My sincere apologies!

Dearest Readers,
I must apologize for my long blogging hiatus; this post is certainly a long time coming. While I'd like to say that I've been so overwhelmingly busy that I haven't had the time to post, that would be a bit of a stretch, even for one prone to blatantly lie such as myself. I have at least been mentally busy if not entirely busy with activity, however, and am enjoying all aspects of my life in Copenhagen a little more every day.

Since my last post, I've had a lot of terriffic happenings in terms of my hockey research:
-A few weeks ago, I met with a man at Team Danmark, which is a body under the Ministry of Culture that provides funding for individual and team sports on the national level for athletes/teams with Olympic medal potential. T.D. once gave money to women's ice hockey, but revoked their funding just when the team qualified to qualify for they olympic games years ago, leaving me with a number of questions as to why such a decision was made. Laura, my Canadian teammate and new national team coach, accompanied me to the meeting with an equally journalistic agenda. We were lucky to meet with a man who was consultant to the women's team when they did get funding and we received a detailed account of the team's history and learned that it was less that they did not want to give the women's team money and more that they basically revoked funding from all sports that didn't have the potential to win olympic medals. Denmark is not a sports culture, but they do have a high standard of living, including winning in sports. Thus, they only want to give money to those teams that prove they will win medals, and right now that's actually only 5 team sports all together! I did question him quite a bit about gender equality, and learned that they don't have such laws and that many people would probably rather not hear about how successful they are. Poul (the man we met with) was quite interested however and even asked that I send him more info about Title IX (so i'll have to get in touch with the guy who left me my first comment) and I now feel like a little Title IX advocate!

I've also taken on a bit of an apprenticeship with my coach, which I'm really excited about. Heikki's job is coaching all of the Rodovre teams and he's invited me to come out with him whenever I want, not only to "study" hockey, but to learn how to coach (since Rodovre wins every national championship each year and he coaches all the teams, he asserts that he is thus the best coach in Denmark), as well as relearn how to skate (my downfall as a player). I've spent a few afternoons with him, doing his skating drills over and over with every team and slowly picking up on the mechanics of good skating (we'll see if you really can teach an old dog new tricks). It's so much fun to spend my days on the ice and I really think that I can learn a lot about playing and coaching from Heikki, even if we can't verbally communicate.

I finally booked my tickets out of here, but just learned that the national tournament won't be until April, so I may go back and change the dates again so I can bounce from here as early as possible in March and get sufficient time in South Africa and New Zealand.

Now, where have I been? Well, first I was just trying to limit my computer use and so I sort of put blogging on the backburner. Plus, I had a lot of great days hanging out with teammates, as well as hanging out with myself and reading and writing my days away. I've really rediscovered the Meghan that used to get told to stop reading and go to bed every night as I sat up and finished whole novels in one night. And then last week I went over to Ireland and spent a week outside of Galway. I spent some time in the city, took a drive through the Connemara, ate some amazing soup, AND genuine whole wheat sandwich bread!, took in a terriffic local performance of "Waiting for Godot," which merely reaffirmed my goal to never get stuck in a life of mindless routine, and I lucked out with a gorgeous day while visiting Inis Mor. It was good to at least get to Galway since that was where I was headed and helpful to remind myself that Galway will always be there (I got a look at the apartments I would have lived in too), but the Watson wouldn't have been had I turned it down. Plus, stepping away from Denmark for a bit gave me a great chance to reflect back on my time here and generate some new ideas about directions I'd like to take with my research, including coaching at some other teams' practices and initiating some sort of gathering for all of the female players in Denmark to get together and see just how the game is growing while having a chance to discuss how that growth can be bettered in the future. I might even start some sort of essay contest as a means of gathering personal stories and see if I can get a hockey shop to donate something for whomever can write the best piece about why she plays hockey and what the game means to her (though the language barrier could get in the way of that).

Games are finally starting up again, which is certainly a good thing. Still not sure if I'll be moving in with any new teammates or not, but for now I'm taking it day by day and trying my best not to live in excitement about heading to Transylvania at Christmas time. In fact Christmas season has started here and it's something they're really into, so I could really enjoy the next four weeks. We've got a Secret Santa exchange on the team, which includes doing naughty and nice things to your teammate, and the city is already decorated and the sales have begun. I really enjoy XMas at the grocery store, where they were giving out free samples of everything and walking the aisles with free candy to hand out!

There is tons more to post but I know it's a lot to take in so I'll stop here for now.
Thanks to everyone for your Birthday wishes; yes I'm very old now. And I can't believe that it was an entire year ago that I was racing down to New York City to make it to my Rhodes interview (yeah, remember when they didn't tell me about it until the evening before, when I was on my way to celebrate my big 2-1, that was awesome wasn't it?).

And now I will stop writing.

thank you, rilke

For your spirit

"...be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now."
-Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet