Hej, blogosphere! (hej means "hi" in Danish)

Here is my first post about my first few days in Denmark thus far.

I arrived here after a long but semi pleasant flight (as pleasant as an 8 hour flight crammed into coach can be...basically because I slept the whole time) in the early afternoon on Sunday where I was greeted by a Danish family who I was connected with via my college roommate/bff Karla (s/o to Karla) to stay with them for the night because I was not able to get into my student housing yet. This Danish family (The Rasmussens) have a son (Frederik) who is our age who was an exchange student who lived with Karla for a year in high school. I had a lot of fun with them and they are so nice and made me feel very welcome in my first night here. Frederik took me to ride our bikes to a little amusement park down the street then we met up with his girlfriend and ate dinner in the city at an American restaurant (their choice..but it was pretty good :)). The Rasmussen's house was soo beautiful...it looked like a house from a European Pottery Barn catalogue.

Anyways, the next day (Monday) Frederik's mom (Lene) drove me to my housing where I met 4 girls from Oregon the second I got here. One of them is named Bri too! There are a lot of students from University of Oregon here. I unpacked and then went to a little convenience store down the street with some other people in my hall. My roommate got here later in the day, around 4. Our rooms are very cute, with all white furniture that looks like its from IKEA with little kitchenettes and our own bathroom. However, the exterior of our building is sort of like a sore thumb, standing out with its hideousness against the otherwise picturesque exteriors on this European street. Once everyone in my hall had arrived, we had a floor dinner of traditional Danish food which is basically bread, lunch meat and cheese along with some fruits and veggies and a traditional Danish strawberry cake. Me and some of my new friends then went to the other student housing for design students, which is when we realized our housing was a little less nice and a lot less closer than the other housing unit but our housing will suffice anyways :) We then went down to the main canal where we watched a World Cup game playing on giant screens set up in a grassy area. Eventually, my roommate decided to walk back home because jetlag was getting the best of us.

This morning (Tuesday), we woke up at the wonderful morning hour of 8 am (too early for me) and went to the welcoming ceremony for our school where some head faculty gave speeches and four girls played some songs on the violin for us. Afterwards, we were sent on the DIS "Amazing Race" where we had to go to four locations and take pictures. It was a nice way to get accustomed to the city, but it definitely wiped me out. I was especially touristy during this activity and took some pretty nice pictures (none with me actually in them, unfortunately) which I will upload to Facebook eventually. We then went to our first class, where our graphic design class (of 10 students..woohoo!!) just did some basic outlining of the class then went on a walking tour with our professor to a fancy furniture store and a design book store. She then took us out for coffee (where I got ginger lemonade, which was very good) and sent us on our way. After class, I went with my friends Lex and Jack back to Jack's housing to wait for Lex's roommate (the other Bri) with Bri's friend from U of O, Amanda. Eventually, we realized Bri wasn't coming so Lex and I rode the bus back to our housing while Amanda and Jack rode their bikes. Once we all got here, we decided to go down the street for some cheap pizza at a place I found on Yelp. Afterwards, I went grocery shopping then came back and watched a TV show about a lawyer on Danish Netflix with Jack and Lex (they go to Pratt in NYC btw). We were hearing sirens downstairs for awhile and noticed a lot of fire trucks outside our window with a decent sized crowd of people, along with smelling burnt plastic but were choosing to ignore it. Eventually a girl in our hall came and told us to evacuate the building because there was a small electrical fire in the dance studio downstairs. They let us back in our housing after about 15 mins, which then smelled like burnt plastic and sweet sweet carcinogens for a little while.


Anyways, it has been some very long and activity filled days but so far I am loving Copenhagen the more time I spend here and am very excited for the next 7 weeks! (well 6 and a half now)

Sorry this post was kind of boring, I just figured I would write a blog post instead of trying to tell everything to the four people who have been asking me for details (mom, dad, Tori, Andrew) so there you have it! Woohoo

Peace and blessings,

Bean