Orientation 3rd day (Trip to Carlsberg)

In the morning we went to apply for our CPR number at the local Kommune. The lady told me that she will be mailing me my CPR card in a week's time, which will contain an assigned doctor's name. Medical treatment will be free but I might have to pay for the medication. No way.

Afterthat, I met Jay and my polish friend Jacek and headed over to Enghave ("Eng hale") where Carlsberg museum is. I met Jay's guide, Carl, a big and jovial Dane, and we compared a lot on the simple practicalities of life in Scandinavia and Asia. He said that living in Denmark is way more expensive than Sweden. And he also talked about National Service in Denmark behaving like the lottery system. If you 'kena', you can choose to serve the army or do community service for a few months. And he was confident that no one will attack them and vice versa. So different from where I'm from.

Some pictures of Carlsberg.

The collection of antiques

Aunty 鸡饭一盘

The garden of deformed sculptures.

I was having a block nose and I could still smell the brown stuff at the btm of the pic

7% alcohol. 

I was so tipsy I just had to cook my Nasi Goreng. My first attempt and it was superb =)

Orientation day 2

Today was excursion day, we went to Copenhagen for some sights on a private double decker posh bus. Of course, we started with the famous Little Mermaid statue, but as usual it's pretty overrated, like the Manneken Pis in Brussels, but it's a lot bigger than the latter. After some readings, I realized that the Disney Little Mermaid came from this Hans Christian Andersen Folk tale. 

from left ( Thomas, Matthias, Jacek, Stienne, Kyle, Kelsey, me and Luca)

Afterthat, we went over to the National museum for a guided tour, we took a bus to the National Museum, where we were led by a very nice but BORING guide. My rationale is that, since we're in Denmark, we're probably interested in Danish pre-history, but no, they sent us an Egyptologist. As if i've not seen enough over all the museums i've been to. I don't hate Egypt's history but I guess I'm here for Denmark's history and he didn't cover it as much as he ranted about Egypt. Well, some interesting stuff i learnt was that most of the artefacts were gifts from the Egypt government, and I saw REAL MUMMIES. No, I'm not uploading those pics here.

I lied

Things people do when they get bored in the Museum.

We ended the day with a nice buffet at RizRaz, a restaurant in downtown Copenhagen. I especially love the Meatballs and pasta. It's really crispy. I took like 9 of them. We ended our night at StudentHaus, a student pub in Copenhagen. The ambience was great and everyone was friendly. Superb.

Orientation 1st day

We met in the morning at the Canteen at 101, where I met my Danish guide Stienne, and Matthias from Austria. Soon I met the rest of my group, Kyle, Jim and Kelsey from the US, Luca from Italy, Tim from Australia, Thomas from UK, Jacek from Poland, Liene from Latvia and Christianna from Greece. Very friendly people, we introduced ourselves, had breakfast and talked about random stuff.

We were taken on a trip around the school by our very friendly guide, followed by a very amusing lecture by 2 international students on Danish culture, a Mexican and an Italian. We then played a game that required us to run around school and answer some random questions, for example, my guide's age which was a little strange. she's 26 anyway. oops.

We had another more interesting game in the evening, which required us to build a tower made of random materials that were given to us by our guide. This tower had to hold as many beer cans as possible, stacked above each other. The winning formula was given by (height of tower)^2  x  number of beer cans. Obviously the secret formula was to build as high of a tower as possible and to hold at least 1 can. But we didn't really figure that out at that time :P I was a little too lazy to think anyway.

Brainstorming / Teamwork!

Final product!

It held 4 cans! Not the tallest though :)

Great dinner

As usual the finale party at CellarBar. It was so crowded we had to stand for quite some time.

Random updates

I did some random cycling around to school to test my new bike which I got from a leaving exchange student from Turkey. It's a little smaller than I expected but it's quite alright. It has 7 gears, and the seat is a little spongy so it absorbs all the moisture around, thus my butt got wet. And when you ride down the slope, the wind blows into your face and i felt i was given anaesthetics. Need to find a tudong soon.

There's green grass!

We wanted to go to the Reindeer park so we had to search for it. Initially we went into the wrong direction, but some kind old folks told us it's the other direction and it was very far. So we walked and along the way we saw some horses and we explored the neighbourhood of the Danes in Lyngby. I think this neighbourhood belongs to the upper class. Below is a short video.

Anyway we didn't get to see the reindeers cos it was getting dark at 4pm and we were so tired walking so far, a few kms i guess. The next time I'm riding my bicycle. after jay gets hers. 

