Hvidovre Hospital Kollegium

My home for the next three and a half months is a "Kollegium" (koh-lee-gi-um. Hard "g"). It's sort of a shared student housing building. Most universities do not have their own dorms, for a number of reasons. Many Danes continue to live with their parents through college, and many live in their own apartments with friends. However, some people want a dorm-type setup, so they come to live in one of many Kollegiums.

They're more or less dormitories, but they don't belong to a particular school. The only requirement is that you have to be a student somewhere in the area. It's sort of like if there was a big dorm somewhere in Baltimore where Loyola, Goucher, Towson, Hopkins, MICA, and other students all lived. Sounds like a crazy idea, huh? Well, there's a couple reason why I think it works here, (and why it wouldn't work quite as well in the US).

The big one is that people get a little too wrapped up in the notion of "school spirit" in the States. Goucher kids spend so much time ragging on the other schools in the area that it would take a lot for many of us to live with Hopkins kids. What with preconceived notions and all. I spent the summer in Boston, and it's the same there. I think it's not until a couple years after college that many people come to the startling conclusion that people who go to other schools are still decent human beings. I'm exaggerating only slightly. It's certainly not true of everyone, though, and I think there are many people who would enjoy living in such a setup.

-----

Onto the dorm itself (I've got pictures, albeit taken awkwardly with my laptop camera) The dorm is divided into 8 halls, each with two floors. The halls are set up off a main hallway (think of it as a spine, with four ribs on each side). This leaves space between the halls for six small, enclosed courtyards, each of which has a picnic table and a tree or two. This is my hall, and some of me:

You'll notice the hall has these red circles on the tile floor (just trust me on the "red" part). When the sun is beyond the end of the hall, as it is in this picture, those dots are completely invisible until you get close. The dots continue down the hall, but you can't see beyond the first two. They just blend into the glare.

On the first day, as I walked down to the end of the hall, I noticed that dots were appearing as I approached them. It reminded me of something from a sci-fi movie, or maybe a Miyazaki film.


My room has its own bathroom, complete with sink, toilet, and shower. No shared bathrooms here. Coming from Goucher dorms, a private bathroom seems kind of unnecessary (that's a lot of extra infrastructure to build), but I don't mind having it.

You might be looking at this picture and thinking "but Eli, where's the shower?"

Well...

It's behind the door. It's a little hard to wrap your head around it if you're used to the standard setup, but the whole bathroom is the shower. Everything is made to be able to get wet, (sink, toilet, etc) so the curtain isn't strictly necessary for anything.

No, scratch that. It protects the roll of toilet paper. That's literally the only thing in the bathroom that can't get soaked.

Anyway, I've been told some Kollegiums are like that, but most standard homes have the setup we're all used to.

That's one challenge I've faced here: I'm open to the idea that things are different in Denmark, but I'm somewhat indiscriminately open to it. I saw my bathroom and thought "Oh, that's how they do it in Denmark." Or, I'll be at the supermarket and be unable to find beans, and I'll think "Oh, I guess they don't eat beans here." Neither of those things are true; I started generalizing the moment I saw anything different.

They actually told us during orientation (without any prompting) "Yes, peanut butter is sold in Denmark, you'll just have to look around, it's not at every store." It's as though they know we're going to jump to conclusions after one store.

Anyway... my room. It's a bit of a mess. I haven't found any blu-tack equivalent yet, so I've got a pile of posters laying in the middle of my room. The room came with a bed, some bedding, a small desk/table, a desk chair, a comfy floor chair, a lamp, a shelf, and three bottles of toilet cleaning solution (two are on top of the shelf, one is out-of-frame in my closet). I'm going to take the high road here; insert your own joke as you see fit.

The door in the right half of the picture leads out to the courtyard. Sometimes I go play guitar out there.

That's pretty much all I can think to say about the captain's quarters. I don't know which things in my room were from the Kollegium, which things were from DIS, and which things were left by a previous tenant. I might find that out sometime, so I know what the expected situation is for an average Danish student living here. DIS coddles us a bit in terms of making us deal with the "real world," although not as much as the average college student (I am cooking for myself, after all). And I wouldn't want it otherwise; I'd like to know how to be a "real person" before graduating, if at all possible.

-Eli