Today was the first day of intro-week at DTU so I took a bus
and made my way to the sportshall. It's located in the main building on campus
and I didn't have any trouble finding it because I had been there before. The
sportshall is simply a large gym and they had nearly 80 tables setup for the
international students. Each table had one leader which they called an
international buddy and about 9 other people. I was the second to arrive and
met my buddy, Ronja, and Stine one of the other international students.
Eventually everyone arrived except the guy we were expecting from Germany, but
he was replaced by a guy from Spain. So in our group we had three from Spain,
one from Austria, one from Norway, one from France, one from Italy, one from
Hong Kong, Ronja from Denmark and me. There was a welcome message accompanied
by Danish pastries called wienerbrød (literally translated actually
means Viennese bread). One of the speakers was the dean of international
affairs. Before we knew it lunch was served, but since we were in the middle of
the sportshall we were nearly last and missed out on some of the choices. The
next speaker was an American that had been an exchange student, but had decided
to stay for his PhD. Afterwards everyone participated in a team building
exercise. We had to build the tallest structure using spaghetti, tape and yarn with
a marshmallow at the very top. After placing the marshmallow on top ours looked
like a combination of the Eiffel Tower and the Leaning Tower of Pisa. We were
actually close to the winning height, but of course there was only one winner.
Next Ronja took us on a short campus tour. The campus is split up into four quadrants
and we only went from quadrant 1 to quadrant 4 then back. All the buildings
have 3-digit numbers and the first one corresponds to the quadrant it's located
in. We had some free time and then dinner, but this time they decided to call
tables up two at a time and stress the importance of portion size which produced
much better results for us. There's a courtyard in the middle of the main
building we went to after dinner and many other people gathered there too. One
thing I wasn't quite expecting was all the people drinking on campus. Along
with the lower drinking age in Denmark (16 for beer and wine, 18 for everything
else) they seem to do it lot just to socialize. I guess the "socializing"
happens in the U.S. too, but I'm convinced that nearly all Danes will need a
liver transplant by age 40 (well not really, but it was an amusing thought). I still
had fun throwing a Frisbee around, but it was so crowded we hit a number of
people nearby. Later we went to one of the campus bars (there are five of them
and they're all in academic buildings) though I shortly accompanied some of my group
upstairs to a recreational room where we sat and talked for while. I took the
bus home and talked with Dang about borrowing his bike to test the route to DTU
before classes start. Then I looked up the route on Google maps and wrote down
the road names because they're difficult to remember when you can't pronounce
them.
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