FC København Løverne

This week Stephen, James and Christian (student from Norway) went to the kickoff game for the Champions league. What is the Champions league? The Champions league is the most important European football tournament that lasts from September to May. To give you an idea of how popular this is, the final match for the last tournament attracted more viewers than any other single annual sporting event (including the Super Bowl). The tournament is made up of the 32 most competitive European teams from all over the region with the best teams coming from England and Spain (probably). These teams are split up into 8 groups of 4 teams each who play each other twice each, once at "home" in their own country and once "away". Each group advances two of the four teams. This year the Copenhagen Lions have made the tournament and it just so happened that they played on the opening night. Anyways to cut a long story short, Copenhagen won by scoring the only goal of the game with a head shot at the 87th minute of the game (a football game lasts 90 minutes so this was 3 minutes before the game ended). Needless to say, it was a really exciting match. Here are some pictures from the event.

The football stadium

The Copenhagen Lions logo. Good shot of the inside of the stadium.

The incredibly rowdy section. 

The goal that Copenhagen was shooting on in the second half.

Some of the action

We got great views of the corner kicks!

It rained on and off. 

Doesn't the rain look cool?

This picture shows where we were in relation to the stadium

VICTORY!

It was really cool. At the end of the game, the Copenhagen players walked around the entire stadium and applauded the fans! This is not something that I'm used to seeing at sporting events. I thought it showed humility and gratitude that is not normal in a lot of professional sports.

Frederiksborg Slot

Recently James, Stephen, Adam (student from Hungary) and I went on a 30 miles (round trip) bike ride to one of Denmarks best castles, Fredericksburg. It was a lot of fun. I'd never ridden that far before but it wasn't too bad. Here are some pictures: 

Stephen, James and Adam

Quick Fix

Our First Sighting

The Flag of Denmark

Cool Gardens

The Castle Entrance

The Castle Court

In the Court

Walking into the 2nd Court

Both Courts

Inside one hall

One of 25 pictures showing the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. This one is of the angel announcing Jesus' birth to the sheppards

The burial and resurrection

By far the most striking room of the castle: the chapel

The chapel was covered in huge wall paintings

Cool stainglass window

This was the 2nd largest room in the castle and probably the most ornate: the ballroom

Slot = castle in danish.

Deer Park

 Today James and I went to this gigantic park in Lynbgy (the city where my university, DTU is located in) that is about a 15 minute bike ride from campus. Some interesting things about this park: First, it is really large and “plainy” (=lots of rolling fields). Second it is located on Denmark’s coast, so you can see the Baltic Sea and also Sweden from the beach. Third, there are lots and lots of deer. The deer are a little different than ones you normally see in America. The males have got these large horns (like a moose) and some of them are completely white. This was a beautiful day and I really enjoyed the bike ride. Here are some pictures from the day.

A typical bike path

A typical tree

Some of the deer

On the coast of Denmark

The Baltic Sea

A good looking tourist

A typical Sailboat

The Marina (on the East Side of Denmark)

Another good looking tourist

A good picture of the park

An interesting grass-roof house at the park entrance

Some more houses at the entrance

A field at the park entrance

Kurser (Courses in danish)

This is a quick description of my classes. Prepare yourself. Don't get too excited. ;)

This is a photo of my Java programming class. Java is a programming language, i.e. a method of communicating with computers. I am taking it because I’m interested in going into a field of engineering that is very multidisciplinary and I’ve really enjoyed the programming experience that I’ve had so far.  I’m actually embarrassed about how happy I am to take this class. ;) We meet for this class once a week on Tuesdays for 4 hours.

JAVA

Lastly, this is a photo of my math class. It is called partial differential equations (=PDEs). PDEs are ways to describe things that happen often in nature. It is the most important field in applied mathematics and so I’m happy for the opportunity to learn about it. We meet for this class once a week for 7.5 hours (3 hours of lectures and 4.5 hours of group exercises).  My prof. is pretty good for this one.  He is sort of tall and, well, math-like. He has a tendency to value the process of getting an answer as much as getting the answer itself which means that we can spend a lot of time in class going over proofs and derivations instead of focusing primarily on the results. But he's pretty dynamic so it's not hard to be engaged with what he's teaching. 

PDE

My robotics class focuses on the mathematical and programming aspects of industrial robotics. In this class we’re going to solve 20 math problems and in the process gain an understanding of how to describe the movement of an industrial robot. Then we will translate these mathematical descriptions into a programming language called Matlab and control an actual robot. We meet for 4 hours once a week on Tuesdays. I’ve got a pretty good professor for this class, meaning that he explains complicated things clearly and often multiple times. I forgot the camera this day so I didn't get a picture of this one.