A trip to the sperm bank

Yep, you read the title right. Last week, I was attending a massive cake festival, and this week I'm off to the world's largest sperm bank. I love journalism! I'm discovering something else about myself too. I love to learn. Who knew?! After enduring long, boring lectures of gen. ed. classes the first couple years of college, I never thought I'd say that I love to learn. But I think it is at the root of my love for journalism. It's fascinating. Last week, we profiled a chef. I learned all about this cool heavy cake table event that is actually an annual Danish tradition.

This week we are doing a story at the world's largest sperm bank, conveniently located here in Aarhus, Denmark. Today we went to Cryos sperm bank to set up a time for an interview. We originally planned on finding a donor to talk to and find out what motivates so many students to donate. They can get paid up to 500 kr ($100) each time they donate depending on the quantity and quality of their sperm. Students make up the largest portion of donors here. When we talked to the director, we decided to change our angle though. He started explaining how the laws are different from country to country, and how there is a big grey market for sperm donations across the world. Many rules only apply to doctors, so midwives or the mothers can bend the rules easily for single parents or lesbians. There's a lot of information here, and I can't wait to produce our story next week.

I'm really enjoying classes and finding stories that hook people's curiosities from the start just like they do mine. Once, the story hooks you, the tricky part is keeping people from grabbing the remote and flipping the channel. You have to keep their interest up for the entire package or show or whatever you're producing. It is a challenge I welcome for our next assignment.

Kate, our teacher, is AWESOME. Last night was our big class dinner at Kate's house where we all prepared a dish from our country. I made fried apricot pies because there are no peaches right now. I was really excited to visit a real Danish home. She has the cutest dog! I miss Fergie and Buddy. Juliet and I became buds last night though. We ate around 8pm, but didn't leave until after 11pm! There was wine, beer, dancing , an enormous amount of food and endless conversation. It was funny. Around 10pm, we started to leave... then, Kate turns up some music and insists we all stay and dance. How cool is that! It was good music too.
p.s. I made 22 pies. They must've been good, because there were no left overs at the end of the night :)