Money

The currency symbol for the Danish krone is DKK, and the plural form is kroner. 

This is pretty similar to Sweden's krona and Norway's krone.

The rule of thumb for quickly converting from DKK to USD is that the conversion rate is 1 USD is about 5.5 DKK, so you can divide by 5 and just round down to the nearest dollar. That's what I've been doing and it gives a good rough estimate.

Currency

There are 6 different kinds of coins, and 5 kinds of bills in circulation and main use in Denmark. Here's a couple of tables that show what they look like and their values. I'm putting in a US dollar value based on the current conversion rate of 5.38.

The smallest coin is 50 øre, which is the equivalent of cents. 100 øre makes 1 krone.

Picture
Value (DKK)	0.50	1	2	5	10	20
Value (USD)	0.09	0.18	0.36	0.93	1.86	3.72

Picture
Value (DKK)	50	100	200	500	1000
Value (USD)	9.30	18.60	37.21	93.02	186.03

A few things to note/notice:

• I can't say I've actually seen a DKK 1000 note floating around anywhere.
• The gold colored 10 and 20 DKK coins are pretty handy.
• I want to point out that all of the bills above are logically sized, even though you can't tell on here. When you hold them in your hand, you'll see that the larger the value of currency, the larger the piece of paper. 
• Oh and would you look at that? They're even different colors.

I have to say they're easier to tell apart than US currency which is all green and all the same size. Of course, growing up in the US I didn't really notice it, but I can imagine it could be a bit of an issue for some visitors to the US.

Final thing about currency: a lot of places have these machines that the cashier just puts the currency in, and the change (if there is any in bill form) will be spit out. I know it's nothing revolutionary, but I kind of wonder why this didn't make it past the self check-out lines at grocery stores.

Credit/Debit Cards

The first thing that probably popped into your head regarding American credit cards in Europe is the foreign transaction fees. Yes they're very real, and very expensive if you're not careful. Here are some basic steps to help you. 

1. Don't use Discover Card, because no one knows what it is.
2. Use MasterCard or Visa since they're actual brands that people have heard of everywhere.
3. Don't use Discover Card.
4. ???
5. Profit

As you can tell, I hate Discover. Hypothetically, it should work relatively well in Europe because they have a collaboration with Diners Club International to not have any foreign transaction fees. But, it doesn't work. Not just the fees part; the card doesn't work at all. I'm not going to bother ranting on it in this post, but if you want to follow me raging about it, stay tuned. 

Back to business: the real options. That link should give you quite a few choices with MasterCard. A couple of friends of mine have the Bank of Americard and Chase Sapphire cards, and they seem to working fine with no foreign transaction fees. If you are already customers of these two banks, look into these card choices.

You can also get "cash advances" from ATMs with credit cards if you're really short on cash. I would not recommend this unless it's a dire emergency because you'll end up paying atleast 10% extra in fees.

One caveat with credit cards is that the vendor could end up charging you extra since you're paying in dollars and not DKK/Euros. I'm not sure how applicable this is, but I've heard stories, so keep it in mind.

Prepaid Cards

The other good option is prepaid cards. These are sort of like those Visa gift cards that have come around in the past few years (the ones that are gift cards but can be used anywhere). You buy it, put some money on it in your home currency, then the card converts it into the vendor's local currency at the point of sale. You don't get charged any foreign transaction fees, and the vendor gets the money in the local currency. Everyone wins. 

For this option, you have two choices: a MasterCard Net+ or a Visa MoneyCorp. I haven't looked into these options much, but I know a friend is using his here in Denmark and he used it in Sweden. There are probably some fees depending on the card but you can do more research into that. 

I've noticed quite a few local credit cards are chip based instead of just magnetic stripe, and there are point of sale terminals to match. 

Any time you want to buy a ticket at a train station, you will have to use some sort of card, so bear that in mind. 

Final tips: always always always have more than one card. The chances of an American card not working in another country are relatively high, so make sure you have a backup. The same goes for cash. I know that plastic has its conveniences, but the fact is, if you're in an unfamiliar place, having some cash to buy some food when you're lost and hungry is a lot more convenient when your card decides to not work.

Banks

First off, you will need a CPR number from your municipality if you want to open a bank account. Technically, everyone is required to open a Nemkonto, or "Easy Account". This is really only necessary for times where the government wants to put money into your account, for tax returns and such. 

