Settling In

I'll have been in Copenhagen one full week as of 1pm local time.

It's such a wonderful process of disassembling and reassembling to travel, and to move to another place. I am here semi-temporarily, semi-permanently. I'm here long enough that I need to learn how to live. I'm not here long enough that I'll be able to ever get very settled.

I've made some progress though. Today I am sitting at my desk in the very modern, very Danish room where I will be working, at the Centre for Design, Innovation, and Sustainable Transitions on the second floor of the Copenhagen-branch building of the University of Aalborg. I have a monitor and a keyboard, a whole lot of desk space, a key to the coffee machine, and a guest key card.

I am a guest researcher! Neither I nor anyone else seems to know exactly how this happened, but mostly it seems to be due to the influence of a professor at the main campus, in Aalborg, who has worked closely with UW students and professors in the past and put in a simple request for an "internship" on my behalf.

I still have not found housing, I still don't have the visa I need, but having a work place where I can leave my things, with people that accept me as legitimate, is enormously reassuring.