Erasmus.Denmark.Send(”me”)

Vacuuming

Since saturday I started working in the evening/night. Alot of the fellow Exchange students work in the MesseCenter so I decided to check it out.  MesseCenter is an exposition hall. When there are big expositions they need i think around 50 students every night to clean the halls, so everything is nice and shiny again next day. Basically we have to vacuum the carpets in the hallways and the ones of the stands. Saturday was the first day, because sunday was the first exposition day. We cleaned from 20 till 23:30 in hall E with a bunch of chinese people. I was a bit late and forgot my MP3 player so 3:30hours of vacuuming without music was very boring. Sundayevening was madness, the first day, the opening day, had clearly been a successfull day, if i looked at the dirt on the carpets. This day I drove to messecenter with the girls from AgroSkolen. We cleaned hall C on sunday evening. this was a long evening. We started at 19 and finished around 24. Thank god I had my music. Mondayevening was from 21 till 2 and Tuesday was from 19 till 23:30. I must say, hours and hours of vacuuming, its not always that easy. If you got a good vacuumer the hardest part is just standing up all the time, but last time I had a crappy cleaner which was sucking itself stuck to the carpet like crazy. This made cleaning the long haired black carpet in the middle of my way alot harder. I felt like I was working in the gym, but the music maked it all bearable for me. When I am listening to great Trance music, I can do the most boring job for a long time. After all this cleaning makes some good money. Around 116DKK is the basic wage, and after 22:00 or in the weekends the wages goes up some more, so it aint that bad I must say. The bad thing is that you dont really have any time in the evening for friends or for school work. The school work is kindof the biggest problem, because when there is work in messecenter, birk is dead. Almost every exchange student goes to work there, so there is nothing to do here anyway (except for the school work fcorz).

This work is not on a daily basis, it is only when there are exhibitions so, it is most of the times only a few days in a month. Perfect for student work.

CPR CPR CPR

If you want to live in Denmark, you need a CPR number. Your name means fairly nothing here, the CPR number is important! When you stay in Denmark for more than 3 months you need to get a Residence permit. This is like a danish passport, with your CPR number. I’ve really lost some days in time for this number already. First we had to go to Ringkøbing to registrate ourselves.  This took about half a day. Then we got a letter a few days later about the registration. With this letter we went to the registration office here in Herning. There we had to fill in another form. With this form we then finally get a CPR number. But thats not all yet, now we have to wait a few weeks to get our official “Residence permit” card. Today I called the office, because I filled in this form  yesterday, and they told me that the computer system in the office was broken so I could not get my CPR number yet, but if I call in the afternoon, I could get it… great!

Problem is you need this CPR number for everything. When you want to open a bankaccount, you need this CPR number. When you go to the doctor, first thing they ask is your CPR. For work it is obvious you need this number as well, but I wanted to order a mobile phone card online, and they asked … my CPR!

So everything kind of has to wait, till I get this stupid number. Lets hope I can have it by the afternoon…

In love with danish roads

Today I had to go to Ringkøbing for our Residence Permit. We were supposed to be there at 9:30, and there is only 1 highway in Denmark, so it was 50km of normal roads. I quote myself when I say: “Denmark is an empty country”. And this was proven again today. The road we drove on was one of the main roads in Denmark. If you know that Herning is the 2nd biggest city in Jylland you might expect some serious traffic between 8:30 and 9:30. But no, the roads were just empty as ever! They never heard of speed cameras in Denmark as well. The roads all are quite new, straight and drive very well. But the best thing is the emptiness of them. In city borders the speed limit is 60 - 70, and on normal roads, it is 80. But no one drives 80 there, even the large trucks drive as hard as they can (90 that is). Even in wet conditions, everyone is driving the speed he wants, and this is brilliant. The normal speed today was about 110km/h. In Belgium this might not be possible because of the hundreds of cars around you all the time. Today I overtook about 4 trucks and 3 cars on a 22km straight. This was so easy because there were no cars in the oposite direction for a whole kilometer sometimes. I love it that I have my car with me here. The nearest shops are 3km, the town center is about 5km I think. So nothing is close actually. Only school. Last saturday we went to town for a beer by bus, and had to walk back around 3 by foot. This was a 40minute walk, so a car is prefered really.

Another reason why I love the road here is the highway around Herning. This highway is so new that it is on no GPS map yet… Quite funny if you check your gps and he tells you that you are driving in the fields and the woods at 130km/h. The best part about this is that I drive on the highway for shoping to LIDL. Can you imagine? It’s only a 5 min drive from here to LIDL, but that there is a highway on the track to it, is just to funny.

The Project

Today I had to present myself to my project teachers, Ulrich Bjerre and Anett Korsgaard Nissen. Ulrich is the person who will follow up our work and Anett will be the one to ask technical questions. After my tiny presentation I recieved more information about the way of working on this project. Every thursday there will be a meeting with the project teachers to follow up the progress.

The project itself has a tiny description. My task now is to brainstorm about the functions I will implement in this project. After 2 weeks of vacation here, there finally is some work to do :P. Not that I needed something extra to do, but to bring this to a good end, it’s good that I can start now.

This project will have 30 ECTS points instead of the 26 that were given originally. Together with the 5 ECTS points of Danish Class, is this 9 points more than original, but I guess I’ll manage.