As a student who will probably not be working here, you can go to any bank (I recommend Nordea; from what I've heard they're a good bank and are in Norway and Sweden as well) and ask for a free account. Just tell them you're a student with no income. From what I've heard, there are no opening, maintenance, or other hidden fees, and you get a debit card for free. Furthermore, there is an ATM on campus of Danske Bank, but there are no fees if you withdraw from a Nordea account on it. 

To open an account, go to a branch. There are two branches in Lyngby: nearest one is by the Lyngby Storcenter/Station across from Magasin and Danske Bank. 

If you're like me and you're using cash everywhere, you'll find that there are quite a few situations where cash doesn't really work (buying train tickets especially), and of course it's inconvenient at times. I really wish I could open an account, but I had some issues with the residence permit, and now I can't get a CPR number. That combined with the fact that I'm only here for another 2.5 months, it's not really worth all the trouble. 

Last thing to mention here is that having a CPR number and bank account is necessary for getting a Rejsekort (Travel Card), which you'd need starting June since clip cards are no longer going to be used. This is probably confusing to you right now so look for my post on public transportation. The same thing goes for getting a contract with a mobile phone provider: you will need a bank account, for which you'd need a CPR number.

Fellow Americans at DTU

Besides your other UIUC students at DTU, there will be a few other American universities represented. This is based on the ones I've met in my time here so far, but there are probably others as well.

• UIUC
• RPI - Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. This university sends even more than UIUC, usually around 10-12. From what I've heard they have rooms set aside in Kampsax for their students in some agreement with DTU.
• University of Maryland at College Park sends quite a few as well, I've only met 3 so far though.
• University of Wisconsin - Madison has sent 2 that I have met, and probably a few others

I'd imagine there are a few masters students from the US as well, considering there are many international masters students at DTU.

For other people with English as their native language, there's the Australians. If I remember correctly, I've met 8 so far from different universities down under, and there are probably more. 

Everyone knows English here one way or another so I sort of always feel at home. I can understand that a lot of students from other countries who might have come alone are feeling out of place when they can't talk about their home country with their fellow citizens. I don't think I've met anyone like that yet, but it's still always good to include everyone in your conversations!

Weather in Copenhagen

The weather here in Lyngby, Denmark has been surprisingly mild. Apparently it was the mildest Febrary in a while, and I can definitely attest to that. Temps were in the 40s Fahrenheit, and there hasn't been any snow since the very first week I got here. There has been some occasional rain, but it's been very mild too.

The main thing here is the wind. The first two weeks here were pretty windy, even by Chicago standards, I'd say. It was routinely 20+ mph. And it's probably just me, but the wind felt a lot stronger here. Not my speed, but just the way it hits your face. Feels more rough here. Besides the wind, I can't really complain about how the weather turned out.

It's no wonder that Denmark is a pioneer in using wind for energy. Already 30% of their energy production is by wind, and they're moving up to 50% by 2020. Just another example of Danes being environmentally friendly. I'm pretty sure I walked past some sort of turbine manufacturing plant in Malmo, Sweden.

An odd thing I've noticed here is people don't use umbrellas too much. Maybe it's because the heavier rainfall came during the night so I never saw anyone, but at least when it was raining lightly during the day, I was the only one awkwardly using an umbrella.

This should make for some fun trips to some landmarks in the next month or so. If all goes well, I'll be going to Tivoli (a big amusement park) and the original Legoland (a LEGO themed amusement park) when they open. Finally, Møns Klint, some striking white cliffs will be really enjoyable in slightly better temperatures. 

IPv6 and the Media

Oh IPv4, the pain you have brought me with your limited address space.

For those who don't know, IPv4 is a protocol to assign a unique address to every computer connected to the Internet. There's a lot more detail that can be given here, but that's not important. What one needs to know is that the addresses can range from 0.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255, with some of them not allowed. This gives us just about 4 billion address to work with.

I have my issues with the way technology is portrayed in TV and movies. They are disgustingly inaccurate. You don't have to hire a consultant to get it right. At this point, you just have to throw all common sense out the door and portray it inaccurately practically on purpose.

I cringe every time I watch TV (I do watch a lot of TV though...) and something with tech comes up, because I just know it's going to be all wrong. One of my favorite shows, Person of Interest, doesn't do as good of a job as I hoped (but it's still a really good show from just about every other aspect).

On a side note, I seriously want to create a movie or TV show and go through painstaking effort to make it technologically accurate. But that's for another time.

