Tag Archives: concert

Happy Moments

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The start of the semester was a little rocky with all of the snow days and power outages, but things are finally starting to look up! There’ve been a lot of things to love about my last semester of senior year, so I’d share some happy moments that have happened thus far:

  • I am going to Indonesia this summer! I was selected as a Critical Language Scholar so the U.S State Department will be fully funding me to study Indonesian language and culture for ten weeks in Malang, Indonesia. It was a tough decision because I now must give up other opportunities, but after talking with many people I trust, I feel I’ve made the right decision. The way someone put it to me was, “Once you graduate it’s easy to get settled and comfortable; take the opportunity to travel while you can!” I can’t wait to see my Indonesian friends, visit the bi-co students who are doing the same program I did in summer 2012, improve my Indonesian, make new friends, and see new places!
My friend Tiwi and I in rural Java, Indonesia

My friend Tiwi and I in rural Java, Indonesia

  • I absolutely love my classes this semester! I was originally going to take a class at each of the Quaker Consortium schools, but I made a last minute decision to take classes I was truly passionate about over ones that would have been a little more practical. I want to spend my last semester studying things that make me happy and having less commute time means I can spend more time with the people I love. One of my classes this semester is very unique. It’s called Writing Taste: an English class that explores the philosophy and sociology of food. Our class is co-taught by a Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr professor so we split out classes between the two campuses. Five of our classes are taught by a famous Philly food critic so we get to learn the basics of food journalism along with some amazing opportunities like receiving money to go to a restaurant of our choice to do a restaurant review and go to Fork, one of the best restaurants in town, with our class.
Cheese filled "gnudi" at Fork: so delicious

Cheese filled “gnudi” at Fork: so delicious

  • Making time to get off-campus! The upperclassmen spend so much time preparing for Hell Week for the first-years that we sometimes forget the importance of getting off-campus to clear our heads every so often. It can be hard to motivate yourself in the winter when it’s so cold, but it’s worth it! On Tuesday, I went to a local restaurant with some friends for delicious chips and strawberry jalapeno salsa and drinks. The next night I went to see Young the Giant with my friend Prianna at the Tower Theater, a convenient train ride away. It’s nice to remind myself that I’m adult and I can go out and have fun even on a school night!
At the Young the Giant concert

At the Young the Giant concert

  • I started my Teaching and Learning Initiative partnership! In this program, students are paired with staff members and we each get to teach and learn a skill (and get paid to do so)! I am teaching my partner arts and crafts that she can do with her three year old daughter and she is teaching me how to cook. It’s a wonderful collaboration and I’m thankful for the opportunity to get to know my staff partner so well since we may not have met otherwise.
Making savory crepes for our partnership

Making savory crepes for our partnership

  • Our newly elected President Kim Cassidy hosted a carnival pop up event! She has been hosting surprise one-hour fun sessions for the whole campus throughout the year. She has done everything from skee ball to lego building to s’mores and now a carnival! There was cotton candy, popcorn, games, prizes, balloon animals, and temporary tattoos administered by the lovely Communications staff. These events are a great way to bring the campus together and get to know our beloved “KCass” a little better!
My temporary tattoo from the carnival

My temporary tattoo from the carnival

  • I got to help make Filipino food with Barkada, the Filipino student club, this past Friday! I’ve never had Filipino food because Filipino restaurants are rare in Portland and Philly so I was excited to try something new. We made a sort of egg roll called lumpia, both fried with meat and not fried with vegetables. We also made a dessert called turón, a fried pastry with jackfruit, plantains, and brown sugar. We also got to snack on Clover chips and try different Filipino sauces to dip our creations in. There was also a Wii to play Just Dance so it was a fun afternoon for everyone! Afterwards, the Community Diversity Assistants hosted an event where students were able to write down microaggressions they had experienced in the classroom to help develop a diversity curriculum for faculty and staff. 
Homemade FIlipino food

Homemade FIlipino food

Now there’s only a week until Spring Break! Good luck with midterms, Mawrters! I’ll be spending lots of time in Philly in addition to visiting some friends in New York and DC and next week so I’m excited to relax next week.

