eventyr i bygninger og kanyler.

gooooooooood morning!
(at least it will be morning by the time most of you have an opportunity to read this.)

i find myself with a little chunk of free time and the presence of mind to record my thoughts so i figured i'd attempt to expand upon my list of events from the last post. i'll begin with my afternoon of exploring with brittany.

my dear friend is taking a history of copenhagen course which requires her to explore the city and answer questions/take pictures of what she sees. i benefit quite a bit from her enrollment in said course because i get a free travel guide AND touring buddy. win-win.
her first assignment took us to the city hall. it's about a block away from the main building of our school. it was officially opened in 1905 and is actually the third city hall in copenhagen's history. the previous two burned down. a lot of things in this city have burned down. like the whole city.

fun fact: the clock tower adjacent to the main building makes the city hall one of the tallest buildings in copenhagen. apparently they opted to have tall humans at the expense of the height of this buildings.
above the front door is a golden statue of absalon, the bishop who founded copenhagen along with christian the fourth. the hall contains quite a few offices, a large hall that any citizen has the power to rent for social events, and a very interesting water fixture.

out on the plaza in front of the city hall is the zero mile marker. err...zero kilometer marker. upon it you'll find the distances to other portions of the city. although upon further examination, taylor realized that it gives three different distances to the same place. moving to google maps was a valuable choice.

next stop: the church of our lady. this ridiculously old and beautiful church is also just a block away from our school. the history of this place includes another series of fires and moving the site of the building from place to place around the city until the area it now resides in was settled upon. it fell victim to the british bombings of copenhagen in 1807 and needed to be rebuilt yet again. construction began in 1817 and was finally finished in 1829. the big controversy surrounding the rebuilding was the erection of the church tower. the old building, having been built in the medieval era, had a tower but the architect designed the new church in the neo-classical style which apparently has a prohibition against church towers. however, the tribe spoke pretty forcefully and they got their church tower.

the sides of the church are lined with marble statues of the 12 disciples, judas iscariot replaced with the apostle paul. at the head of the church is the christus. apparently quite a while ago a mormon prophet entered the church, saw the statue, and exclaimed that this is what jesus looked like. he had copies of the statue made and i believe there's one in every mormon temple.
in 1924, the church of our lady was officially named the national cathedral of denmark. however, it doesn't look like any huge events have happened in there for a while. in 1648, frederik the third was crowned and then, after a sizeable dry spell, the current crown prince and his wife were married there in 2004.

our exploration was cut short after this visit as i had to get to class. however, this wasn't your ordinary class. it was clinical skills day and i learned how to use a stethoscope, place an IV, and perform a lumbar puncture. it was a pretty big day. i think the craziest part of the whole deal was how nonchalant our professors were about the whole affair. as if it were the most normal thing in the world to give a bunch of 20 year-olds needles and allow them to stab things. including each other. yes, we were given the option of practicing our IV insertions on each other. a sweet girl in my class offered herself to be stuck but was too nervous to do it herself. i took her up on the offer and was ultimately unsuccessful, but she assured me (in response to me repeatedly asking, "am i hurting you?") that it really didn't hurt her. crazy day. i think it still hasn't truly hit me that i tried to put a needle in another human being.

we had a short week of classes because we all left for our short study tours that thursday. and since that was such an incredible weekend and deserves a post of its own, i'll stop here for today. but i'll leave you with a picture of some graffiti on the outside of the church of our lady.

kærlig hilsen,
kati