a heck of a week!

This past week has been exciting, fun, stressful and very busy all at the same time. My roommate and one of my best friends from home, Victoria, came to Copenhagen for the week for her Spring Break. It was so much fun to introduce her to Copenhagen, my friends here and the life I have been living for the past 2 and a half months. It is so hard to describe to people the true essence of my experiences here, so it was so exciting that she could see it for herself!

We went and saw many of the touristy Copenhagen sights: Round Tower, Little Mermaid, Kings Gardens, Christiansborg, Changing of the Guards, Carlsberg Brewery and several others. I also introduced her to some of my personal Copenhagen favorites: Wednesday cinnamon snails at Saint Peder's, The Living Room Cafe, Kulør Bar and Monday burger night at Peder Oxe. She even got the chance to meet my visiting family and eat their delicious frikadella (like meat balls).





It was so fun to show her around and we ended up having a week of great weather! On Friday Copenhagen really turned into a new city when it was finally above 50 degrees. Everyone was in the squares eating and enjoying the outdoor cafes. It makes me sooo excited for the weather to really start getting warmer once we get back from travel break!

Yet despite all the fun adventures with Victoria, I still had class all week, with 2 major presentations and a big midterm. Luckily, I got most of it done before she got here, but it was still stressful trying to get all of it done. But I made it through!! :)

Tomorrow, Victoria flies back to the States and I am heading off on my European Spring Break with Emily. We are traveling to Madrid, Barcelona, Nice, Rome, Florence, and Interlaken to go hang gliding. I am SO PUMPED.

Can't wait to recap my crazy EuroSB2010 for you in two weeks!

victoria.

We met our freshman year in small group.
We decided to room together within only a few months of knowing each other.
We have shared a room the past two years.
We have so many memories together.
And we are about to make many more in the next week!

That's right. My roommate...my curly haired, easy going, beautiful, smart, best friend is coming to COPENHAGEN! She will be here in exactly 18 hours! Here is a video of us before I left the States for nostalgic purposes :)

little things.

I am struggling to come up with a theme for this post. There hasn't been any trips or big stories since my last post.

Yet this makes me think in a different way. Is life always about the big things? The extravagant vacations, the life-changing revelations or the big events?

Or is life about the little things? The little pieces of each day that make up our life and who we are.

Here are some little things that have brightened my life little-by-little in the past week:

- Going on a night run by the famous Copenhagen lakes with Emily and Suz, even catching a glimpse of water under the ice!
- Getting the same sandwich at ChiliMilli that I had on the first day of school in Copenhagen, nostalgic.
- Skyping with my friend Sarah in Costa Rica and finally hearing hear voice, not to mention being jealous of her suntan!
- Cooking a delicious meal with my Australian friend Tom, more like watching him cook.
- Meeting Margot's sister, Shannon, and learning more about Margot....I feel like meeting someone's family always tells you more about a person.
- Receiving an email from the internship coordinator at Weber Shandwick Chicago about a possible internship this summer!
- Playing Keops Olympics at the grand planning of Maddy and Miriam
- Having lunch with my visiting family and finally trying Smørrebrød, an open face sandwich..Danish classic.
- Finally booking all our hostels for travel break...Spain, France, Italy, Switzerland... HERE WE COME!

home.

What does home mean to you?

I love how throughout our lives home means different things.

Everytime I come back to Copenhagen, I love it that much more. I finally feel like I am coming home.

I love living with people that I know care about me, even if we have only known each other for a short time. I love the fact that I know what bus takes me home. I know the understood "rules of the bus." I know how to get to the grocery store. I know that dinner is downstairs at 7:30. I know how to get to my classes. I know what time the gym closes and opens. I know what cafes are the best and which ones are too expensive. I know where to find notebooks. I know where the best pastries are.

I have been here almost 2 months and it finally feels like home. I like this a lot :)

london? check.