If and when I create a Reddit account, one of the first subreddits I'm subscribing to is "/r/itsaunixsystem" so I can get a good laugh every once in a while. There are countless examples where an IP address is "traced" (there are sooooo many issues with this clip from CSI but I digress), and they show some IP address that's clearly outside the bounds of an IPv4 address.

In an effort to not accidentally give an IP address of someone's actual server in the real world, they give a fake, non-valid, address. I can understand the logic behind that. What I can't understand is why they can't just show an address of the network, or the production companies. That should give enough addresses so that no one gets damaged and everyone's happy.

Anyway, back to the main point: we're running out of IP addresses. As smartphones become more and more common in the third world, we're coming dangerously close to the 4ish billion IP addresses that can be allocated at a time. Not to worry too much, though, because IPv6 is on the way! This will assign some insanely long address to everyone, way more than we'll ever have in this universe.

What I propose is simple: we set aside some of this newfound space as specifically for the media. So, in the odd situation that some viewer wants to put this crazy long string into their URL bar, it'll just redirect to nothing. Problem solved. With IPv4, this wasn't an option because we don't have enough to spare so we can't afford it. With IPv6, we can do this a million times over and we'll be fine. Everyone wins.

Seriously though, some of the stuff on that subreddit is golden for tech geeks and programmers like me. 

LaTeX, MATLAB, Maple, Mathematica

So I just started using LaTeX. Before you jump to conclusions about what this implies about my personal life or ability to use capitalization...this is about the markup language. (A markup language is something that allows you to display text and images in different ways. Biggest example of course is HTML, used everywhere on the Internet.)

I've come to have sort of a love hate relationship with it. You can do so much with it, and it's extremely convenient, especially in comparison to doing it all in Microsoft Word. Though, in its defense, Microsoft has added much better equation and math typing tools built right in since Office 2010, if I'm not mistaken.

But there are a lot of quirks about it that annoy me like anything. For example, the default margins, and the default font. These are personal preferences, but I don't get why you need like 2 inch margins. And I just hate serif fonts. I'm fairly certain there was a certain logic behind the way it is, but I sure am glad you can customize it to the way you want.

Also, I like putting white space in my code. Not just for LaTeX, but for all of my coding. With LaTeX, when you put an extra empty line between two lines of text, the second line becomes indented for some reason. Also, in math mode, spaces are SO weird. If you just type words, then it doesn't put spaces between them. This is sort of understandable, because you're not supposed to put words in math mode unless you're using "\text{}". But when you want to separate say two equations with a comma, you have to put in "\;" for every space you want. #TheStruggleIsReal

I only just started using LaTeX about a week ago, and I ended up doing both of my first two assignments of the semester with it. After fiddling around with it and getting used to the package system, I finally got the hang of it and I was on my way to making some clean HWs.

For anyone interested, I used the base MiKTeX, set up a custom batch file to compile the code into pdf without making a log file, and automatically open the created pdf. I ended up finding Sublime Text's (shoutout to the best text editor of all time, OF ALL TIME. One day I'll buy the software. Maybe one day I'll even buy WinRAR) build command. This allowed me to use Sublime for editing the tex files, and compile straight to PDF.

Somehow or another, I ended up installing Texmaker, and am now using that since it has a side by side view of the source code and the pdf. Still haven't found a way to make it stop making the stupid log files.

I have a feeling that many a backslash keys have been broken by heavy LaTeX users.

In other math program related news, I think it's become my unwritten goal to learn as many different math related computer tools this semester. I started using MATLAB (I know, sort of sad I didn't already know this) and Maple. I'm thinking of learning Mathematica too. Might as well learn all the free software I can.

Maple is also really cool because it shows you the expressions as you'd write them, in actual fractions, exponents, etc. But the programmer in me absolutely loathes having to do ":=" to assign a variable. So frustrating.

Anyway, those were my musings about math related software. I'll probably be posting more coding related things as time goes on.

Haven't forgotten about this!

I haven't (completely) forgotten about this blog. I've been making a HUGE list of things I want to talk about, so hopefully this weekend I'll get a chance to just power through everything. In the meantime, I'm going to add some non-study-abroad related things to this blog. Might as well use it.

Some posts to look out for:

• Why I chose DTU
• Danes and English
• How courses work
• A lot more. Seriously I think I have about 30 more topics on my list.