Day 1 in Denmark - 29th August

Its been quite a day. After all the confusion with the flights – with the Chicago flight getting delayed, being put on the Seattle flight instead, and then the flight from Seattle to Copenhagen getting delayed – we finally made it! I met Jacob – the other prize winner, who also happens to be from Stanford, coincidentally – on the flight. We ultimately got into Copenhagen about an hour and a half late. Getting through the airport was the easiest ever – we filled out no customs forms, had to do nothing literally, and just show our passport at one point to someone – talk about increased security nowadays everywhere! Seems like anyone can get into Denmark with ridiculous ease.

Mille – the person from Niras I’ve been in touch with all this while - was there at the airport to pick us up. She’s really nice, and like all Danes, quite fluent in English – so communication at least wont be a problem. That cant really be said about road signs etc, though – everything is in Danish. And there are some weird looking characters in the script – one that looks like a ø, which is pronounced in some even more weird way… Lots of guttural sounds, with "oo"s and "llluuu"s and god knows what else.....danish is not for me, I guess.

One of the first things you notice as you get off the plane from the US is the vastly different mix of automobiles on the road. Almost all are European – lots of Benzes and BMWs (all taxis are Mercs, btw!), tons of cars u never see in the US – French ones like Peugeot and Citroen, Fiats, Alfa Romeos – and even the Jap cars look different! Lots of smaller cars, unlike the US. And of course, finally i'm back in a place where people use sensible units like kilometres and litres!! So that was a big first impression.

Oh the weather – its been raining ever since we got here! Varying from a light drizzle to an almost monsoon-like heavy rain! Apparently they’ve been getting a lot of rainfall here. Just hope it doesn’t stay like this the rest of the week – would really spoil things!



The parts of the city we drove through were typically European – old brick buildings, sloping roofs, lots of spires and so on – just the picture one has of Europe. The hotel we’re staying in, on the other hand, is quite modernistic – rooms aren’t too big, but space is used very well, and everything is reasonably decent.

So we got to the hotel around 4pm, showered etc, and then at 5pm there was this reported from this Danish paper called the Engineering Weekly who’d come to interview us both (ahem!). Went off quite well – asked us mostly usual stuff, how we got to know about it, how much effort we spent on it, contrasts between our two essays etc. Unfortunately its only published in Danish - so unlikely we'll understand anything of it when its published. We were also joint in the middle by Henrik, one of the other people at Niras - Director of Development, apparently - and spent some more time talking to him and Mille after the reporter left. Just general stuff – the anniversary celebrations, the schedule, Niras in general, and so on. Was quite nice.




Then we took off to go to the DHL annual relay which Niras takes part in every year – this is a huge event in which many many companies across denmark take part, by sending teams for the relay. As many as 80000 were taking part this year, spread over 4 days!! So it was quite crazy! Was held in a huge park called Faelledparken, where companies had set up tents – so we got into the Niras tent, which was filled with runners and supporters, all excited and talking. Met some more of the people from the company, and everybody seemed to think we’d done a great job…. Got some dinner later – mostly bread and cheese and the likes…Bread was awesome, it must be said. As was the cheese. And some pretty good chocolate as well as cake to go. The funny thing of course was that though everyone speaks english, they still talk to each other in Danish - so every once in a while we'd run into someone who'd ask us something in Danish, which of course would be completely incomprehensible - then we'd go through the entire rigmarole of explaining who we were, why we were here etc, and once they figured out we were the prizewinners from US, all would be forgiven.

The evening ended with some cool fireworks celebrating the end of the races for the day. Was still raining all through, so by now everything was muddy and mucky – so not the best thing, I guess. We were dropped back at the hotel, and will now be picked up tomorrow morning at 9.

More tomorrow….quite jetlagged now, and dying to get some sleep… :)