The last couple of days, the word unmotivated understated my mood. A whole range of things played a role in that, but one significant one must be the desk in my room. The heating doesn't reach all the way into my 'office corner', the walls have moldy stains and the internet connection is at its lowest. And any attempt to work in bed is bound to fail. 

The Statsbiblioteket Aarhus would be a great place to work in the weekends - but it's closed. The Danes are very strict with their opening hours. But I recently got the key card to one of the University buildings. So I went to the wonderful and pretty new Information and Media Science building. To my surprise, I wasn't all alone. Two other groups worked on presentations, one was prepared and brought a six pack of beer. The building is great: it's spacey and has comfortable furniture AND there's a pool table and hammocks in the basement. The only thing missing, as far as I noticed so far, is a coffee machine. In either case, it was quiet, I couldn't distract myself with too many other things, and I actually got much of the stuff done that I kept pushing away for over a week now. 

And here's the thing: It's Sunday. Over the last half year, I became aware that my weekly rhythm individualized itself from the working world. The strict opening hour policies of Danish shops and public buildings confuses me. In Maastricht I even enjoyed the time I spent in the library with my housemates after Sunday dinner. And here, my rhythm is all messed up. All but this: Whatever my new Sunday is, it's not Sundays.

here's a little photo-update from what Risskov looks like these days! On Friday I was amazed by the mist and how beautiful and serene everything looked, and obviously enough I hadn't taken my camera with me. But after Saturday was no photo-weather, Sunday proved perfect:
Recovering from Saturday night's Vengaboys show at Train and the return to standard time, Liselott and I went for a walk through Risskov and to the harbor closest to us. Wait did I say Vengaboys?

As an attempt to adventurize our lives a bit, and actually just because it sounded like a fantastic party, we bought lots and lots of Vengaboys tickets for Saturday aaaand we were right! They played for what felt like 15 minutes, but at least only the songs we all knew from our childhoods in the 90's, and were then replaced by more 21st century music. The Vengabus was in town and everybody was jumping! 

We got to dance, and we got to dance an hour longer. I have a little time-change jet lag, and I will not blame the Vengaboys. 

Living in the basement apartment of a student house has many, many advantages. For instance, the basement is one floor and one floor only. Down here, we share our bathroom and kitchen with four people and we know who’s cooking. And who’s leaving the mess – you get my point. Another nice thing about living in the basement is that we can do whatever we want without an entire 13-people household licking their lips. This is also how we came to invent Pancake-Sunday. I think. 

We do still hold that more are merrier. In any case, we’ve had our third weekly Pancake-Sunday today and because pancakes are everywhere and always in our student house, we’re over pancakes already. 

So instead of writing that essay that’s been waiting for days already, I decided to take it on a culinary challenge: Challenge the Samosa-man from the shopping center across the street! To my own surprise, my home-style samosas were pretty edible (say Kieran and Liselott and I’m eating one of the leftover samosas right now). And I’ll most likely be having sore muscles from kneading the dough. Aha - That’s why people have kitchen aids. 

My creative spirits thus awoken, the essay moved further down my to-do list and I went for a walk instead – to find out what’s on the other side of the shopping center. Curiously enough, the Danes do really seem to put much trust in each other – while in the Netherlands, no single supermarket would even leave their dumpsters out, the bins and boxes are stacked right next to the parking lot here. 

Coming back to said creative spirits; I’ve been feeling the need to get storage space in my room that I don’t have to look at all the time, so this seemed perfect. And so later today Sanna, Liselott and I put on hooded sweaters and pretended to be scary, walking the 20m to the parking lot and got crates that I can now fill and stack under my bed. I might have to go back for more. 

Obviously, this wasn’t really adventurous until I noticed that our landlord/neighbor was strolling down the street – he does that. And although he’s actually a nice man who just happens to be quite slow on fulfilling his landlordy duties, he’s quite attentive to whatever could be causing trouble on our side. Oh well. He didn’t seem to care about the crates. I’d like to believe we actually tricked him with our hoodies… 

What kind of Sunday was this? No pancakes, no real adventure, but the discovery of non-20DKK samosas, storage space and ants in my cosy basement room (that happened just now).