A bit more about my project, my life in kbh

I thought I would talk for a bit about my project.

First I will describe further the place where my project partners and I work. From previous entries, you know that I work at a museum called Frilandsmuseet or "The Open Air Museum". This is a place where families, school children, and senior citizens go to see what parts of Denmark looked like in the last couple of centuries. So the museum consists of original houses, farms, and other constructions all spread out over 86 acres with gardens, animals, and ponds in between.

There are many cool things about this museum, not the least of which is free admission. But another cool thing is that they hold special events for children during the holidays. Last week, we were around during the Easter events. I include here a picture of the children and their parents making decorative cut-outs. In a nearby room there were people dressed up in garb from the Danish 1800s and they were cooking food from a recipe book that looked really old. Everywhere there were children and their parents walking around. Especially popular were the geese that waddled in the dooryard and the stilts for everyone to try. I had not tried walking on stilts for maybe 15 years and gave it a go. I guess I did ok, but it took a while to get the hang of.

Back to my project. This museum has a program that was developed a couple years ago called Mulighedernes Land (Land of Possibilities). Basically it is a virtual role playing game that uses the museum grounds as the playing field. Participants choose which character they want to be and then they use a gps-equipped cell phone that gives them location-specific information. Where they go determines what happens in the story. Based on the story development, the group makes decisions about where to go next. The goal is for a the character to 'make it in life' in the 19th century. This program is for children of roughly all ages. Actually some adults have tried it and liked it, but it was really designed for the kids.

Anyway....

Our project is to create a teambuilding program for businesses that uses the gps technology. The museum's goal is to expand its use of the gps cellphone technology and to bring in some more money by attracting a wider audience to the museum. Shown right is our sponsor showing us how the gps cell phones work. If my partners look less than enthused, it is because it was a candid shot. We really like going around the museum and learning about everything. Most of all we like it when our sponsor comes to visit. His name is Klaus and he very excited and energetic.

I hope you can get an idea of what our project is like from what I have told you. If you have any questions or whatever just make it a comment to this post and I will get around to responding. I will leave you this time with something that I saw the other day. From these pictures you cannot hear the music being played in the streets or smell the bread being baked in a shop nearby, but you can imagine. It all brightened my mood a bit.

The start of a routine

Today, my group partners and I took the train and then a bus to our project site at the Open Air Museum, Frilandmuseet, north of Copenhagen. We met the man in charge of our project, Klaus, from the Danish National Museum IT department. After introductions, we went over the project for a while and then went for a tour of part of the museum outside. Then it started snowing. However, the snow flakes were not flakes at all but more like pellets. In fact they looked like those white moisture holding things that you see in store-bought soil. They eventually became normal flakes. Anyway, it was also really windy. I put a picture here of the view from where we waited for the bus to come get us. Such dreary weather would normally motivate one to just go home stay warm, but we had other plans.


Since discovering what I call the Turkish part of the city, I have not been able to resist going there every day for food at lunchtime. The others decided to come along and so the three of us had Turkish food for lunch. Specifically, I had Adana kebap (a spicy stick-less meat kebob on rice) which was so very very good. I think I was full for about 9 hours afterward.

Not much else has happened recently. I am just excited about the project and working at the museum. In time I will take some more pictures of the place.

I think I am getting used to living here in KBH. I feel comfortable getting around, buying food, learning Danish, and exploring. I feel less like a tourist and more like an inhabitant. Maybe it is because I have seen many other foreigners living here, or maybe I am just turning into a Copenhagener.

Arrival in Copenhagen: a friendly city

I did not do the responsible thing and gather all my Denmark information before departing.
For spring break I had spent a very relaxing week in Turkey with a close friend. Distracted by the 70° sunny weather and the rich warm Turkish culture, I had not given too much thought to my upcoming trip to Denmark.

My flight was 2 hours and 45 minutes from Istanbul to Copenhagen. I gained an hour from the time zone change and felt great when I stepped off the plane. Inside the terminal, however, I realized that the next hour or two would be very difficult. I knew the address of the place I would be staying in Copenhagen, but I had forgotten to review the instructions for how to get there from the airport. I suddenly felt a rush of dread. I had never traveled around Boston without a friend or a distinct plan for how I would get from place to place. Copenhagen, apart from being significantly bigger than Boston, presented the obvious disadvantage of being completely unfamiliar.

I set my luggage down, took a deep breath, and spent a couple minutes just looking around. I noted the where the trains, buses, cabs, ATM, and information desk were. I went to the ATM and withdrew some cash. Then I went to the information desk and asked what was the best way to my address. It was suggested that I take the bus. I could tell about my adventures figuring out the bus system, but it is kind of a long story. Anyway, with some help I figured it out and eventually ended up at my apartment. Once inside I set my things down and plopped myself down in a comfy chair. I closed my eyes and relaxed.