Snapshots of my Philadelphian Summer

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My sincerest apologies for not posting more this past month; there’s a lot to catch you all up on! I am living in a house in West Philadelphia with two housemates (one is the landlord and is in an Argentinean tango band; the other is a Haverford alum who is working towards a masters in architecture at Penn) and two cats. When I haven’t been interning with the Mural Arts Program, I have been working in the admissions office at Bryn Mawr, and when I am not doing that, I’m likely hanging out with friends in the city. I am pretty lucky in that many of my friends are in the area for the summer or have at least been for a short while so I’ve had a chance to see them. What’s also been great is that I’ve been getting to know Mawrters who I didn’t know as well during the school year who are also in the area!

One of the greatest parts about living in Philadelphia is the FOOD! In the past month, I have had Indian, Mexican, Indonesian, Ethiopian, Thai, Burmese, Chinese, Malaysian, Lebanese, Greek, Japanese, and great brunch food! I have countless restaurants that I still want to try. West Philadelphia has an extremely diverse range of food options so I am pretty lucky to be able to walk a few blocks from my house to find delicious food. It’s a great way to bond with friends, especially since there are so many affordable options in West Philly.

I’ve also really come to love cooking for myself. I cooked for myself for half a semester in Denmark so I already had some experience but it’s actually been much easier here in the U.S, where all the ingredients are all in English and I am familiar with the measurements. Sometimes it can be exhausting and just seems like too much after a long hot day but I’m proud to say that I have never succumbed to ordering take-out for just myself or cooking microwaveable food (NOT that there is inherently anything wrong with either of these things, it’s just more affordable and more fun for me to cook my own food!) One of the big reasons I chose to live in West Philadelphia over Fairmount (where my internship is located) was the proximity to grocery stores. I live near three grocery stores which each fulfill different niches for me: Aldi (for dirt-cheap dry goods), Shop N Bag (still very affordable, where I do most of my grocery shopping), and The Fresh Grocer (more expensive so I go here when I need fresh produce or want a treat) The most challenging parts of cooking for myself are: A) buying groceries that won’t expire before I can eat them , B) coming up with new dishes for one, and C) having to cook not just a main dish but a side as well. It’s also really upsetting when something turns out terrible and you have to eat it anyways or throw it away because you already used so many of your groceries and you already took so much time to make something (like when I made pesto pasta with chicken and asparagus yesterday and I accidentally poured ALL of the salt on my meal…). I usually rotate between: fajitas, stir fry, pasta, sandwiches, and for sides: cooked vegetables and salad. Lately, I have gotten more creative and made things like potato leek soup and nasi goring udang (Indonesian fried rice with shrimp). I’ve even started baking more, making things liked nutella filled chocolate chip cookies and chocolate cake for a friend’s birthday.

I am also  at a unique advantage in that I live on the border of “University City” and “West Philly” (which seems to be divided by 52nd Street). I get to see two very different sides of West Philadelphia, something that I really love since most college students only ever stay on Penn’s campus and never venture out. West Philadelphia has had a history of crime and violence but things have changed a lot for better and for worse due to gentrification of the neighborhood by University of Pennsylvania but there has also been a lot of revitalization of neighborhoods for themselves. One of my favorite examples is the community garden that is right under my El stop. Every Thursday, they have a farmer’s market and I love buying fresh strawberries there to enjoy on my way home!

Most days don’t tend to be incredibly exciting for me: go to work, come home, cook dinner, clean, up, sleep, but having friends nearby breaks up the monotony! My friends Megha, Kriti, and Alisha live less than a mile away so we usually get together once a week and cook dinner or go out to dinner. My friend Amelia came to stay with me before she left the country for Japan and Malaysia so we had a delicious dinner and hilarious photoshoot altogether! I also got to see my friend Rebekah before she left for South Arica to study abroad so we made a final dinner together and ate gelato! It was super hard to say good-bye to my friends going abroad but I know they will both be having incredible adventures and with any luck I might be traveling too if I am accepted to an international fellowship program after graduation. I am hoping to visit Amelia in Japan; a country that has always been on my bucket list to travel to.