I actually saw the RED TELEPHONE BOOTHS. The real ones. I've seen them in Disney World Epcot and at Universal Studios in LA, but this time I saw the real ones. Yes, ladies and gentleman, I became a Brit for the past week. Here is a re-cap of my long study tour in London with the DIS Communications & Mass Media program:


Sunday
-Left for London from CPH airport at 12, we even got to check a bag!
-Arrived in London for a bus tour with a British man-got to see all the sights
-Checked into hotel, Holiday Inn Kings Cross and group dinner at a really nice restaurant called Bertorelli's (DIS always hooks us up with AWESOME food!)
-Jourdan, Emma, Kellye and I found a local pub to go watch the USA v. Canada hockey finals...we were surrounded with Canadians, but still showed our American pride :)


Monday
-Delicious English breakfast at the hotel- eggs, tea, croissants with jam, ham, cheese, cereal, yogurt
-We were given three choices of museums and I chose the Saatchi Gallery, which had contemporary art exhibitions. My favorite exhibit was a wall covered with tiny squares, each square with a drawing of everyone that has been killed in the Iraq war. Some of the squares had descriptions on them about the person. It was a very touching illustration.

-After the museum visit we decided to use our free time and go to Buckingham Palace. We arrived exactly in time to see the changing of the guards, which was SUCH a cool thing. There were tons of people, so it was hard to get good pictures, but here is a little video of the band marching in.


-We met up with my professor Jonas and some other people from our group to visit 3 fish in a tree, a creative agency in London. We met with one of the directors, who was actually a man dressed as a woman, but I guess that is just part of the creative industry? It was awesome to see how creative people can really get and see some of the things they are producing for their clients. I left thinking "if ONLY I were THAT creative!"
-Kellye and I took the rest of our free time to wonder around Piccadilly Circus, London's version of Times Square, and got coffee at Costa, London's version of Starbucks.
-We met our class at an outdoor place called Cafe 1001 for yummy burgers and potato fries and then we went to Short & Sweet, London's only weekly short film evening. Each and every week, a program of the very best in short films is shown, giving new artists a chance to display their work and old artists a chance to keep playing theirs. Some of the films were super trippy, but others were awesome!
-We ended the night celebrating Kellye's 21st birthday at this HUGE club called TigerTiger. The club was almost overwhelming because of the size and amount of people, but luckily Kellye got treated to VIP wristbands for all of us, so we hung out in the VIP lounge for the night.
-At about 1:30 a group of us decided to head back to the hotel because it had been such a long day. Little did we know that we had about an hour journey ahead of us to figure out how in the WORLD to get back to the hotel. To our surprise, the tube closes at 12 (still don't understand this reasoning). Public transportation then switches entirely to buses, which may be useful if you know which ones go where, but unfortunately we did not have this privilege. After asking about 10 different people which bus went where, we finally got the right one after a couple of tries. When we arrived back in King's Cross we still had a 15 minute walk to the hotel, and were pretty creeped out by the guy who had followed us off the bus. Needless to say, we RAN. Literally ran from him. I was so thankful to finally cross the threshold of the Holiday Inn at 3 a.m.

Tuesday
-We started Tuesday off with an academic visit to a public relations agency, mine being Edelman. They are an amazing firm and I was familiar with a lot of their work, so it was neat to see their chic office, clad with colorful chairs, Mac computers and mini-bars everywhere. We chatted with a lady named Vicky who worked with their technology team and she answered a lot of the questions that we had about PR at Edelman and the field in general. Everything she said went hand-in-hand with what I have been learning at Elon and in my time here at DIS, so that was affirming.
-We decided to go back to the hotel and grab a quick nap before the rest of the day continued
-Met up with Jourdan at Harrod's (what a sight!) and then made our way to King's Cross College campus where we discussed our PR interviews with the class and Kellye, Emma and I gave our presentation on how convergence and new media is changing the landscape of the PR industry
-We had dinner at Brown's in Covent Garden, ending my steak meal with an absolutely delicious Sticky Toffee Pudding
-I braved the tube on my own and made a trip to the Elon flats to visit my dear friend Mary Catherine. It was SO great to see hear and hear about her experiences in London and share mine from Denmark. It was definitely the face from home that I was needing :)

Wednesday was our day to travel outside of London
-We started our day at Stonehenge, the 5,000 year old monument that is now a World Heritage Site, thought to have been built by people of the late stone age
-Made our way to the city of Bath where we visited the famous Roman Baths and Sally Lunn's House, the oldest house in Bath that serves the infamous Sally Lunn Bun (DELICIOUS)
-We got a chance to roam around the beautiful little city, which ended up being my favorite place on the tour! It was such a quaint British town.
-We stopped for dinner on the way home at The Pear Tree, a place that reminded me of Kate Winslet's house in The Holiday. Great food, great people, great conversation.



