Name: Jennifer Abplanalp
Home University: University of Wisconsin – Madison
Summer Session 1 Course: Livability in the Modern City
Summer Session 2 Course: Food Systems
It’s really hard to make a bucket list when you have so little time left and still want to see enough places and do enough things to take up several solid weeks of being a tourist. It’s amazing how time disappears when you’re busy with school. I appear to be out of weekends.
Learning is great, school is wonderful, and I would not have learned the things I’ve learned in the past five weeks if it hadn’t been for attending DIS. I wouldn’t change that. However, school does have that nasty habit of getting in the way of traveling around a country. I’m realizing now that my bucket list needs to and needed to be slightly smaller in scope if I was to be honest about leaving enough time for school, schoolwork, and my own personal sanity and recharging.
I’ve decided at this point to simply do the best I can to enjoy Copenhagen for the remainder of my time here and plan the bigger bucket list items for the next time I come to this little peninsula of Viking goodness.
This evening, after a low-key weekend of recuperating from my study tour, I did meet up with friends for another visit to Paper Island, or Papirøen, for some crispy duck from the Red China food stall. One item checked off the list. Then I went and briefly explored Christiania … that was an experience. Another item checked off the list.
I’m going to be missing a lot, but I’ve also seen a lot and learned a lot about Danish customs and culture. I was fortunate six years ago to meet two Danish young women while staying at a hostel in Washington DC. I visited them in Aarhus during my time here and realized that while everything we did wasn’t on my bucket list, the experiences I had during that weekend might as well have been and I realized that some of the best moments that you can have often come in the most unexpected ways.