Introduction – ‘A Fresh Dwayne in Denmark’

This is the first post of ‘A Fresh Dwayne in Denmark’. My personal expectations for this blog are listed below.

Number 1: I do not want to simply write a checklist. There are too many blogs that are filled with boring recaps of people did and everywhere  went without any real substance. Here’s an anecdote to explain why I feel particularly averse to these sorts of projects. Before I left for Copenhagen, I glanced through one of my mom’s photo albums. It was filled with photos of when she was 19 and took a road trip across the country with her friend Elizabeth. Understandably, most of the photos were of the places they visited and the things that they saw; Victorian houses, trees, fire hydrants, etc. As an observer of these images, I couldn’t really care less about them. To me, they were merely replications of things that I see everyday in my present life. However, the photos of my mom and Elizabeth were amazing to see. It felt as though the crucial elements of their road trip (The tightness of their friendship, the sense of adventure and the unknown, etc.) radiated from these pictures. They were important, while the photos of trees and buildings were not. My goal is to try and replicate the personal quality of these pictures through this blog. Each picture and video that I share will portray a personal experience of mine; you will be hard pressed to find an aesthetic picture of the Amsterdam letters. Moreover, my biggest hope for this blog is for my writing to carry my current personal voice and opinions in the same way the photos of my mother carry her personality from that time.

Number 2: I do not want to portray everything as the best or most life-changing thing I’ve ever done. (i.e. Visiting the ______ was a truly life-changing experience). I dislike the term ‘life-changing’ because I don’t believe that my life has ever been hugely impacted by a singular event. I dislike blogs that are overly positive and enthusiastic because it’s annoying, narcissistic and too obvious. I’ll just get this out of the way so that I won’t have to say it over and over again. I’m living in Copenhagen with a bunch of Danish people, studying what I really enjoy, playing rugby, and seeing my favorite rappers perform all over Europe. It’s obvious that I’m having a good time. I’m writing this blog so that I can think more critically about my time here and better analyze my current mental and emotional states, not flex on social media to my friends and family.

Number 3: This blog is more for me than it is for you. I’m glad that it is public because I have really valued reading about my friends experiences in their travel blogs (Chris Hankin and Michael Augustine’s blogs come to mind) and others may enjoy reading mine in the same way. This being said, I could care less if I’m the only person that reads it.

This concludes the first post of ‘A Fresh Dwayne in Denmark’. In the next post, I’ll introduce Dwayne and discuss my thoughts on William Bridges’ theory of ‘The Neutral Zone’.

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