At work, clean water, House of the Swallows

I've begun the workweek on a Friday. How incredible! After three days of workshops and conferences that I had no inkling I would be participating in beforehand, I am in my new office here at Risø. I share half a room, back-to-back with Janet Jonna Bentzen, a Danish scientist who has been here for some years. Our office is about 8 feet wide by 15 feet long; the upper half of its southern wall taken up by a three-pane window looking out onto a narrow parking lot between some of the buildings. It's quite cozy, but doesn't feel cramped. Janet, conversely, has filled nearly every inch of storage space. I have half a shelf along my wall, out of six shelves. The storage landscape is dominated by red binders containing a myriad of proposals, papers, research plans, student projects, conference material, and the like.

My desk is mechanized! By pushing a button near the right front end, I can raise or lower the top to a good height. This is a common workspace type (at least at Risø) and as I walk the office halls, I see a variety of configurations, from low to accommodate the shorter person, to stomach-high for the worker who desires to actually stand rather than sit during the day.

The day went well. I will be spending most of the next week in a lot of introductions to this machine and that co-worker, and this administrative procedure and that instruction manual. I have lab safety training sessions Tuesday and Wednesday. The facilities are so much more well-endowed than the ones at Mines (at least the ones in the Ceramics Center). No doubt this comes out of a sizeable bit more cash, but for my purposes as a visiting PhD student, I'm working in a gold-mine of furnaces, mass-flow controllers, soldering irons, and test stands, among many other tools, not to even mention the large chemical/powder inventory!

ø ø ø ø ø

I've moved from Anne and Klaus' house into a renovated farmhouse near the lab. It's called Svaleholm (Home of the Swallows), and the sign over the main stable door says it was built in 1868. On a bit of a tangent, in any conversation I've had involving the term "old" when applied to architecture, customs, or ideas, the Danish don't consider anything younger than 500 years to fall into this category. I tell them the School of Mines was founded in 1874 (already younger than the farm I'm living at), and they tell me, "Oh, well DTU was built in 1822," or, "København University was started in 1479," or they just smile and say something like "that's nice." It's quite alien to me to see buildings that have been around since before the Crusades, and still quite well-preserved and open to the public; some are even still used.

Anyway, Svaleholm's interior feels more like a medium-priced hotel. I've got my own room and am sharing a bathroom and kitchen. All the appliances are new, the furniture is new, and the heat stays on in the night. It's nice.

I think the most incredible discovery to me recently has been about the tap water. I've been told Denmark has really strict guidelines and enforcement policies for clean water everywhere, so anyone can drink right from their bathroom sink with no worries. In fact, some of the Danes have told me the tap water is often safer to drink than the bottled water from France.

I've already started looking for alternate housing. I want to live down in København if I can find something. After asking lots of questions and heavily relying on Google Translator (a nifty tool!), I found some good "classifides" websites, mostly in Danish. There are some good deals on here, so I'm going to check 'em out.

To that end, I've planned a trip into København for the weekend days. I've been using a really great public transportation site called "Rejseplanen," meaning "trip planner." You put in your start, end, time of arrival or departure, and it calculates all the possible routes to get you there the fastest. It includes the Metro, all trains, buses, and walking routes, even giving prices and detailed maps. It's quite handy for me and my poor Danish pronunciation skills (asking for directions without a map can be a real hard time).

Adios and hej and goodbye for now!