Monday, November 15, 2010

Denmark Part I: Getting there + Wednesday

Oh God, I just looked at the date of my last posting and it was two weeks ago. Sorry about that! Well, there's a lot to say about the Denmark trip, and since I don't want to leave anything out, I've decided to divide it into three parts :) I know you're excited. So, part one, which is what you're reading right now, is all about the insanely difficult time we had getting to the airport combined with the activities of that first, severely sleep-deprived day in Copenhagen. Hopefully, part two which is all about the activities of Thursday and Friday, will be up tomorrow, and by the end of the week, I'll have put up part three, our Friday night out + Saturday + getting back home which, although less difficult and traumatic than getting to Denmark, has its own fair share of annoyances and stories.

So, here we go, with the start of my trip to Denmark. Our flight left at 8 am on Wednesday, which meant that, between taking buses to get to the bus to take us to the airport, checking in, and getting to our gate on time, we needed to leave for the airport around 4 in the morning, which I did. (Keep in mind that through all of this, Molly and I were both severely sleep deprived as she was a little hungover and I had been unable to take a nap at all). The bus route was supposed to take me 45 minutes max, so being the cautious person that I am, I gave myself an hour and a half. When I was forced to wait at my FIRST bus stop for twenty minutes, I realized that I might have a problem. Eventually, that bus did show up, and I got on it and got to my next bus stop. Once there, I started checking my watch every two minutes because I realized that I would be cutting it close.

Eventually, the bus showed up, but then proceeded to tell me that he wasn't leaving for another 10 minutes and that instead of the 20 minute ride I was promised, it was going to take around 36 minutes to get to my stop, which would have gotten me there well after my bus to Gatwick airport had left. So, I started freaking out. I called Molly, who was on her bus and well on her way to our final bus stop, and she kept me calm long enough to find a cab. Unfortunately, I then realized that I didn't have enough money to pay the cab driver, so he followed me to an atm, where I pulled out some money, and then he drove me straight to my bus stop (Yay for awesome cab drivers!).

Now that my drama was over, it was time for Molly's to begin. She has this fear of buses not going where she needs them to go and so whenever she recognizes the name of a stop, she gets off. Usually, that's not a problem, but this time it was. The personal she asked directions from sent her in the exact opposite direction of where she needed to be and by the time she was actually on her way to the right place, the bus was showing up. I managed to get him to wait until she showed up, and then we were on our way to the airport.

Once at the airport, we ended up waiting in a line that we didn't actually need to be in, and then finally found our gate after wandering through what is quite possibly the most inefficient use of space I've ever seen in an airport. We found our gate, and then had issues with Molly's suitcase being not quite small enough to count as a carry-on and having to check it. However, after all of that was over, we found ourselves in Denmark. Getting to our hostel turned out to be a relatively simple process, thank God. There will be more on the hostel in future posts. However, I will show you a picture of what would, for the rest of our, be our beacon of hope that we were almost to the hostel and it was nearly bedtime. Witness, the greatest pizza place in Denmark, if not the world.

Sorry it's so dark, I almost forgot to take the picture until our last day and it gets dark really early in Denmark. So, after finally checking in to our hostel, we decided that we were not going to waste an entire day, and so we went out to Copenhagen. On our way there was when we found out some news about the Little Mermaid statue, the #1 attraction that we had been intending to see...

It's not currently in Denmark.

I know, seriously? But the Little Mermaid statue is currently (until the end of November) on exhibition in China. Instead, there is an exhibition by some Chinese artist which, although it might have been interesting, is not nearly as cool. So, we did not get to see the statue. Oh well, we still made sure that Wednesday was a Hans Christian Anderson day. We went to this museum called The Wonderful World of Hans Christian Anderson, which is technically a children's museum, but that was about our state of mind in our sleep deprived state. The best part was that they had displays where you could press a button and it would read fairy tales out loud to you, so we could just sit down and listen for awhile.

That night, we attempted to find the place where the statue was supposed to be, but it was dark and late and we weren't really able to comprehend park maps at that point, so we pretty much just wandered around for awhile until we were ready to go back to the hostel and go to sleep. I know it doesn't sound like it from this, but it was actually a pretty fun day. Denmark is beautiful and it was nice to just walk around and see things, plus we ate the most delicious pizza ever and saw a really cute museum all about fairy tales!

Well, that is it for Part I. I will do my best to have Part II up by tomorrow night, although I have a paper due on Friday, so I can't make any promises.

Love y'all!
Emily

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