Thursday
-Started off with a lecture by Mads Qvortrup, who previously served as the Spin Doctor for Tony Blair's administration. Unfortunately, since I am not that interested in political media it didn't hold much relevance to me.
-Visit to the LONDON EYE..probably the coolest thing we did! It is kind of like a ferris wheel that looks out over all of London--great for pictures!
-Spent the rest of the afternoon in Camden, a younger, hipster part of London that reminded me a lot of Canal Street in New York...I got a really cute hat at a vintage shop for 3 pounds!
-Met up with the rest of the group at 7:30 for Billy Elliot the Musical....good show, but not the best I've seen. New York Broadway is definitely better..
-Got a chance to see Kelsi and Janelle (its been about 10 years since I've seen them), two of my best friends from when I lived in Missouri for kindergarden through 3rd grade...we had SO much to talk about and they are just as I remember! Ironically enough, we are all majoring in communications and want to go into PR!
-Unfortunately after I left them I couldn't get in touch with my group who had gone out with our professor, so I just got in a taxi and headed home.








Friday
-We paid a visit to The Daily Telegraph, the highest selling British broadsheet newspaper
-Ended the trip with lunch at SeaFresh where everyone was served fish and chips, but I claimed to be "vegetarian" for an hour so I wouldn't have to muster the energy to force down my most hated food.
-Hopped on a plane at London Gatwick back to CPH and arrived home at 9:30

FINAL THOUGHTS:
I really enjoyed visiting London. It is such a beautiful city with a lot to see. But in all honesty, I didn't like it as much as I thought I would. I guess everyone had built it up to be the greatest city on Earth and nothing can compare, and I just didn't feel that. It was a great city, don't get me wrong, but it just wasn't AS great as I thought it would be. The transportation wasn't superb, I felt very unsafe on more than one occasion, and there were SO many tourists everywhere. I guess I have started to compare every city I visit to Copenhagen, since I consider it home now. I've learned that I like more of the small, big city feel and that I feel safer here than I do anywhere else. Maybe its because I know the transportation system and I know my way around, but nevertheless I am more thankful I chose to study here everytime I return :)

berlin? check.

This post is LONG overdue....my apologies. Its been a long week.

Maren, Emily, Suz, Margo, Julie and I took on the city of Berlin last weekend. Needless to say, we are travel GURU'S now :)

We left on our journey around 6:30 from Keops and made it to the airport with plenty of time to spare. Since we took EasyJet, a really cheap airline, we were forced to watch the screens with departure gates up until about 5 minutes before we were actually going to depart. We FINALLY found out what gate we were at and were on our way to Berlin!

It was my first time out of Denmark, other than Malmo, Sweden which is only 30 minutes away, and it provoked so many different emotions. Excitement. Adventure. Exhaustion. Thrill. I honestly felt like I grew up just a little bit more, planning my own trip and figuring out how to get there, booking the hostel and tours.

We arrived in Berlin about an hour after our scheduled time and found our way to the hostel with some other DIS students who were also traveling that weekend. We got on the train that went to our Hostel, The Generator, and were greeted with a very interesting/scary man. He was clearly overly intoxicated and was passed out on the floor of the train. After about 5 minutes he woke up and started trying to speak to all of us saying random things like "I only talk to highly intelligent people" and "just call them and tell them to take me to the hotel so I can be there right now." He had a bottle of vodka in his hand with about 1/4 of it left and I watched him literally chug the rest of it and then fall completely on the ground. Needless to say, I was terrified and I think that is the first time I have actually felt unsafe while abroad. It was scary and sad at the same time and its those kind of people that really show you how blessed you are.

After that experience we arrived at the hostel, went to the bar for a short while, chatted with some guys from Holland and then crashed so we could get up early and start exploring Berlin the next morning.

We woke up to absolutely amazing weather! We are talking blue skies, sunshine that requires sunglasses, and over 40 degree temperatures. I felt like I was in Hawaii, haha! We hopped on the metro and made our way to the TV tower where we were meeting for our bike tour. Please note, Berlin's metro system is genius AND we made it the whole weekend without buying a ticket, yes!! We did an amazing bike tour with Tom from Wales and got to see all the great spots in Berlin: the Reichstag, the Berlin Wall, Potsdamer Platz, Hitler's bunker, the Jewish Memorial, Museum Island, Brandenburg Gate, Checkpoint Charlie, the hotel Michael Jackson dangled his baby from and lots more. Berlin is an amazing city and it was SO neat to see all the places I've seen in pictures in real life!






