Looking for daylight; plunging into perpetual darkness

It's pretty dark by 3.30pm and it could be the middle of the night by 4.30pm. If it's a cloudy day, it's never lighter than twilight. Ironically, the lack of sun makes it so hard to get out of bed in the morning... I don't know how the Danes can live through this year after year. One tried and tested technique is the seasonal selling of Julebryg - a special, stronger Christmas beer.

Christmas beer has been a big part of life here in Copenhagen at the moment too - partly because you feel you deserve it after actually doing some study, and partly because of the renewed zest amongst the international crew for parties. (There was a slight drop off when everyone felt they should do some work, but this has given way to the realisation that we only have a month left together...) The French were the first to fly the flag of Christmas festivities with an xmas party in mid-November. The crazy french! Joyeux Noel!

On Friday Night the student house put on an xmas dinner for the bartenders - a traditional danish jule frokost (xmas lunch) at dinner time. Each course was preceded by numerous beverages courtesy of Carlsberg and Tuborg, and punctuated by schnapps. I was perhaps a little overzealous on the herring in the first course, but needed something to offset the abundance of alcohol. The traditional main course was a balanced variety of pork, pig, ham, bacon and swine. Dessert was an unpronounceable but tasty "grød" (porridge) with almonds and a cherry sauce.

I'm not sure at what time I made it to bed, but it could only have been a couple of hours before I speedily rode through the dark Copenhagen streets at 7am to the bus for Århus. This weekend was my first adventure outside of Copenhagen (within Denmark) since the law camp. Århus (think "Or-Hoos") is the second largest city in Denmark and is in Jutland, the region that connects to the German mainland. The city is full of canals and a funky (and expensive) shopping strip to rival Copenhagen. In town there is also an "old town" - buildings from the 16th to 18th centuries have been cobbled together in a fashion that resembles the Danish eras of old. Saturday night was spent at the Århus student house for (another) big dinner, folk dancing and the bar; followed by the night club Chokolade Fabrikken (The Chocolate Factory). I managed to find myself on the bar at student house representing Australia in a beer-drinking competition. Unfortunately, the Danes' representative completed the half-litre in somewhere between 3 and 4 seconds, allowing the rest of us to enjoy our beers...

Aside from spending the waning daylight hours either in bed or at the Black Diamond (the very danishly fancy library on the waterfront with great views), I managed to make my way to a concert by the welsh band The Kooks. A great introduction to a band I'd never heard before, although I was left wondering how the lead singer managed to perform on whatever drugs he was on... Or maybe that's his secret, who knows? Anyway, I'm now a Kooks fan.

Having just got back from Århus, I have nothing in my fridge, so I will be getting the English house to cook for me tonight, even though they don't know it yet. And maybe we'll have a few more jovial julebryg's.

Skål!