Denmark: The First Week

Wow! It's hard to believe I've been in Copenhagen for a whole week now! It's been one busy week, of course. I've hardly had time to breathe, let along catch up on my jet lag until yesterday or so. So I doubt I'll really be able to get everything into this one blog entry, but I'll do my best. I'll try to at least cover the important things:

First off, Copenhagen is a BEAUTIFUL city! There is so much here to see and do and the more I see of the city, the more I realize that I haven't seen yet, if that makes any sense. I'll be walking to one place and on the way I'll pass something else that I really want to go back to and take a closer look at. But I love the buildings here. They're so brightly colored and so unlike anything that you would see in an American city.
The photo to the left shows three random brightly colored houses I liked. These are all over Copenhagen. And of course, there's Nyhavn, which is one of the most photographed places in Denmark, with more really nicely colored houses. To the right, I got a photo of me in front of Nyhavn. We got to see many more sites on our scavenger hunt and boat ride through the Copenhagen canals. These included the Royal Palace, another palace, the parliament building, the little mermaid statue, the opera house, and much more. We didn't get to spend a huge amount of time at any of these places, but now I have a huge list in my head of places I want to explore further in Copenhagen. Like, I really want to get back to the Royal Palace to see the changing of the gaurd someday. We were lucky enough to see the soldiers leaving from their starting point and marching through the streets on the way to the Royal Palace, but now I definitely want to go to the Royal Palace and see the entire ceremony. Here's a brief selection of photos from around the city! (In order, the royal palace, a street performer on Stroget, another palace, soldiers on their way to the changing of the gaurd)
A couple other sidenotes about my first impressions of Denmark:

• Danish is a really difficult language! Nothing sounds like it looks and there are all of these extra letters (æ, ø, and å). For example, the street I live on, Tåsingegade is said more like Tow-sin-galthe or something. I honestly don't really know how it's pronounced, because even when I've had Danish people say it for me very slowly, I still can't really figure out what the last sound in it is. This is typical of most words in Danish for me. Nyhavn? Pronounced "new-houn." København? I honestly have been trying to figure out to pronounce this one the whole time I've been here, and I still butcher it every time.
  
• It's strange to me that the Danish lanuage has no word for "excuse me" or for "please." I feel really awkward when I'm trying to get around someone and don't know how to ask them to move over. I know I probably could just say "excuse me" in English, but that feels weird to me as well.
  
• Biking! I'm not going to say much about this, because biking is important enough to both Copenhagen and to me that I'm going to devote a whole blog entry to it, but biking here is AMAZING! I have a bike, and bikes have their own separate lanes through the whole city. It's awesome, but more on that later.
• Danish pastries! They really do have Danishes in Denmark. I suspected that they did, but to be honest I wasn't completely sure. I thought maybe they were like French fries, which you'd be hard pressed to find in an authentic french restaurant. But here they are called "weinerbrød," which interestingly means Vienna bread according to my Danish teacher. And they are delicious. Definitely the best Danish I've had in my life.
  

And now that I have weinerbrød on my mind, I must end this blog entry. There is, after all, a "bageri" across the street that I've been dying to check out.