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| So I just had a neat thing happen to me tonight on my walk home from my meeting at school tonight. I was listening to Norah Jones on my mp3 and walking from the bus to my apartment as it was becoming twilight, so the sun had just about finished setting and the sky was kind of a blue. I was just taking in everything around me and my mind was at rest and I felt just a complete and utter sense of peace and contentment. Just thought I would share that. While my life here in Copenhagen is different from that at home I'm learning a lot about myself and just living life and being happy in the small moments because really the small moments are what make up our lives and when we find happiness in those we can lead a happy life. Have a good night everyone, I'm off to bed!
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| Hey all! I'm in Europe as you obviously know and what a busy almost 4 weeks it has been since I left. Sorry I didn't get to this sooner but it turns out that most places in Europe you have to pay for time on the internet so I didn't have quite the time or money to spend on getting this started. John and I traveled for just short of two weeks before it was time to come back to Copenhagen and then on August 24th I met my danish roommate Frieda and moved into our apartment.
Here is a bit of a synopsis of the two weeks traveling:
The traveling we did was so much fun! We got to Copenhagen on the 12th after a very long very uncomfortable flight. We arrived in the rain and contrary to my thoughts, while many people speak english all of the signs and information for the public to read are in danish! So after a bit we figured out how to get to the school so we could drop off my suitcases and John's bag and just have our backpacks. After getting the bags to DIS (and taking the long way around in the rain) we decided to hop on a bus and just tour the city a bit. Now keep in mind that we were new to the city, didn't know where we were going and had just about no idea what there was to see. So we got on the bus randomly and got off the bus randomly. Turns out we were smart after all. We got off on the street Frederiksberg alle, which at the end of it has a beautiful park and a zoo that I do have plans on visiting. We walked a bit of the way down the street then realized what time it was and caught a series of buses to get to the hostel. The hostel was nice but the guy running it had just recently reopened after he closed due to not getting very good reviews. While it was clean and dry and warm things were a little bit expensive, we paid $10 to rent sheets and I don't remember how much it was to rent a towel but it wasn't cheap either. The owner and some friends of his and other people staying in the hostel then partied late into the night which made sleep something difficult to attain. In fact, when John and I went downstairs at 5:30 in the morning to make breakfast before we walked to the airport for our flight to London, he was still up with a friend of his! They then subsequently went to bed. I don't think he realized how late it was before we came downstairs.
We had planned to take the bus to the airport but the first bus to arrive by our stop wasn't going to be until after 6am which was just around the time that we wanted to be to the airport so we just started walking since the airport wasn't a long ways away. We got to the airport around 6am and checked in for our flight and settled in to get ready to leave for London. Got to London around mid morning and went to the left baggage area. Left baggage is a wonderful invention where you can just get a ticket, leave your bags at an attended counter where they will be locked up and then pay a nominal fee when you get back and pick your bags up! This was perfect so we didn't have to carry our backpacks around London. John and I then caught the train into London and saw quite a few different things. We saw the Westminster Cathedral, which is on the walk from the train station to Westminster abbey. It was really pretty and didn't seem to have many tourists viewing it. Then walked down the road to Westminster abbey and took a couple pictures and went in right as it was starting to rain. It was beautiful inside. Its hard to quite describe what it looks like. There were many statutes and carvings and lots of just ornate workings all over. It was quite large and there were separate rooms that you could walk into dedicated to certain people or certain groupings of people. Unfortunately you can't take pictures but it was quite memorable. There was an area devoted to famous poets and writers, a smaller chapel area that was commissioned by King Henry III, a shrine to St. Edward the confessor, and many other things. There are markings and writings everywhere on the floor indication where someone was buried. It was definitely different walking over the graves when its taught that to respect the dead you don't walk on their grave. They also have the coronation chair that has been used for hundreds of years, and every time there is a coronation a stone called the stone of scone which is brought from Scotland for every coronation so that by placing it under the chair the King or Queen will rule over Scotland as well as England and Wales.
After Westminster Abbey John and I walked past Big Ben and then through London and got lunch from a convenience store and ate at Trafalger Square which is in front of the National Gallery. They had a huge screen up with the Olympics televised so we watched the Olympics as we ate lunch and then went into the museum after it started to rain. After we left the museum we walked down the mall so that we could go see Buckingham Palace. We then continued on to Hyde park and walked in the park for quite a while. When we got tired we stopped at this cafe right on the river that goes through Hyde park and had some coffee and watched it rain for the third time that day. As we left the park we walked by some beautiful Palaces and took the tube back to the train station to get to the airport so we could catch our flight to Dublin.