After our tour Margot, Emily and I got traditional German food (yum!) and then met back with the other girls to go on a pub crawl. It was the first pub crawl I've ever done, but it was tons of fun. We met some Irish guys, some Australians, and a couple people from America.


The next morning we headed back to the Reichstag (Parliament) and went up in the spiral dome where you can see all of Berlin. After that we went to the East Side Gallery, where they let painters paint on part of the Berlin Wall that is still standing. It was definitely a sight to see. We decided to go back towards the part of town we were familiar with and grab some food and McDonalds (or as Tom says..Mackers). It was my first taste of American food...DELICIOUS. We bought some souvenirs, laughed a lot at making funny accents, grabbed ice cream, frolicked in the sun and then made our way back to the airport.






Unfortunately when I got back I had 2 midterms, 3 papers and 2 projects waiting for me in the next week, hence my absence in the blog. But I MADE IT and now I am off to London for the week for my long study tour. Vi ses København!

one month.

I woke up this morning feeling like P-Diddy, grabbed my glasses, hit the door, I'm gunna hit this city.

Today is a big day. I have officially been living in Copenhagen for ONE MONTH and MAN it has gone by fast. I can't even believe it. I definitely want to post about what I have learned in my first month, but I will leave that for next time.

As for the past couple days, here are a few highlights:

Sunday a group of us from Keops decided to celebrate Valentine's day with lunch at a local place called RizRaz. It was so nice to go out to eat and the best part was FREE REFILLS ON DIET COKE!!!!




Monday I decided to officially assimilate a little more into Danish culture and joined the Fitness World Gym 2 minutes from my kollegium. Working out is something that I have always really enjoyed and it is a chance for me to get away and have some Kelli time. The first time you go into a gym is always a little intimidating. You don't know where the machines are. You aren't sure what weight to do yet. In this case, you don't know that water fountains don't exist here. Despite my nerves, I walked around and figured out what machines they have and which ones they don't. It is a little more difficult to figure out everything here since all the machines are in Danish, but I think I will get the hang of it once I get into my routine. Another shocking thing was the locker rooms. Call me sheltered, but I have honestly never been in a locker room where all the women walk around in the nude and shower in front of everyone else. I was not expecting this either, so was a little culture shocked when I walked into the locker room.

TuesdayI had my Copenhagen History class and International Advertising. I got my first test back in History and was happy to see that I got an A! The test was on a Scavenger Hunt assignment where we had to go all over the city and learn different landmarks. Basically, I can now tell you most all of the landmarks, where they are on a map and what century they were built in. Cool, right? After class I came home and caught up on my Bachelor episodes. Team Tenley!! :) I headed to the gym to have a, fortunately, smoother second round. Then last night we had a CMM Social at one of the local theaters. We watched a movie and then were treated to drinks and snacks by DIS! When I got back to Keops some people were heading to Bar 7 downtown. I was already dressed to go out, so I decided to tag along. Since Facebook had told the world about Bar 7 drink specials that night, it was PACKED. We decided to head over to a smaller pub called Heidi's. I played some foosball (sp?) with some Albanian guys and then all of us were hit on by old Danish men...woof.

Wednesday (Today) a couple of us didn't have a study tour so we decided to get out of our rooms and go exploring! We hopped on a random train feeling liberated to just go wherever. We ended up in Frederiksberg were we grabbed a delicious lunch. I had an amazing cheeseburger and fries (MAN, I miss American food SO much). We then wandered to find Frederiksberg Have (gardens) and the castle. It was so beautiful and there were little kids sledding down the awesome hills. Once we could no longer feel our toes, we decided to head back into DIS part of town, grab the Wednesday special cinnamon buns from St. Peder's Bakery and take a lounge at The Living Room.




The Living Room is this great little cafe that definitely has the Danish hygge (look back to a previous post for the description). They have living room furniture and candles everywhere. I would LOVE to have a place like this at Elon. It is times like these were I really miss all of you back home!! I wish I could bring each and every one of you to this place. Yall would love it :)

Tonight is consisting of laundry, dinner, catching up on reading and doing some research for BERLIN this weekend. Cant wait.