By now, I have probably lost all three of my readers, since I’ve gone like three weeks without a word. I know, I’m the worst! But I’m back, because I love to #blog and because I love to collect them paychecks (thanks Whitman Off Campus Studies!).
As usual, the last few weeks have flown by, and trying to reflect on them is a muddled and blurry task. But I’ll try to work through it and spit out some sentences for you to read, my dear audience. Our story begins after I returned from Dublin. I spent a day back in St. Andrews to get my life together, and then headed off to Copenhagen with my roommate and true homie Forrest.
Similar to my Madrid trip, I stayed with people I’d never met before. My uncle is close friends with a couple who live in Copenhagen, Stina and Nils, and nicely offered them up as a contact. Since I’m a weird person who likes to hang out with strangers, I jumped at the opportunity.
Not surprisingly, Stina and Nils were awesome. Very creative, very nice, very happy people who seems to be really digging life. They meditate and they design clothes and they like art and they’re vegetarians and they ride bikes and they play foosball and they are perfect and I want their life. Forrest and I were both pretty stoked on our good fortune, getting to stay with such awesome people. They were very nice about letting a couple dorky Americans sleep in their guest room and eat breakfast with them, and I am very grateful to them for that.
Forrest and I were only in Copenhagen from Monday afternoon to Wednesday afternoon, so we got after it and saw quite a bit of the town at a pretty brisk pace. From this relatively distant retrospective, I recall us seeing a funky church, the hippy district Christiania, the Danish Architecture Centre, the meat packing district, the National Gallery, the Royal Garden, the Botanical Garden, a cool food truck market thing, and I’m probably leaving some stuff out. All of these destinations were very cool and enjoyable, but I was most struck by the overall architecture and design of the city. The buildings are beautiful while also seeming very functional, and the city just seems seamlessly designed with the canals and generous bike lanes and comfortable public spaces. And everyone rides bikes and leaves them unlocked, which is awesome. It’s basically a more cutting-edge Portland, with cooler architecture, fewer food trucks, and the same amount of white people.
The highlight of the trip was probably when Forrest and I rented electric bikes and whipped all over the city on Wednesday. After so much sightseeing on Tuesday, we just kind of wanted to cruise and not worry about focusing on reaching any destinations. So shooting around on our robo-bikes was a really good time, and we got to fit in with all the local folk milling about on their normal bikes. 10 out of 10, would totally love to move to Copenhagen and ride bikes forever.
This was my last little trip out of St. Andrews, which was kind of a bummer, but I felt like I took advantage of my abroad-ness and visited a lot of neat places and met a lot of neat people. So I’ve got no regrets. As always, it was nice to come back to St. Andrews, and this time especially, I got to do some very St. Andrewsy things. I tagged along with Forrest to this pier walk where a lot of students were wearing their red robes and carrying torches, which sounds like a terrifying cult gathering, but actually looked pretty cool. I even carried a torch, which was a little bit awful because I hate fire, but it was fun nonetheless. Then, I stayed up all night for May Dip, when students jump into the North Sea as the sun comes up on May 1st. It is all a bit hazy due to sleep deprivation and the activities of the night, but I think it was a good time.
That’s all for now. Tune in for the next post, coming sometime in the next couple days!