Guess who has 1.9 thumbs and is super excited about starting classes tomorrow!!!

THIS GAL!!!

Picking up my books on Tuesday morning made the whole I’m-going-to-school-in-Denmark-not-here-on-an-extended-vacation thing feel a lot more real.  I only have four books, which is a pleasant turn of events from last semester when I had to have someone drive me from the bookstore back to my dorm because my box(es, plural) of books were too heavy to carry across less than half of campus.

We had planned to walk up to the observatory at the Trinity Church (Trinitatis Kirke) but unfortunately we got there before it opened so we’re planning to go another day.  The church was one of our stops on our DIScover Copenhagen event (read more about that here) and definitely was one of my favorites.  When looking at the architectural design of the church, you can see that it’s pretty clearly separated into three sections:  on the left is a round tower, which once held an observatory.  The main building is the church, and what looks like a roof was actually once the library for the University of Copenhagen.  Thus, not only does the name of the church represent the Holy Trinity but also represents the trinity, or combination, or science, knowledge, and faith, respectively.  The DIS faculty member at the stop described it as a building that was intentional built to combine a very Danish view of faith that includes other aspects (science and knowledge) that are often seen as juxtaposed.

After walking around downtown to familiarize ourselves with the locations of the main DIS buildings, we headed over to the most important task of the week: our immigration appointments.  Don’t worry everyone—my visa application was approved and I am not (yet) being kicked out of the country!!!

We had our first LLC group dinner on Tuesday night, and it’s a tradition we’ll carry on throughout the semester, even and especially when we get busy with classes, visiting host families, travel, and more.  One of the reasons I decided I wanted to live in an Living & Learning Community was its focus on building an intentional community.  We’re all brought together through our love of the outdoors, and as we begin our LLC activities (which include, among other things, slacklining, bouldering, acroyoga, and parkour #RIPme) we’ll start exploring how to live a life “outdoors” when living in the middle of the city.  I met up with a friend for lunch today, and we discussed how strange it is that we live here now.  I’ve never lived in a big city before; in Minnesota I live in a cornfield.  This has been a transition, and I’m not sure it’s quite sunk in yet that this city is my city and I live practically right in the middle of it. (No more 45-minute plus commutes by car for me for a while!)

Today was Academic Orientations for all students, so we met with the students in our Core Course along with our professor.  Caroline, one of my friends from Wake, is in the same Core Course as I am, so we met for lunch before our orientation.  We stumbled upon a little place and got a brunch platter, which was delicious and so needed—I hadn’t eaten out yet, so I celebrated today by eating two meals out…oops?  Our academic orientation for my terrorism class filled me with even more anticipation than I already had!  We discussed expectations for the class and the schedule for the study tours we’re doing to Hamburg, Oslo, and London—the people we meet and the places we go on these study tours is absolutely incredible and I absolutely cannot wait to leave for Hamburg in just 18 short days!!! SOS, classes haven’t even started yet and the semester is already flying by.

For dinner tonight, we took advantage of a two-for-one burger deal at a local burger shop called Grillen.  My very balanced meal consisted of french fries and a chocolate milkshake.  Abroad has made me very health-conscious.  We biked there and back (I biked! Again!) and on the way back I accidentally took a wrong turn and accidentally took my first solo bike ride and accidentally took a right turn too wide and ended up in the actual road and accidentally almost ran into a parked car BUT I did not and I made it back to our apartment safe and sound with the knowledge that I can, in fact, bike BY MYSELF and nothing exponentially terrible will happen, probably.

Tomorrow we start classes and I couldn’t be more excited!  While the past five days have been great, I’m really looking forward to getting settled into a routine: all these little questions like when do I get up? When do I leave for school? How do I get to school? Where do I go between classes? When do I do my homework? Where do I do my homework? keep popping up in my head and within a few weeks all will be right with the world and I’ll have answers to all of them.  I can only imagine that structure will make this feel more like a home and a school than the super amazing, wildly fun, week-long vacation that it’s almost felt like up until now.  Catch me being ready to return to said super amazing, wildly fun, week-long vacation when I’m knee-deep in papers and projects, except not actually because MY CLASSES ARE SO COOL AND I STILL CAN’T BELIEVE I GET TO TAKE THEM???

That’s all for now!  I might actually be able to say that in Danish after my first Danish class tomorrow, but odds on that are slim-to-none.  I’ll keep you posted.

Good night from Holmbladsgade!  Our SRA tried to teach us now to pronounce our street name in Danish tonight and it was a massive failure on all accounts.