I have arrived!

Hello again,

So apparently Denmark did not welcome me very gracefully. The first day that I arrived we were supposed to receive our rooming assignments. Well we arrived at approximately h800 (8am) denmark time. Since I could not seem to sleep on the plane for more than 5ish minutes I did not get to sleep because we left 530pm New York time. Then the only way to avoid jet lag is by staying awake until it is actually bed time. I couldn't sleep the night before I flew out in anticipation.. so between all of those awake hours I'll just say that I had about zero sleep in me for WAY too long.

Okay, so back the the accomodation mishappenings. I arrived and was one of the first ones to get in line at the office, and they told me oh no you're going to have to wait til we finish going through everyone else. That is not what you want to hear when all you really want to do is go take a nap. So finally after they gave all the other like 15 people their rooming assignments they're like oh we found a room for you (i still don't know why I was taken out of my original room in the first place) and they gave me the key.

So then the next part of the adventure was carrying all my luggage the fairly long distance up to the dorm room that they had assigned me. After lugging it all the way there, yes my key worked, but I walked in and there was someone already in there!! Lucky for me it was one of the girls here from RPI that I already know, but still pretty creepy and it was only like h830. So back down to the accomodations office I went, and when I arrived I received a bunch of giggles and they were like we wondered how long it would take you to come back, we realized after you were gone for like 10 minute, my luggage was probably only half way to the original room at that point.

So they then searched again for an open room for me, and half hour later they gave me a new room, of course all the way accross Kampax, which is my dorming complex. So after lugging my luggage for another 5 minutes I arrived at my new room, which of course smells just like an abandoned room that a guy had lived in.. yum! So I preceeded to spray the room with my perfume.. all fixed! After all that drama, I must say that I do like my room quite a bit, and most of the people in my kitchen (or hallway for americans) seem pretty fun to be around. So now I love my room.

Adventures.. this week has been our orientation week.. the first day was somewhat a traditional orientation, the morning consisted of breakfast (they eat bread and cheese.. weird!), followed by a tour, and course registering. The afternoon consisted of listening to hysterical exchange students that have been here and then a scavenger hunt. My favorite activity was after the scavenger hunt. We all gathered back together in the meeting room in the canteen for it, I'll show you a picture to get an idea. We all had to build supporting structures from a bag of goodies.

Here is my structure (top) and one of the other group's structure with the measuring weights (bottom)
So basically you can see from the structures, we were given cups, balloons, straws, foil, tape, string and a few other things and told the winning structure had a formula to determine who actually won. We tied for the most number of beers, however i think the other team had us by quite a few cm.

So the night life is quite interesting here in Denmark, the Danes are absolutely insane (Family shouldn't read this!!). Basically the Danish mentallity is that you should go out every night and party until 5am. This has been proven hard to do since we have events at 9am every day for orientation week. But the 2nd night I was here we had international night at the campus pub, so we joined them for an interesting night. Well, these international kids are insane!! They drink me way under the table, but then again most people wouldn't have much difficulty trying to do that.

This picture is one of my favorite ways of drinking beer here. It's called a beer tower. Basically it's a huge tube of beer with it's own tap and you tend to split it between your friends. Now I really am not all that crazy with so much alcohol, but hey you have to try everthing once! So the culture here is pretty amazing! It seems like the point of the introduction week is to acquaint us with the culture, since every single night ends at a bar or a party, kind of crazy!!

So last night we headed out to the Student house in downtown Copenhagen. It was pretty nice, the end of our tour through Copenhagen, which I unfortunately forgot my camera for :(. But I will go again and take pictures!! We sat on the Mermaid in our tour groups and took pictures, quite fun then wandered around and let me say the architecture in that city is BEAUTIFUL!! I was in heaven, such a dork, but so happy. I can't wait to go back and see it again. One of the girls i met here, Amber, is a civil engineer as well so we plan on going back there (i think) and being in awe all day. I think that it should be quite fun!!

Alright well I must head out and hope to find the rest of my group shortly, I don't want to end up being on my own for the duration of the day. I miss you all!!

Kristyn