vivi torontali

Not caught up? Read Episodes 1-20 here.

I have found many reasons to celebrate over the past few days. Copenhagen received its first coating of snow and its first taste of the holiday season. In America, you know ‘tis the season when Mariah Carey breaks out of her block of ice once again to sing “Iiiiiii… Don’t want a lot for Christmas…” Luckily here in Denmark I haven’t been subjected to that yet. In fact, the holiday season is celebrated a bit differently here– Christmas markets have been popping up in every square, park, and town center in the country. Food stalls offer free samples of delicious cheeses and nougat, and artists sell knits, beautiful wooden rolling pins, and needle-felted animal figurines. The best part of the holiday season here is gløgg, a spiced mulled wine. The Northern European winter feels a little less intense when there’s a cup of hot gløgg in my stomach. My mom, sister and I also attended a Christmas party that our relocation company hosted. They aided our process moving here by helping us with our residency paperwork, our CPR tax numbers, apartment hunting, etc. They served gløgg at this party, along with hot chocolate and æbleskiver, a traditional holiday pastry best described as pancake balls covered in hot fudge, jam and powdered sugar.

While Copenhagen was experiencing the first snowfall of the season, my family was celebrating Nudli’s second birthday. He was given a bath as well as a new donkey toy to replace his other one that has only one of its legs left and no head. We’ll see how long it takes for him to rip this one into an unrecognizable mass of stuffing just like the others. He’s already gone through four, which is why we call him our csacsi tacsi (pronounced chuh-chee tuh-chee), Hungarian for ‘donkey dachshund.’

Another reason for celebration is that I passed my first Danish exam. I will be moving onto Module 2 out of 5 starting next week, and the next test will be more difficult. The exam for Module 1 consisted of two tasks: the first was a series of questions the examiner asked me about my job, or arbejde. He asked me questions such as “where do you work,” “how long are your breaks,” “where are your colleagues from,” and “how long does it take you to get to work?” The second task consisted of me asking questions about an imaginary situation, for example “Sara is at the beach.” I asked things such as “who is she on the beach with?” and “what does she do on the beach?” It seemed as though the examiner wanted me in and out of the room as fast as possible because he cut me off before I could ask more than the minimum amount of questions about Sara’s time on the beach. Overall I’m pretty sure I passed with flying colors, and I look forward to catching up to my mom in her Danish progress, as she took her test a few weeks ago and has since been flying through Module 2.

Speaking of arbejde, the café’s new location is almost ready to open. This means we have a few new hires. I’m celebrating no longer being the newest at the café– in fact, I’ve been teaching the newbies how to make the perfect flat white. Just a few months ago I was frustrated with the amount of mistakes I was making, but now it’s obvious that I’ve grown and learned a lot. Even my colleagues noticed that “I’ve been getting better” and that I was a “star in the kitchen.” Obviously that hasn’t gotten to my head at all. My ego has grown like the Grinch’s heart in the past week if you can’t already tell. Anyway, please enjoy this slideshow of my recent latte art successes.

I was able to attend the grand opening of MDS Studio and Gallery in Nørrebro. I had first met the owner of the gallery, the exhibiting artist, and many of the guests at a networking event I attended back in August (see Episode 11: On the right track). The opening night featured a solo exhibition by Chris Rini titled “Men Without Mentors.” It is a story told in the form of a comic following Chris’s experience at his first job. It’s a narrative about growing up in New York City and working for a company called Brothers Greenery that delivered plants to the brokerage house founded by the Wolf of Wall Street. The works were a mix of wooden engravings, printed digital illustrations, and charcoal on paper. It’s a powerful and thought-provoking story told in such gorgeous illustrations. Outside of the comic strips, there were many illustrations with narratives written below it on paper. I included the written portion for you to read, as it’s essential for viewers to truly understand the piece. You can read the serialized comic on Chris’s website.

The gallery application that you’ve been reading about me applying to in previous episodes was for MDS Studio and Gallery. I met with the owner earlier today and I’m very excited to announce that I’ll be exhibiting my mountain work in April or May 2026, a solo exhibition much like “Men Without Mentors.” This is my biggest reason to celebrate this week, as it’ll be my first professional art exhibition. I’ve done some gallery work in college, which you can read more about on my Audio Work page, but this will be my first independent expo. It’ll take a lot of time, energy, money, and planning to get my works up on the wall and the 3D printed sculptures to supplement them, but I’m very excited for the opportunity!

As a way to get 3D prints of mountains in the size I want, I’ve been prototyping a 3D jigsaw puzzle. I was able to print a few cross-sections of Mount Taranaki to test how they lock together, and I’m quite pleased with the look so far. It’s a bit big and they don’t latch together very well, so I decided to trace a puzzle I put together about five times before because I find the shape of the pieces to be very interesting. This past week has been very restful since I was suffering from a mild cold and thus ended up not working for four days. In that time I put together half of this 1000 piece puzzle and traced it in hopes of getting some interesting 3D pieces going forward. I hope to print some new prototypes soon, though my priorities might shift toward reworking some illustrations for the gallery exhibition.

While I can now consider myself an artist by profession, I’m not the only artist in the family. While visiting the Copenhagen Christmas markets, I found a lovely wool headwrap at one of the stalls. It was an orange and gray knit with sheep on it, ten white sheep and one black. I was about to buy it when my mom told me she’d knit me one. She later told her friend about her new project, and she replied, “you go out, not to buy stuff, but to find things to reproduce.” She’s absolutely correct– from photos alone, I was able to recreate the pattern of the sheep for my mom to knit me a headwrap that looks exactly like the original, and she made it in just a few days. I’m looking forward to sporting my new look, perhaps as a part of an outfit consisting entirely of clothes my mom made for me.

Though Danes don’t celebrate Thanksgiving and they go straight to Christmas after Halloween is over, I have so much to be grateful for and so many reasons to celebrate, but I’ll likely write more about that in my upcoming Thanksgiving episode. I’m glad I got to rest and also partake in the community’s festivities. Last week I was in a reclusive state, but this week I’m emerging from my cocoon. As always, thank you for reading this bløg, and I hope you have a lovely Thanksgiving and all the other holidays that come around this time of year.