Yesterday, we met some students from HKUST, Hong Kong University of Science And Technology. At first we thought they were Koreans, but they had to drag their huge luggage from the airport and by the time they reached the accommodation office they were so worn out, so we decided to introduce ourselves and help them around. I also met Dan, an american, and we brought them all to the groceries store at Lyngby storecentre, a huge shopping mall located in the heart of Lyngby. They kept asking whether it was safe to drink from the tap water, and yes I told them it was safe, and yes I have been drinking it for the past few days. Too lazy to boil water after a while.

Nørreport and food

Emmiline, this NTU girl I met in DTU suggested that we go to Nørreport to meet her friend and some other people. It was a 4 zone ride to and fro, and it cost like 44DKK --> SGD11. and it was just a 20 mins ride. Madness. Basically you have to buy a clipcard and you have to clip the corresponding zones accordingly. So if you buy a 4 zone card and it has 10 clips, you can travel to a 4 zone to and fro like 5 times, or an 8 zone area 5 times. Trouble is, if the place u wish to go is 3zones, u have to buy a 3 zone clip card. It's simple maths. 3 zone card for 3,6 , 2 zone card for 2 , 4 and it's always better to buy 4 zones cos its cheaper than 2 2zones. And i don't expect you to understand all these either, cos i didn't. And it get's more complicated. You can also travel to another 4 zone destination if you are within 1.5 hour. So if you can go there and chiong back in 1.5 hour time, u just need to clip once. And Singaporeans still complain about the E-link card.

It was really dark at that time and the wind was cold but it was quite shiok so we didn't wander around much so we ended up buying groceries. Groceries in Denmark are NOT THAT expensive, especially for discount items, I bought fillet fish for like 6 pieces 45 dkk, 1 long piece like SGD2? Normally I'd shop at Netto which is by far the cheapest, compared to other higher-end supermarkets. I even saw Nissin Cup Noodles selling for about 10dkk for 1 cup.

My room

The place where I'm residing in is the campus village, famously known for its container accommodation. Each container(unit) houses about 10 students, with its own kitchen, washroom but I need to outside to wash my clothes in another special container, which comes with dryers too.

I was really surprised when I entered my room after getting the key from the Accommodation office. It was really huge, had my own lamp, nice bed, with proper bed sheets and nice comforters. Huge wardrobe and personal heater.








And of course my very first breakfast. Prepared by yours truly.

Lunch: Fried yee mee with some sliced meat balls

Denmark the beginning

I had like 3 bags, altogether about 30kg, but I checke in like 24kg to be safe. As long as you don't cross 25kg even if they said 20kg. I left changi at 0030hrs, because there was a slight delay and there was a long queue of germans to the boarding hall, which was worrying because I might miss my connecting flight at Frankfurt which had only 2hours of buffer.


I was placed like the last row right at the back just near the toilet which was a good thing cos I had easy access to the washroom and I get my food first. And behind me there was a huge space for me to get up and stretch my leg. I sat beside this long haired German guy, which initially felt rather spooky, but then he turned out to be my life-saver of the day. His name is Joerg, and he was also going to Copenhagen because of his work and he just came back from Indonesia. It was a good thing cos I now have a travel companion to my transit in Frankfurt which was horrible. Food was mediocre, we both agreed.




I had to find my way to the security check which took like almost 45 minutes considering i had only 2 hours to run to my flight. Then I had to climb up and down 2 stories walk another 1 to 2 km just to reach to the end of the huge Frankfurt airport to at Gate 42(see above). Damn tiring. When I reached there, there was another delay with the connecting flight (good news), because there was a strike. Anyway it's alright because I have to wait for Jay's flight to arrive at Copenhagen anyway. Delay means I have to don't need to wait.

They swapped gates one more time, and they made us take a bus to the plane itself. yes. and it was ok and I just had my jacket and T shirt on but it was quite shiok for the first time. Loved the drizzle.


I finally reached Copenhagen airport at about 10am exactly and I met Jay with a friend. Joerg offered to send us to Lyngby, he was so nice, so we bought him a SGD7 muffin. Yes it was that expensive. We sat in his van and he sent us to DTU, at first we got a bit lost, but i recognized the place a little so we got lucky. He helped us settle in and he waited for us to settle down before he left. Jay was so touched she gave him another packet of her Sri lankan special tea. The trip saved us so much trouble in taking the train and also the $$, accompanied by the problems of figuring out the zones of getting to Lyngby.