When I saw the familiar faces of my friends from WPI, I felt great. It is hard to describe the feeling but I think it is easy to imagine. For some reason, not seeing friends for a while and then seeing them again in a new and foreign place is just enchanting. The moment had arrived. We all got a tour of the nearby area. There were already obvious differences between Copenhagen and any city in the States. For the city as large as it is and the nearby streets as large as they are, there was very little noise and very little traffic. Car traffic anyway. There are bicycles everywhere. They come in all shapes and sizes for every kind of person. There are the bikes with the baskets for the shoppers, baby seats for the mothers and fathers, wagon attachments for the toddlers, speedy bikes for the racers, old fashioned bikes for the old fashioned, and motor bikes for less physically active.

So hopefully you can get a picture of what the city is like here. It is clean, polite, quiet, and full of history. I have had almost a week to enjoy it and not have to focus on my project. Oh yeah my project. I will talk more about that later. This week has been orientation week. We attended Danish classes every morning this week and took tours of different parts of the city in the afternoon. As you can imagine it has been 'the life'. Wednesday, we went to the Danish Parliment and met with the environmental spokesperson of the Socialist Peoples' Party. She was awesome and very inspiring. She was saying how Denmark has a long way to go environmentally. Thinking about the USA made me want to cry. Friday, we went finished off the orientation week by going to dinner to a Turkish restaurant. The irony is, I was in Turkey last week. It was a nice meal and it was fun to exchange some Turkish words with the waiter. Oh also there was some belly dancing. No wonder the restaurant was so crowded.

The next day, we went to the site of our project to see it. It was closed, but still it was awesome to finally arrive at the place we had read so much about and seen in pictures. Our project is to develop a teambuilding program for businesses at the Open Air Museum (Frilandsmuseet) that incorporates the history of the museum and the use of gps-equipped cell phones. On Monday, we will go back to the museum in the morning to meet with the person in charge of the project. We are all looking forward to it. The museum is in a small town that is just lovely and fun to walk around in. So maybe we will do that if we have time later on (and it's not too cold).

More news soon.

Cimbom!!!!

I will tell about this day backwards.

I thought for a moment, trying to remember from my flashcards how to ask for someone to take our picture. I remembered and turned to the gentleman standing behind me who had been joyously rooting for Galatasaray along with everyone else. (I made sure nothing exciting was happening in the game at that moment.) By then everyone around me knew I was American because I had been talking a little with Pınar. They had asked me where I was from, if I had ever been to a Galatasaray match before, if I know any Turkish, etc fln. Anyway the man happily agreed to take our picture.


The match was awesome and it was mostly because of the fans. Shortly after the game began, the man standing in front of Pınar turned around and asked her if she could see. She said yes but he scooched himself over and offered for her to stand in a free space next to him where the view was much better. Later some room was made for me too. Another man I stood next to offered me a cigarette. The girl over my right shoulder was friendly and we chatted for a bit. The atmosphere was incredible. Fans were chanting and Pınar was translating the chants for me. Although one chant in particular was obvious: "sarı! kırmızı! şampiyon! Cimbombom!!!" (yellow! red! champion! Galatasaray!)



I have been a fan of Galatasaray for about a year. There came a time where after hanging out with Turkish people so much I needed to pick a Turkish team to root for. All my friends root for different teams and so with nothing else to go on I just picked the team with the nicest colors. I included a video clip that is not particularly interesting, but it gives an idea of what it was like to be at the game. Here is a video of the goals of the match. Cimbom defeated Kayserispor 2-0.

The scene in and near the stadium was just a blur of yellow and red. Thousands of happy and determined people were walking every which way. Even as we drove near the venue, the streets were crowded with yellow and red clad people. We were driving from a fancy restaurant where we had enjoyed kebobs and Turkish food in other forms. Before that, we spent a lot of time at Dolmabahçe palace.Dolmabahçe is a palace. It happens to be the place where Atatürk lived and died. It is most grand. The walls and ceilings of just about every room are covered with gold leaf. The interior is filled with statues, oriental carpets, carvings, chandeliers, and those sorts of things. We wanted to just walk in and look around, but tours were mandatory. So we took an English tour. The guide was a friendly Turkish lady. At one point she said in Turkish to her friend that she was very tired and not in the mood for giving a tour. Still, it was a pleasant and very informative experience.


Going out and about today was highly necessary because the weather was marvelous. In the morning, the beauty of the day made it hard to resist going outside and taking some pictures.

Gray day but hey

Today we rode over the Second Bridge.

We walked along busy streets.

We ran some errands.

It was a great day.

And even though it was chilly and gray,


a smile or two could be found.