Happiest people in the world

As you may know, the danish people are the happiest people in the world. Why? I have some theories. First of all Denmark is an empty country. With about 5.4mil people and 43,094 km² they have an average of 129.16 inhabitants per km². When we arrived in Denmark I just saw empty fields, and here and there a barn, like in the USA, it was amazing. In Denmark they also have never heard of traffic jams i think. We live in the middle of Jutland, And around Herning is a highway. 2 lanes in each direction. We drove there in the middle of the day, and this highway was fairly empty. I had the feeling I was driving on the belgian E17 at sunday morning around 8. It was so quiet. The Danish also have a good public transport system for busses and trains. This, together with the healthy air and the low rate of pollution must have some influence on the happiness.

But besides that I think I have discovered the real reason why the Danish are so happy. It is because all the electric plugs in their houses are smiling at them. You should see it.

How can someone be sad if he is surounded by these things?

First Week

I’m here now for 1 week. And it was a great week. It went quite fast and we actually did alot of things. Out to the student bar, making food, cleaning, vaccuuming, doing the dishes, the gym, watching movies with the fellow erasmus students, room party and TEKO party. It was really nice. I had a great week here and am ready for the next one

btw check my Flickr for photos

Teko Tickets

Today our day started with getting up and dressed to get some tickets for the TEKO party. TEKO is a school next to ours, where they teach Design and Mode. In this school 98% of the students are girls, so this is nice :P. The tickets to the party in presale are 50krones (6.7eur) They were being sold at “lunchbreak”, so yesterday we went there around 13 and lunchbreak was already over, apparently they have lunchbreak from 11:15 till 11:45. uhh….. lunchbreak? we had breakfast at that time!

After we got the tickets today, we had a meeting with our project manager Ulrich Bjerre. At this meeting we also met a newly arrived Erasmus student from Germany, called Volker. We had a little presentation with the basic information for contact and stuff. We’ll meet our projectmanager every thursday around noon. perfect timing

Next thursday we will discuss the things we’ll do in our project. So untill then we have nothing really to do except for danish course on mondays.

In the evening the studenterhuset was open and we had a little poker there. After it closes (at 23, yeah, the danish people go to bed early…) we went to Ektor his place for some after-drink had some chat with the polish guys and the one from Spain.

Studenterhuset

Today at 11:30 we met up with Esben to have a look at Siemens Wind Power. After we had lunch there, our buddy gave us a small tour through the factory. It was quite cool to see all those windmill parts. they are bigger than you might think.
The reason I was at Siemens was for a job interview. The interview went ok, quite hard to understand all the things they wanted but ok, they’ll call me on monday. we’ll see
After siemens we did some shopping, filled our fridge, had some toast dinner and then we went to the studenterhuset the local student bar, accoss the street. we met up with the other erasmus students there and had some drinks. In Denmark, apparently everyone goes to bed early. the student bar closes at 11 so we had to leave quite early. Because no one was tired yet, we had a little after-”party” at our place, had some drinks, some martini and stuff with the other students till about 1:30 and is was nice really. Didn’t think we could fit so many students in our small room

Danish Class

Today we met up with Ingrid Billesø, our contact person from the International Office here. She told us we had a Danish Course today, from 15:50 till 18:15 we had our first danish lessons. Quite funny. First we used a program to learn some basic danish words, like face, elbow, knee, toe, hand, talking, telephoning, …. you know… the basics. then we had some sentences and some basic danish, learned to pronounce them. Quite funny to do really. The danish language is like a mix of dutch, german and english. verbs are always the same in the present, so it isnt that hard I think. The right pronounciatons are the hardest. At the evening Esben, our budy, guided us around town. We visited some local pubs and the shopping center. One thing is for sure, if you want some cheap beer, don’t come to Denmark!

The trip to DK

The trip to DK started for me at 2:25 in the morning. At that time I woke up, took my food for the day out of the fridge, said goodbye to my parents and drove to Jago’s house where we was waiting with some last boxes of stuff and some bags, which, after a bit of fooling around, got in the car. My car was loaded heavily, stuff for 4 months for 2 ppl, its some weight all together. Quite funny to see that the back of the car was lowered by 8cm or so. At 3:15 we took off at Jago’s home in Belsele and started our trip to Herning

My GPS, and google maps as well, calculates this as 8h30m driving, so we guessed we’d arrive around 13, because we need to rest sometimes :P. The weather was perfect and the roads were perfect (perfect = empty, dry and flat). At 6:30 we took our first break to have some small breakfast and a wee. At 7:35 we had another small break where we filled up the car again. Another 2 hours later we had another small break for some more eating and stuff. at that time we had done already 700km. Around 10:50 we crossed the danish border. The 150km/h I got used to in germany now had do be reduced to 110 - 130, but we were almost there, sun shining, still emptry roads. After a second fueling stop we headed to the smaller roads, leading to Herning. Finally at 12:00 we were here, at Esben (our buddy) his doorstep.

He had the keys of our apartment. We were quite amazed by the size of our apartment, and not in a good way. The sleeping room was very small, and sleeping in that with 2 people…. It is possible, but not very comfy. In the living room - on the other hand - we had a little bit more space, 2 desks, a small couch and a comfy chair. So we moved around the beds and desks in a way that we both have a “private” room. My desk and bed are in the living room and Jago his bed and desk are in the sleeping room. So we have a bit of privacy.

Pictures of the first day: