Oh, by the way- I live…

It was the beginning of the semester and I was walking back from the grocery store with a girl from my Kollegium. She told me that there had been stabbings in our neighborhood and some violence with gangs in our area. I didn’t really know what to think…

A couple days later I was on the bus with a girl I had just meet who lives in my kollegium. She asked me if I too had heard the gunshots at night; I said huh? She said yeah, there are gunshots on the other side of the train tracks (there is a train station next to where I live). I didn’t really know whether or not to believe her.

I later on found out that I do live in the gang area where all of the gang violence is, and it has pretty much been confirmed that there are shootings right next to where I live. Apparently the gang violence has gotten consistently worse in the past 6 months (4 of which I have been living here for). But its hard to evaluate; for Denmark’s standards, this violence has never been seen before and is extremely scary. However, when judging it from a New Yorker’s perspective, or even as an America, unfortunately, it is not anything I should not be use to.
One night I was sitting in my room waiting for my friend to come over and heard loud noises that sounded like gun shots and ran into my bathroom because of the way my room is set up with a screen window it would have been the only safe place. I called her and told her to wait before getting off the bus and coming. I later found out that it was fireworks…woops! But it made me feel better that my neighbor apparently thought the same thing because he said that he ran out of his room with a knife and 911 on his phone.

Did I mention you need a key to get onto anything but the ground floor of my kollegium? Oh did I also mention that I live on the ground floor? The place I live only started getting a little scary when I came home last week to see the door across from me was shattered all over the ground. I ran into one of my friends who told me that apparently two guys had been banging on everyone’s doors last night. They had blood on their shirts and there was blood on the walls as well as kick marks on my neighbor’s door. This all happened at 3 in the morning and I could just say that I was happy I caught the 3:30 bus that night and got back after all of the commotion.