Week Two

Now that the overwhelming feeling of my first week living in Europe has subsided, I can finally take a deep breath. In my first post I found myself in a frenzy, wanting to just update everyone really quickly. Now I feel like I can really sit down and write a better post that gives a more realistic portrayal of my time here. So where do I even begin... I'm two weeks into school and am really loving my classes. I'm taking everything from "Positive Psychology" to "Criminology in Scandinavia" to "Hans Christian Anderson and the Danish Golden Age" (possibly a little known fact: Hans Christian Anderson is, in fact, from Denmark). My teachers are all wonderful and speak pretty good English besides the understandable "uhh" in between most sentences/phrases, but I've learned to overlook that. We don't have class on Wednesdays and I only have one class on Tuesday/Friday so I'm definitely loving the abroad school lifestyle to say the least. Vanderbilt could definitely learn from my study abroad program with regards to scheduling. In the two weeks that I've been here I've seen some of the more "touristy" (not sure if that's even a word) sites like Nyhavn, which is in almost every single brochure/website/book about Copenhagen.

It truly is beautiful in real life and looks just like all of the photos. Each house is a unique color and it is really awesome. Some of my roommates and I also went on a canal tour on Friday, succumbing to the tourist in all of us, and it was so worth it. Copenhagen is basically surrounded by water, so this canal tour showed us a lot. Included on the canal tour was the famous Little Mermaid statue inspired by Hans Christian Anderson's fairy tale The Little Mermaid (also little known fact, Disney embellished this gem of a story). Anyways, I snapped this photo of her "good side" I like to call it (more like we couldn't see the front of her face from the boat). 

This shockingly underwhelming statue is a tourist attraction. I know, we were confused when we saw it too. Now I figure I need to add a photo with some people in it just to prove that I do have friends here! So here are some of my roommates Kelsey, Jamie, Virginia Ann, and Halley on the canal tour!

This Saturday we went to Malmo, Sweden for the day which was awesome. It's a short thirty minute train ride to get there and we went over there with no plan in mind. We wandered around, went shopping (it's a better exchange rate than Denmark, so of course we had to take advantage), and went on a canal tour which was pretty average in comparison to the one in Copenhagen. However, Michael Jackson did make an appearance on the streets which was a definite bonus

Malmo is a cute town that looks similar to Copenhagen but on a much smaller scale, with a population of only 300,000. It was a great day trip! Other than that, at night I've been enjoying Copenhagen, its beauty, and low drinking age. Not much more to say about that due to the audience that is going to be reading this :). Now, adding to my list of things that I've learned/are interesting about Europe:

6. There is no shame in Public Displays of Affection (PDA) here. A casual makeout on the side of the road, on a canal tour, at a restaurant, or anywhere else imaginable is completely normal. Not sure I will join this trend, but it is something that I am learning to get used to.

7. On Thursday night, my roommates and I went to a bar where we were the only Americans.  No exaggeration. After about an hour of Danish men hitting on us, we had a truly indescribable experience. A mosh pit of 30+ Danes (crowd surfing and fist pumping included) singing slash screaming the words to "Oops, I Did It Again" by the one and only Britney Spears. Apparently the pop culture trends are about ten years delayed here. Needless to say, we joined in.

8. This is the water that I purchased at my gym. Yes, this is a water bottle.

But anyways, still loving Europe and am learning daily about the culture and about myself. Hopefully this post gives you a little more insight into my life here, and I will be updating you again soon!