Trine Blogs: Final Countdown

Is it just me or are the days passing at alarming speed at the moment? I feel like we’ve JUST come back from Paris, and at the same time it feels like it was months ago. I mean, it’s June now. It’s JUNE. Things are approaching with alarming speed. Thesis deadlines, holidays, and… the first important football match of the European Championship 2012.

Paris was good. We had good food and went to quirky little shops and spent way too much time at the Sacré Coeur looking at people. It’s amazing how you can yearn for meeting fellow Danes when you’re in Tilburg*, and then as soon as you’re a tourist you’re threatening to throttle the two middle-aged Danish couples walking around in their sandals-and-calf-length-socks, whispering loudly about how they can’t wait to leave the Sacré Coeur – while a service is taking place. It doesn’t get much ruder (= typical Danish) than that, and it made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Or maybe that was just suppressed, embarrassed rage. Sometimes they’re difficult to tell apart.

These past weeks I’ve been finishing up my thesis like a mad woman. I want to finish before the first deadline in end-June. The alternative is mid-August, and that kind of conflicts with my plans of sitting in a lawn chair with a cheap drink and an umbrella (in case of rain, and also to beat people who try to remove me) from July until end-August. It’s a good thing that we’re on the last stretch now, because I’m on my last shreds of sanity.

But right now I’m just looking forward to Saturday – you know what happens then? Denmark plays the Netherlands in an epic game of win (soccer). I’ll be watching it with my Dutch friends, and you can bet my face will be painted all red and white. The copious amounts of orange everywhere are starting to wear me out; I’ve never seen people decorate the streets in such a fashion before. When I asked my boyfriend why it was, he told me someone had a baby in that street. I thought that was a little strange, but oh well, it’s the Dutch. He then rolled his eyes and told me that obviously it was for the football. Well duh. Excuse my orange ignorance…

Kom så Danmark!

(* People keep telling me there are other Danes here. I haven’t met a single one. I’m starting to think people are only saying it to mess with my head…)

Trine Larsen (23) from Denmark studies Management of Cultural Diversity at Tilburg University and blogs for Univers.