2 Months

As of the wednesday I have now been in Denmark for two months. I can not believe how fast the time has past and I feel as though I have not done enough. However considering I put many of my trips at the end of the semester because of the nicer weather I guess that makes sense. It has been a lot of fun enjoying Denmark and what it has to offer but starting tomorrow my trip becomes more international. Tomorrow I am taking the train to Frederikshavn, DK. From there we will take a 3:15 ferry ride across the sea to Gothenburg, Sweden. I will be traveling with two of my friends from my collegium Vincent and Mathieu.  I have heard the Gothenburg is a great place to visit. It is definitely a larger city than Aalborg (130,000 ppl) more on the scale of Arhus (400,000 ppl) but maybe not as big as Copenhagen (2,000,000 ppl including suburbs). I heard that they have some wonderful architecture there and that there is a section of the city that is very old because it escaped a devastating fire which burned down almost all the wooden houses in the city. Also there is an amusement park much like Tivoli in Denmark yet much larger however I have my doubts of it being open this early in the year. It will also be nice to get a taste of what western Sweden is like because I will be traveling to Stockholm in the east in a few weeks with my family.

Last weekend we had a cleaning day for our collegium. We had to clean all the common areas including the laundry room, freezer room, kitchen and bathrooms. This would seem like a daunting task but with 35 people it took only about 2-21/2 hours. In the end we were rewarded with free pizza which was awesome. I also got to play some football (soccer). Despite not having played in a while  (I played some pick up last summer), I was still quite competitive. Football is the unquestionably dominant sport in Europe and so I had very high expectations for the skill levels of all Europeans. However I think I made the US proud as I scored not one but two goals during the game. Especially because both of them were with my right foot and I shoot lefty. It was a lot of fun to play especially because it started snowing during the game. My wrists were completely numb by the end which made for a fun 3k bike ride home but I definitely enjoyed it. Unfortunately they play every sunday at 3pm but I will not be around much in the month of april so I think it will be may before I get to play again. However now that it is warmer out and they sun is shinning the opportunities to play sports are growing and I hopefully will get some play time in during the week. I would love to play frisbee but it is sooo windy here I think it would be a nightmare. Especially because many of the athletic people I would like to play with have little experience with the game and playing as is can be tough but add in 20-40mph winds on a regular basis and good luck. That kind of explains why wind power is so common and so effective here in Denmark.

I have also started my two new classes: thermal stress and energy and the environment. Thermal stress is like an extension to mechanics of materials (ME014) from home and in fact the problems are often taken from my same book. It is both interesting but very difficult. Energy and the Environment however is a very different twist. Unlike my other classes it is not about crunching numbers and doing calculations. Instead it is about ethics of environmentally conscience decisions for energy policies and renewable energy. It is quite interesting and a nice change of pace. In that class we have a different professor lecture each week. I met my professor for next week already because this week in my ISCAN class he gave a lecture. His lecture was about renewable resources and danish environmental policy which I thought was fascinating but many of my class mates were not so thrilled.

After the four of us who were in some way related to energy engineering all went up and talked with the professor for about an hour about various environmental decisions and debates. It was really interesting to here the opinions about energy policy from people across Europe. For instance one guy was from the Czech Republic a country that unlike Denmark is not blessed with strong winds and unlike Spain does not have the best sunlight. At his home they are currently building the worlds largest nuclear fission power plant (4Gw). He was very pro nuclear power even though he is completely aware of the current disaster in Japan and what happened in 1986 in Chernobyl, Ukraine (Actually I learned an interesting piece of information about that disaster. Apparently there is still a nuclear meltdown happening in Chernobyl and there will be one for the next 10,000 years because there is no way to stop it. As a result there is a gigantic steel, lead and cement tomb that encases the old power plant and there is a 12mi-20km circle surrounding it that is considered a dead zone and no one is allowed to live there for the next 10,000 years. ) Hopefully the same will not happen in Japan because that would make the Tsunami a true tragedy  to have a second plot of 1300 square km that are uninhabitable. But it was interesting to hear about why he thinks nuclear fission is still a good option and how he thinks that when fusion is a stable process it will be the ultimate power source. I do have to agree that fusion is much better than fission because of the lack of radioactive waste and hazardous materials (The reactants and products are hydrogen 2,3 and helium both very safe elements) but I think there are still problems with it especially because of things like intermittency and the need for a "smart grid". The discussion really got me thinking about what I am interested in pursuing as an engineer and I have known for a while that I would like to work with wind power because I think it is the foreseeable future in renewable energy which the professor completely agreed. So I think I would like to work with some aspect of energy technology whether that be thermal (such as heat pumps or hot/cold storage) or mechanical (such as wind turbines). There are a lot of problems to be solved and the only way we can tackle the problems with the environment is to start with how we create and use energy for heat, appliances etc. Anyways enough of the engineering, I could go on forever about this stuff. All in all it was a cool lecture and I am excited to hear what he discusses with us the engineers on monday.

Oh and one last thing, I saw the movie Sucker Punch (I streamed it from this wonderful European site) and it is pretty terrible. Despite the fact that it is somehow doing well in the box office it is a terrible movie and do not watch it. I understand the appeal-it is featuring a bunch of girls running around with guns and swords killing crazy beasts and undead soldiers but it had no plot, no character development and was a dumb story. On the other hand I also saw limitless, which I thought was pretty good. It had a clever new idea and although the ending was perhaps a little too predictable it was a very enjoyable movie and I would recommend it. Hopefully I will get my pictures from the weekend up by sunday/monday. I have found a much faster way to add them to facebook but it is still slow for the blog so my album here may be limited again.