It’s been 3 months, huh. I’ve really gotten into the routine of life here.
I’ve always been a very live-in-the-moment person when I travel. I like experiencing things as they are. And in these 3 months, I have done exactly that. I’ve explored Copenhagen, Malmo, Munich, Billund, Aarhus, Berlin, Warsaw, Lodz, Amsterdam, Odense, and very soon, Bergen, Oslo, and the fjords of Norway. I’ve really kept myself busy and haven’t had much time to really reflect on just how wild this summer has been.
It’s really crazy what travelling does to you. It teaches you to be resilient, to be accepting of change, and to find positives when you are surrounded by problems. More than once on my many trips, I’ve found myself on the verge of tears from stress. Missed trains, nearly-missed flights, stranded in the middle of nowhere, no cash. But what is a missed train and being stranded in the middle of nowhere but a chance to explore a new town? What is a nearly-missed flight or having no cash but a chance to meet others and to learn to ask for help?
But regardless of all of that, I always make it back on Monday for work. Back into the comfort of routine with my bioreactors and yeast cells. Back to the office with my coworkers and our lively chatter over coffee breaks. And that is always a welcome break from my weekend chaos.
I’ve gotten very comfortable in this routine. For the last 3 months, this has been the new normal. Going to work to do my 9-5 in the lab, going home and cooking myself a nice single serving of dinner, doing a little doomscrolling, watching the sun set from my balcony, chatting with my Italian roommates, going to bed, repeat. The moment the weekends hit, I’m out of here, off to another fun city to explore.
But recently, my roommates have moved out and I come home to find an empty apartment. It’s like a stark reminder that this is all temporary. This “home” is temporary. And while some people avoid calling a place home unless it is their actual house where they grew up in, I find myself on the opposite of that spectrum. Home is just a place I find comfort and rest at the end of my day. Perhaps part of that comes from my family, the fact that my early years were spent bouncing around from place to place, since our landlords would want the space back for their families, or want to increase rent by too much for my family to afford. To me, home was never really tied to a specific place or address, but rather the people around me and how I have transformed that space to be “mine”. This allows me to adapt to a new place quickly but also feel disconnected and depressed equally as fast. With my roommates gone and an empty white apartment as I remove all the little parts of “me” that are scattered about, I am reminded of the temporariness of it all. I might never come back to Copenhagen or even Europe again.
On one hand, I wish that I didn’t have to leave. Copenhagen is so nice and pretty, and there’s so much to do. My neighborhood is cozy and residential, just off the hustle-and-bustle of Norrebro, a street filled with life and so many shops. The work-life balance here is something we MIT students desperately need. Heck, MIT feels so far away, like a problem for some other me, some me that would stay up until 3am grinding PSETs and stressing over exams every other week.
On the other hand, I’ve learned that Copenhagen is such an isolating place. I find myself awake some nights at 1am unable to sleep, wishing there was someone I could hit up to have a late night chat with. I miss my friends back at MIT and good Asian food so much. Even now, I hear stories from other MISTI students here, now my friends, about the racism they have seen here, just little comments here and there but still reminders that we’re different and we stand out (re: my last blog post!). I bike through some neighborhoods that aren’t as manicured and gentrified as the one I’ve been staying at, and it makes me realize that the separation between immigrants and Danes exists here. My coworkers tell me my neighborhood has a reputation for being very nice and expensive, but that it isn’t that way everywhere, that Copenhagen isn’t as perfect as it seems. I feel lucky to be able to live in such an environment, although I wish I had known about them earlier, before I had formed such a positive impression of Copenhagen.
I don’t think there’s a satisfying ending to this blog. I think that my attitude towards this summer experience will continue to change over the years. Right now, I’m still living in the moment; who knows what me in 10, 20 years will think! Will I regret this summer? Hell no! But I wonder what the lasting impacts of this summer will be for me. Only time will tell.
Until then, Ming logging off.
Ming ’27, a biological engineering major, is interning at Yeti Foods, a start-up working on mycoprotein at the BioInnovation Institute in Denmark. Her favorite thing about Denmark was the weather and birds.
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