my parents came to visit last week. i had midterms and a cold, so i didn't do much sightseeing with them, but it was nice to show them around a little. they had dinner with my roommate's family, which didn't go nearly as badly as it could have. my mother only asked my roommate's boyfriend to repeat his name three times. we also went to the royal danish theater to see a ballet (manon) and the jazz house to see the bad plus. danish people almost always clap in unison. sometimes it's because they want an encore, but then the encore happens and they keep doing it. it's kind of disconcerting. i ate (and drank!) at restaurants for pretty much the first time ever. my parents visited my sister in rome last year, and there were a lot of comments along the lines of "italy is so much warmer this time of year" and "wine in italy was so cheap," "an expresso in italy is never more than a euro," and "you can eat out in italy every night and they just keep bringing you food, and it isn't weird cold fish." but they did like copenhagen.

this past week has been fastelavn, a danish carnival type holiday. they had a party at our school last weekend where you hit big wooden barrels with a bat until candy came out. then you kept hitting them until they were completely destroyed. the game has gone on since medieval times, except back then, instead of candy there was a live cat inside. you only hit the barrel until the cat got free. i think. you also used to fast (hence the name), but somehow that's evolved into dressing up and eating a lot. last night i went to a costume fastelavn party at the university of copenhagen. danish college students have an almost unhealthy love for foozball. as usual, they asked me how i could handle coming from a city like new york to a city like copenhagen. most danish people i've met who have been to new york are kind of afraid of it, and this fear always revolves around some bad experience in the port authority. i try to explain that even i am afraid of the port authority.

actually, it's common to send your children to the u.s. for a year in between junior high and high school. my roommate's younger brother is thinking about it. he doesn't want to go somewhere "too religious" but he thinks it "might be great," which is one of those phraseologies that makes me wish english was my second language.