Photoshoot at my friend Megha's place

Photoshoot at my friend Megha’s place

A few weekends ago, I went down to D.C to visit my friend Colleen! Three years ago, I worked at a summer camp for military youth in Oregon and Colleen was my cabin partner. Together, we managed 18 eight to nine year old girls and we’ve been good friends ever since, always making sure to see each other breaks. I was ecstatic that my friends from home would only be a few hours away from me for the summer! I was in less than DC for 24 hours but we still had a blast! We found a great pizza shop on H-Street for dinner, had stuffed french toast for brunch the next morning, explored the National Mall, and wandered through the museums. I had only been to D.C twice before: during an eighth grade East Coast trip and for one day earlier this semester when I came to see Obama’s inauguration so it was great to just explore and see it as a city and not just a tourist site. I’ll be going back to D.C again this weekend to see my friend Alia and to explore even more of D.C since less than 24 hours is definitely not enough.

Visiting my friend Colleen in DC

Visiting my friend Colleen in DC

I also got the chance to celebrate my lovely friend Elizabeth’s birthday for the second year in a row. The three Bryn Mawr girls from Indonesia got together and went out for Greek food and ice cream on Friday and then met up with a big group of the friends the next night. I am eagerly awaiting my birthday now when I can finally go to 21+ concerts and join my friends on more outings. A lot more people will be back for DLT training on my birthday too so it will be a great chance to reunite as well.

Me and the birthday queen

Me and the birthday queen

The same weekend, my friend Alia and I met up with fellow Mawrters Maddy and Jennifer to see Monsters University, cook lunch, and go out to Franklin Fountain afterwards.

Ice cream treats at Franklin Fountain

Ice cream treats at Franklin Fountain

Last weekend, I was extremely fortunate to be able to see the Atlantic Ocean for the first time from the U.S side! Elizabeth and I went to visit our friend Paige in Long Beach Island on the Jersey Shore. We played in the waves (sadly it was just as cold as the Pacific is…), laid on the beach, visited a lighthouse, explored the tide pools, and ended the day with Blizzards from Dairy Queen. It was a wonderful day, and I have the sunburns and sand everywhere to prove it!

Paige, Elizabeth, and me at the Jersey Shore

Paige, Elizabeth, and me at the Jersey Shore

I’ve also been going to lots of ~*free*~ concerts! The radio station 104.5 puts on free concerts at The Piazza in Northern Liberties every few weeks during the summer. I’ve had the chance to see Royal Teeth + Metric and Capital Cities (it started pouring rain before we had the chance to see Cold War Kids sadly). My sister is coming to visit in the mid September and she’ll get to come with me to the last event of the season! For Fourth of July, since Philadelphia is where it all started, they have a huge free outdoor concert and fireworks so I got to see John Mayer and Ne-Yo! The night was soured though when complete chaos broke out in the crowd when someone set off a firecracker. Mob mentality  is a scary thing. This past week, I won a pair of two free tickets from Campus Philly, a non-profit that connects students in the Philly area to the city, to see Yo La Tengo and Belle and Sebastian at The Mann Center. I brought my friend Kriti and we had a blast! It was the perfect kind of music for an outdoor concert and we had a great view of the city by the end. Next weekend, Elizabeth and I are volunteering at the Xponential Music Festival in Camden meaning we will get to see a bunch of bands for free, including My Morning Jacket, Wilco, and Bob Dylan! I have no idea how I’ve been so lucky these past few weeks, usually I never win anything.

