Greetings, Newspaper Readers! My name is Ashley Myers, and I studied abroad in Copenhagen during the fall of 2017. When deciding where I’d want to spend four precious months of the transient time that is college, I knew two things: I had to go somewhere I’d never been and I had to be able to write (a lot). Copenhagen was charming new territory, with rainbow houses along the canal and an authentic amusement park that sold mugs of mulled wine around the winter holidays. The location was perfect, so the program was the next piece I had to research. I soon discovered that with my program, DIS, there’s the option to reside in a living and learning community (LLC), and it just so happened to have a creative writing one. I was sold.
Fortunately, my LLC’s apartment was in the bustling heart of Copenhagen—less fortunately, above a bar, so Despacito would keep me up at 1am. I lived with fourteen other people—including Michael, our dry-humored and much-beloved Danish SRA. We all became like family after a mere few days of late nights talking or listening to our musical members play guitar and sing. Every Tuesday, we would meet with our LLC coordinator, Karina, for a writing trip. We traveled to a beach at sunset, the old house of Danish author Karen Blixen, and the smoke-filled Cafe Intime, which felt like a portal back to the 1920s when it was built. The very first place we went was Assistens Cemetery where Kierkegaard is buried. We were instructed to go off to a spot alone with our small, black journals to free-write for 45 minutes. We reconvened as darkness set, sitting in a circle to share what we wrote. The sharing aspect terrified me, but eventually I grew so comfortable with reading my work aloud that I volunteered even on days when it wasn’t suggested.
One of the most memorable experiences for me was hunting down giants. You might be questioning my sanity right now, but these were not mind-made. Danish artist, Thomas Dambo, built his six Forgotten Giants out of scrap wood and hid them on the outskirts of Copenhagen. I rounded up a handful of my apartment-mates to look for the first, our only guide an online brown treasure map, with, yes, an X to mark the spot. I got four out of the six giants. In the process, I made a new friend as we both almost missed the bus, lost a pair of shoes to an iced-over channel of muddy water, found a human-sized hamster wheel, and wrote a short story about the giants, Thomas and Tilde, on a picnic table surrounded by purple wildflowers and bees.
I could write a full-length novel about my abroad experience, and have barely covered .001 percent of what I did there, but to sum it up: Copenhagen is the place to go and be and live in the fullest sense of the word. •