We got into Dublin fairly late that evening and then took a bus and walked to our hostel. At night when it was cold and I was tired with a headache and just wanted to find a bed it seemed like such a long walk but John and I walked the same path the next day after a nights rest and while it wasn't short it wasn't nearly as long as it had seemed the previous night. We got to our hostel around 12am and checked in, thankfully they had our beds still reserved and we got our stuff in the room and went online for a while and went to bed around 1:30am Dublin time. Oddly enough this was the 4th time zone I had been in for a significant enough period of time within a span of 2 days so while we were exhausted it was weird adjusting. We got up after noon the next day and got ready to start our day. We asked the nice girls working at the desk of the hostel if they had suggestions on what buses to take for the day and a good place to get some food since we hadn't eaten except for a cold sandwich before we got on the train to go back to the airport the night before. They sent us to a really delicous and well priced cafe with a great lunch special and then we walked to O'Connell Street and saw the spire and the General Post Office where there the stand on Easter Sunday in 1916? (not sure on the year) was taken during the revolution. From there we caught the bus to go to the Glasnevin Cemetery.
Glasnevin is the burial place of over 1.5 million people and has over 700,000 headstones. It is the final resting place of many political figures and people who are important to Ireland's history and from the civil war in the early 1900's. We got there just in time for the tour and took the tour that lasted about an hour and a half. We saw the old and new areas and our tour guide was telling us about plans for the cemetery. It is currently undergoing a refurbishment and all the gravestones that have sunk and lost alignment and had pieces fall off are being restored to their original state. They are also making the paths and roads in the cemetery walking paths instead of having roads to drive on. A small area of the cemetery that was the oldest is now finished and it is a really neat thing to see. Wouldn't want to be there at night by myself but in the light of day its really neat. One of the final stops on our tour was the Angel's plot. This is an area where many children who died were buried. It is a really peaceful area although it sad to contemplate all the children who died and what they might have died of.
After Glasnevin we went to the pub that is right next door because we were told that it is a real Irish pub. John and I had a couple pints of Guiness, which tastes absolutely amazing and completely different in Ireland, and I had some Jameson whiskey. Overall it was a nice day although while we were talking there we realized that not all the plans we had could happen because we just didn't have enough days so we cut out 2 spots on our tour of Ireland and decided to just go again at a later date. We caught the bus back into town then and went to dinner at the The Brazen Head Pub which is actually the oldest Pub in Dublin est in 1198. The food and atmosphere were delicious but sadly we missed the musical entertainment. John and I then walked back to our hostel passing St. Audoen's Church and another church that I can't remember the name of, although I'm sure john would know. We had a fairly quiet at the hostel until we tried to sleep and then there was commotion all through the night because people weren't sleeping in their assigned beds.
The next morning we got breakfast and walked to the old Jameson Distillery. We wanted to catch the early tour and they opened at 9:30am. The first tour didn't start until 10am so John and I had a nice cup of coffee in their cafe to start the morning off. The tour was definitely interesting and should be something you do if you ever go to Dublin. If you volunteer at the beginning of the tour you get the opportunity to taste test different whiskeys from around the world and compare them to Jameson. That was a lot of fun but when we walked out of there a little bit after 11am John and I both had quite the buzz from being taste testers! From there we went to St. Michan's church to take a tour of the crypts where they have mummies! You enter in this small stairwell from the outside of the church and go into underground tunnels. It was really creepy but neat. They offer the operant to shake the hand by touching the finger of one of the mummies that is 800 years old and is reputed to be a crusader. Its good luck to shake the hand of a crusader so John and I both did. It was a weird feeling though! The mummies were made by the conditions underground with it being limestone, dry, and methane gas being released inside. The mummies were only found when some of the coffins stacked on the bottoms of the piles were opened due to the weight. After the tour of the Church and a thorough washing of our hands John and I walked to the Collin's Barracks and toured there and then went to Phoenix park and rented bikes for an hour to tour it. It was beautiful and huge! After biking we walked to Kilmainham Gaol or the jail. Sadly the line for the tour was quite long and we didn't have the time to stay there and wait to get in, plus we were also tired from the day. So we went to the pub nearby and got John got a couple pints and I got a couple pints of Bulmers cider which is really tasty stuff!
So this is all for now, its a long entry but gives you lots to learn about hopefully. I need to get ahold of John so I can get some more information because I can't for the life of me think of what else we did. Enjoy, and the pictures are available in the pictures tab or on the side I believe you can just click on the collage of pictures!
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