An American Coffee Maker in Denmark

I've been up since 5 AM.

As much as I'm loving my early morning jet lag (yay), it is a huge inconvenience to fall asleep at 9 PM on the button every night.  Which is what I've been doing every night since coming home.  (It doesn't help that I now have a head cold, just in time for the holidays.)

The main problem is that 9 o'clock is when my siblings and I begin doing our weird funky bonding things.  Late night movies, strange snack foods that weren't originally snacks (or possibly food, for that matter), midnight runs to Waffle House so we can drink bad coffee and play the jukebox, and the occasional nap in the shoe aisle at Wal-Mart.  This is the time of night when all the hair-brained pranks come into existence.  (If your siblings are your best friends, you know of what I speak.)

So.  Falling asleep at 9 is not working out for me.  Playing Mexican Train Dominoes is much less fun when you feel like a truck has run over your brain, and winning Settlers of Catan is next to impossible at that point.  Even with cheating.  (And I always cheat.  It has less to do with winning than with seeing how long it will take my brother Noah to figure out I've been stealing all his wooden roads and hiding them in my sister's shirt pocket.)

And before you suggest coffee (the drink of all drinks), let me just say: IT DOES NOT WORK FOR ME.  I know I've written posts upon posts about this stuff, and, at some point in the not-so-near future I hope to make my living off of it, but for whatever reason coffee has no effect on me whatsoever.  I know nothing of that jolt that makes my brother Peter go bonkers at 4 AM.  

On the contrary, the stuff has more of a tendency to make me kind of sleepy.  Which is a moot point, really, because I'd probably drink it no matter what it did to me.  Or what it did to my coffee-maker, for that matter.  Take the little black Mr. Coffee I lugged along with me to Denmark ...

Source

From the beginning ... So there I was, about to embark on a two-year expedition to a foreign country armed with ... four army-sized duffle bags filled with the wrong kinds of clothing.  Being your typical American, I naturally knew nothing about Denmark beyond a few basic facts: Hans Christian Anderson, Hamlet's kingdom, some kind of pastry, invented legos.  I take it back, I was one step up from a lot of Americans, because I knew for a fact that Amsterdam is actually in Holland (and for those of you who still think I moved to Amsterdam, think again).  

For a solid two months, I had nightmares about Denmark being like Paris, an entire city completely devoid of regular drip coffee (and happiness), so you can understand why I had no choice but to bring my own coffee maker.  Just in case. 

I had no way of knowing that the Danes drink coffee like it is going out of style.

At any rate ... the point is that my poor little Mr. Coffee is a real trooper (I don't think that was actually the point but who's keeping tabs).  Every morning for the last three or four months I have hooked that thing up to a voltage transformer and watched it fizz.  Literally.  If I forget to unplug it immediately after it brews a pot, the thing boils my coffee, makes some really incredible sounds, and then explodes.  (Actually, Tim runs into the kitchen and says "YOU HAVE TO UNPLUG THIS OR THE ELEMENT WILL BURN OUT!")

So there you have it.  An American Coffee Maker in Denmark.

Which has little to do with this post other than the ... title.  But like I said, I've been up since 5 AM.

If you have any suggestions regarding how to beat jet-lag, please let me know.