Belle and Sebastian at The Mann Center

Belle and Sebastian at The Mann Center

Speaking of being extremely fortunate and lucky, I had the opportunity to hear Hilary Clinton speak at Bryn Mawr last week! I will know have seen both the Clintons speak in person since Bill Clinton came to Bryn Mawr my freshman year to campaign for the Democratic PA senator candidate. I was originally on the wait list but enough people didn’t show up so I got off the stand-by list and actually got to see her speak in person! I was absolutely delighted since my sophomore year, I was invited to the initial Women in Public Service (an initiative to involve more women in the public service sector) meeting where she was speaking but I couldn’t go since I had too much work since it was finals week. This time around, she was the keynote speaker for the Women in Public Service Institute, a conference that brought together female leaders and activists from around the world to discuss peacebuilding and development. Hilary was incredible and eloquent in her speech; stressing the importance of having 50% of the public sector be represented by women by 2050. Sadly, she did announce her candidacy for president but nevertheless, seeing her was inspirational and an experience I will never forget.

Hilary Clinton at Bryn Mawr (photo credit: Hannah Smith '14)

Hilary Clinton at Bryn Mawr (photo credit: Hannah Smith ’14)

That was a super long post but I feel like I’ve finally caught everyone up on all the thing I’ve been doing these past few months! Stay tuned for an update on my projects with Mural Arts!

Cemeteries, Culture Shows, Cake, Concerts, and Christiania

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Since I’ve been back from my short study tour, things have finally started falling into a routine. Most days I wake up early to take the train into the city for the class, spend the day in Copenhagen in class, working, or volunteering, and then returning home to my folk high school in the evening for dinner and homework before falling asleep. On weekends, I usually take the opportunity to sleep in, catch up on work and TV shows, and try and see at least one new place. This past week has been spiced up with lots of fun events however!

Last week, I had my first field study on Wednesday. I went to visit Assistens Cemetery, the burial ground for famous Danes, with my Danish Language and Culture Class. We split into groups and did research on various Danes to present to the rest of our class as we did a walking tour of this picturesque cemetery (Danes will even often have picnics here!) My group presented on Ben Webster, a famous African-American jazz musician who spent his final years in Copenhagen. Other graves included Hans Christian Anderson, author of stories such as “The Ugly Duckling” and “The Little Mermaid”, Niels Bohr, a famous physicist, and Søren Kierkegaard, a renowned philosopher credited as being the father of existentialism. After our visit to the cemetery, we stopped by a cafe where we got a free drink. I got hot chocolate, which was absolutely delicious. Since we sat outside, we got to wrap ourselves up in the blankets that the cafe provided to stay warm making for a very cozy evening.

Can you get any more Danish than wool blankets and hot chocolate?

That Saturday, we had the Central/Eastern European cultural night with presentations from students from Latvia, Slovenia, Czech Republic, and Hungary. They had gone all out with decorating the big hall in the theme of space as the whole culture night revolved around the idea that aliens had landed on Earth to learn more about Eastern and Central Europe. We got the chance to sample various dishes from sausages to dumplings to a bread with chives. After many hilarious presentations, including a section where the audience members had to try and pronounce Hungarian tongue twisters. The night ended with a sing along to The Beatles’s “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” complete with sparklers for everyone!

A dazzling end to the night!

On Sunday, I was invited to my visiting family’s first birthday party! I arrived for a delicious birthday brunch where I got to have scrambled eggs for the first time since I left Bryn Mawr. It was fun getting to meet my visiting family’s extended family and friends. We celebrated the traditional Danish way with “the birthday song” in Danish, birthday cake (even more delicious than American cake since it’s made by stacking large pancakes with icing in between), and Danish flags everywhere. The situation reminded me a lot of experiences I had in Indonesia: everyone would be speaking in a different language unless they made a point of speaking to me in English which always feels a little isolating but I understand a lot better after so many similar experiences this summer because when you’re with your friends and family, one can express themselves much more fully and naturally when speaking their native language so it’s unfair to expect everyone to cater specifically for me in English. I had some really interesting conversations with many of the people I met who had been to the U.S before about some of the cultural differences between Danes and Americans which I’ll discuss in a later blog post.

Delicious homemade birthday cake for my visiting host sister's first birthday!

