The first posting

Alright, I'm going to try and keep this updated fairly frequently....I arrived on Sunday after about 10 hours in planes and luckily my luggage arrived with me! It was a tad hairy though, because Lufthansa decided to try and sabotage my travels by giving me the wrong gate information for my transfer in Frankfurt. This was after the hour delay in Philly. At about 8:55am germany time we landed and my next flight was to board at 9:15am. my ticket said gate b5. so i got off the plane, proceeded to passport control where I had to wait in line for about 7 minutes. they basically look at your passport and tell you you're aloud in the country. sometimes they ask why you're in the country but because i had my Danish visa that said i was a student they didnt. naturally, I picked the slowest line out of about 8...i finally get up and theres like 2 people ahead of me. and the line next to me there was an older guy at the counter. the passport control lady was like"why are you in the country" and i didnt hear his response but he either didnt say, or refused to answer or was sketchy and so the POLIZEI were called. They come and i'm just standing next to this guy whose mumbling and talking to the polizei. I don't know what ended up happening with him...as I got through, went down an escalator, and BAM we hit security. not an issue, you're thinking. WRONG. i take my laptop and camera and cell phone out of my bag place all of my items on the conveiour (sp?) belt to be x-rayed and they say okay walk through the metal detector. BEEP BEEP BEEP. it goes off. so now I am legit FRISKED in the middle of the security checkpoint by some frightening German TSA character. this is awkward and i am ticklish so i laugh. again, i'm still standing my arms held out and theres like an entire plane full of people waiting for me to finish. so i'm laughing which makes some of the other passengers laugh, but my security officer didnt find it too amusing. so finally im cleared, except it's not about 9:14. again, my flight is boarding at 9:15. so im running to gate b5. i get up there and theres like 10 people sitting there. BAD SIGN. so i ask someone if theyre going to copenhagen. they look at me and tell me in something that they dont speak english. someone else informed me they were going to poland. i knew that was wrong so i walk through the airport and finally find a lufthansa person excpet there was a line 4 people long, so i was going to have to wait. so i go back and look around b5 again and see a girl from Gettysburg that I know standing in the b5 gate looking equally confused and so we go to a coffee shop next to the gate and this guy looks up the correct gate in a computer and gives us directions to get to the gate and we're runnnnning throuhg the airport and luckily we made it. eveyrone is great....my family is really funny.....it'll take some time to get used to life here but im excited. i have my own bedroom with a bed, desk, tv and closet unit.

To get to school is about an hour long trek. I ride a bike for about 10 minutes to the train station, take a train about 40 minutes into Copenhagen and then walk to my school about another 10 minutes. Living here would sort of be like commuting from my house in Glen mills to a school in Philly (Temple, Drexel etc). It's really not too bad...the train gives me time to read and the bike and walking give me my exercise!

This picture is from Nyhaun...it's a canal and there are streets on either side of the canal. It's a tourist attraction and pictures of this are often used to promote Copenhagen. It's a really pretty area with lots of restaurants and cafes...

This is a street somewhere in the city that I walked through yesterday when we did a 'scavenger hunt' around the city. We also saw the Queen's palace, the Parliament building and Denmark's largest department store....

This is just a random grouping of buildings on a canal near the Parliament building. I just thought it looked pretty...I'm going to set up a webshots account or something like that to upload all of my pictures and will put that address in here when I set it all up. Classes start tomorrow and I already have homework (?!) so I have to go do get started on that but I'll talk to you later!

Tak! (Thanks!)

Olivia