Ayasofya

The title is a bit misleading because I did much more than visit the Hagia Sofia today. However, it was the highlight because it is one of the few places I planned to go before I left the States. The visit was in honor of Misa who has studied and gained a great appreciation for it.

From the beginning... this city is huge. Pınar and I rode the bus for what must have been almost an hour before arriving in the vicinity of the mosque/museum know as the Hagia Sofia or Ayasofya to the Turks. There were many subtle things I enjoyed about riding through town such as trying to understand the advertisements and signs on the buildings, the people on the bus looking at me when they heard me speaking English, and just experiencing the feel of the city again. The smell of chestnuts roasting on a streetvendor's stove, the touristy shops, "gevrek" (crispy) simit (bagelly thing) stands, sipping ayran and eating köfte in a café. Well I am getting dreamy and carried away.

We walked a distance from the bus stop to the Hagia Sofia <-- (that's a link with photos). After going through security and paying the fee, we walked around part of the exterior of the building. It was already apparent that a lot of retoration work is currently being done on it. There were guys climbing all over a makeshift wooden scaffolding high on one side of the structure. Not a bad day for it-- the weather was pushing 65 F in the sun. We walked inside where the air was very cool. The sheer enormity the place was overwhelming at first. High archways and beatiful artwork captured our attention even as we stood in the entryway. We walked to the middle where there was a huge metal scaffolding going all the way up to the ceiling (shown right). The restoration work did not take away from the beauty and grandeur of the place. This building was a Christian church, then it became a mosque, and finally it was turned into a museum. I like that the Turks maintain it for everyone to appreciate. On that note, I had never seen so many foreigners in Turkey. A British man looked around and then saw me. I wasn't the closest person to him but I realized that was the closest one who looked like I knew English. He asked me if I wouldn't taking a picture of him and his wife as he handed me his camera. I happily did so. Even though I speak English most of the time here, it seemed strange to speak it with a native speaker.

We went upstairs, although there weren't any stairs. Rather, there a huge ramp made of large smooth stones that wound endlessly upward. The upper level consists of a large gallery of photographs and artwork in addition to the visual impressiveness of the walls themselves. Another thing I should mention is that there were large groups of young schoolchildren everywhere. I thought how lucky are they to go to a place like this for a field trip.

When we left, we walked to the park that sits between the Hagia Sofia and the Sultan Ahmet (big mosque that I went to last time). It is marked by a large fountain. There we discussed what to do next. We decided to have lunch. I had köfte and ayran. We sat next to the window on the second floor where we could see the train and the people below. I had asked Pınar the day before what the word "saray" meant because I forgot and she said she would take me to one (rather than just tell me the meaning). So we walked in the direction of a nearby saray. We passed by some shops that I had seen before. Hanging above the door of one of the shops was a sign that I found to be especially amusing.

We arrived at the saray. Saray I learned means "palace". This one I had been to before but not inside. Topkapı is the name of the p(a)lace. As you might imagine it just gleamed with artwork and treasure. However, a lot of the places inside forbade the use of photography, so I do not have a many of photos of the artifacts. Still, I put some pictures below.

Asım in Eurasia

This story starts with a welcome home. Pınar was the first to welcome me as I had been standing there in the airport, feeling excited as ever to be in İstanbul again but frustrated at not being able to just run out of the airport. I probably felt a bit like Boris (the dog) when he is about to go for a walk but has to wait in the car. Anyway, the wait was not long. The reunification of me with Pınar and her mother was joyous. However, the airport was not the most exciting place to hang out, so we walked to the car.

The sunny, 65°F weather was next to welcome me. Even as I write this the next day, the weather is so sunny and warm and I can hardly believe I am sitting here, indoors. However, I can only brag about the weather for so long. In less than a week I will go to Copenhagen where I hear the weather is generally miserable this time of year. So just let me enjoy it while I can.

When I took my things up to "my room", there was a big sign on the door that read 'Hoşgeldin Asım' (Welcome Asım). That evening I sat down at the dinner table with Pınar, her parents, and their helper Nadiş. I don't need to tell you how good Turkish food is or how much I missed it. I don't need to tell you that the rest of the evening was lovely. I shouldn't have to tell you about how I stayed up late with Pınar's dad while he told me all about cardiology and his research. And you could probably go without knowing that I slept like a baby and felt great the next day.

It is good to be back. You might wonder if I find it less exciting this time or something. Actually there are things about this time that make it better. For one, I know a bit more Turkish and I have been speaking more (or trying to). The weather is much much nicer. I have no surprises planned this time or crazy travel plans. It is just this week here. There was a thought that the infamous B might come to İstanbul for a visit this weekend, but it is not looking likely at this point. Anyway there is plenty to do. Plenty to think about. Denmark is looming. That is going to be interesting. I am excited about going there and everything, but damn. It is so nice here.