On Tuesday, two other Bryn Mawr students and a friend from one of their classes went to check out the Copenhagen Ice Bar. Everything in the room is made of ice, even the cups you drink out of! They give you big parka-like capes and gloves to wear so you don’t freeze to death while enjoying your drinks. The whole experience was pretty underwhelming since the place was rather small and you’re only allowed to stay for forty minutes maximum which was disappointing after the pricey entrance fee. It was fun to hang out with everyone and take lots of pictures (as well as make plenty of puns about ice)! It was definitely a unique moment though and something to check off of my Copenhagen bucket list.

Just "chilling" with my Bryn Mawr buddies

The next day, I met up with three Bryn Mawr students to have dinner at a “hyggelit” (cozy) restaurant with big comfy chairs and candles everywhere before we headed to the Of Monsters and Men concert where I met up with two girls from my folk high school! Of Monsters and Men is an Icelandic indie-rock band who if you haven’t heard of them, they’re great (you can listen to their song “Little Talks” here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghb6eDopW8I). They were amazing live and it was really nice to get out into the city at night since usually I always have to go back immediately after class so that I can make dinner in time. Makes me even more excited for seeing one of my favorite singers ever, Bon Iver, in November!

"Far from home, all alone, but we’re so happy" - Of Monsters and Men describes study abroad very fittingly

On Friday, my friend Prianna from Bryn Mawr and I decided to spontaneously find cupcakes in the largest pedestrian shopping street in Europe. They were so good; much creamier versus the overly-sugary sweets we are used to in the States. Afterwards, there was a festival of vendors from around the world set up in the square near DIS so we grabbed Thai food and reflected on missing the spiciness of Indonesian food. We got overpriced fudge for dessert though like taffy, I always get excited about fudge yet always seem to forget that it never really tastes that good (I’m much more of a brownie person myself.)

The next day, we visited Christiania which I’ve been meaning to see since I got here. In the 1970’s, a group of protesters took over and began squatting an old military base. It has since become a communal “free town” and indepdent nation (you even pass by a sign that says “Now leaving the EU” when you enter.) Dogs run around everywhere and people ride bikes everywhere since cars are not allowed in the spirit of reducing their environmental impact. There has been a struggle between Christiania and the government but the residents are actually paying back for the land and it is continually allowed to exist as a sort of social experiment and because it serves as a major tourist attraction. The entire time I was there I could stop thinking about how a place like this could NEVER exist in the U.S. It reminded me a lot of Portland with the the murals and environmental consciousness though it was much grimier than I was expecting, especially in contrast to how clean Copenhagen is for the most part. It was fun to explore and people watch however since there was certainly ever kind of character you could imagine.

Mural in the entrance way of Christiania

On a side note, I finally bought my tickets for my travel breaks! We have three breaks with DIS, one of which is our study tour and the other two are free for our own traveling. I will be going to London and Dublin during the second travel week in late October and Paris and Rome during the third travel week in mid-November. I will also be going on a mini-cruise to Oslo, Norway during the last weekend of November! If any of you have been there before, I would love any suggestions of places to visit! I am so unbelievably excited to live out my life dreams of visiting the quintessential European cities. I’m going to be traveling on my own, since most students in this program have been to Europe before and therefore aren’t as interested in going to the more touristy cities, but I think it’s going to be a life-changing experience, though I’ll be meeting up with friends from various realms of my life along the way to have lunch and have them show me some of the sites! I of course have all the emergency numbers programmed into my phone and will make sure to always be aware of my surroundings when traveling since safety can be a big concern. I can’t wait to finally be independent and see the world on my own, getting to visit exactly the sites that I want to see and not constantly having to compromise or wait for others. I feel like I finally get to be hero that goes on their own quest and adventure, much like Odysseus from The Odyssey. It’s going to be challenging, sometimes lonely, stressful, beautiful, exciting, and the most rewarding experience I could possibly imagine.

The next week is going to be pretty busy since I have two papers due, a midterm exam, and two paper outlines due by the end of the week but I will try and do one last update before I head to The Netherlands for my long study tour next week!