these elephants were painted by artists and are going up for auction to raise money to help save the elephants in Asia or something along those lines.
This is the little mermaid statue. Not really that special in my opinion but it's a huge tourist attraction.
This was the only sitting elephant I took a picture of but there's supposed to be others like it, I just haven't seen them yet.
Here are some random useful hints: Bring extra passport photos, if you're planning on getting a monthly train pass you need one and you also need two for your residence permit. Bring a suit and dress shoes or a nice dress, you'll need it. Make sure you have good walking shoes, you'll likely be walking a lot. If you plan to use your credit card in Denmark you need to get a PIN code for it. Yes, your credit card, for some reason you need a pin to use it here and I had to get my dad to pretend he was me and call my credit card company and get it for me. Call your phone company to get your SIM unlocked before you go, they won't let you do it once you're overseas, well at least Verizon won't. If you like drinking coffee in the morning I would bring instant coffee from back home, while it isn't as good as fresh, you won't go broke buying coffe every morning. I have yet to find a place that sells regular drip coffee. Mostly everywhere sells expresso drinks but if you buy those regularly, like I said, you'll be broke before you know it. Also, I haven't seen a coffee machine in the stores and my apartment only has an expresso machine.
Being from Hawaii I don't really have much winter clothes but if you have any you should plan to bring it. We went down to the beach one night and it was freezing. Luckily I had a good windbreaker because without it I would have been miserable, the wind went straight through my jeans and sneakers and my face was frozen. Weather here is very unpredictable. In the morning it might look gloomy and cold but by the time you're on your way home in the afternoon it might be sunny and making your wish you wore shorts in the morning. I'm sure I'll make an update sooner or later on how cold it gets. I'm still in the process of finding warm clothes for the looming winter ahead.
Ask for student discount when you're buying stuff at cafes and bars, some places give 10% off and that 10% goes along way when everything is so expensive.
Another friendly bit of advice, if you don't like to cook make sure you bring LOTS of money to eat out and if you don't know how to cook, there's no better time than before coming to Denmark.
Here are a few pictures:
Most of the first week was very glum and overcast so I was very happy to see the sunshine again. This is right off a metro stop near one of the CBS buildings.
This is the royal palace from the canal tour perspective.
There are these painted elephant statues all over the city. I took a pictures of most of the ones I came across but I don't want to upload them all so here are just a few of them.
This is the opera house. If you're into architecture there are tons of very very cool buildings here in Copenhagen.
There are these archaic looking statues all over the city and this is one of my favorites so far.
I forgot to explain that these elephants were painted by artists and are going up for auction to raise money to help save the elephants in Asia or something along those lines.
This is the little mermaid statue. Not really that special in my opinion but it's a huge tourist attraction.
This was the only sitting elephant I took a picture of but there's supposed to be others like it, I just haven't seen them yet.
Monday, August 15, 2011
First Impressions
When I first decided to travel to Denmark for my student exchange I thought it was going to be easy because almost the entire population speaks English. While it is true that most of the locals speak English and are friendly, they usually speak Danish. Not to mention all the signs, menus, food labels, and other important displays of information are in Danish.
Copenhagen is a rather large city compared to my hometown of Kauai, Hawaii but seems small when you compare it to places like LA and Chicago. There are tons of people like a big city, yes, but the city is much more country like. That doesn't really make sense, let me try to explain. In Copenhagen, as far as I can remember all the buildings have been under 7 stories or so. People ride bikes everywhere, there are definitely more bike riders than car drivers. There are lots of small shops all over the place and not many of those huge discount stores like Walmart and Costco. Well, I haven't been to too much of the city since I just got here 3 days ago, but I have yet to find a shop that's bigger than the size of Longs.
The Copenhagen Business School (CBS) is great so far. There are about 750 exchange students from about 54 countries this year and about 13,000 full time undergraduates. I was shocked when I found out students attending higher education institutions in Denmark don't pay tuition, they go to school for free. On top of that they get about an 800 Euro a month stipend because the cost of living is so high. Talk about growing up in the wrong country.
Copenhagen is a rather large city compared to my hometown of Kauai, Hawaii but seems small when you compare it to places like LA and Chicago. There are tons of people like a big city, yes, but the city is much more country like. That doesn't really make sense, let me try to explain. In Copenhagen, as far as I can remember all the buildings have been under 7 stories or so. People ride bikes everywhere, there are definitely more bike riders than car drivers. There are lots of small shops all over the place and not many of those huge discount stores like Walmart and Costco. Well, I haven't been to too much of the city since I just got here 3 days ago, but I have yet to find a shop that's bigger than the size of Longs.
The Copenhagen Business School (CBS) is great so far. There are about 750 exchange students from about 54 countries this year and about 13,000 full time undergraduates. I was shocked when I found out students attending higher education institutions in Denmark don't pay tuition, they go to school for free. On top of that they get about an 800 Euro a month stipend because the cost of living is so high. Talk about growing up in the wrong country.
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