Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Continuation of last week's events

I left my last post with a few other things I wanted to write about. I am not sure why, at the time, I thought I really needed to share the fact that I bought a few hat...but I did feel like I wanted to share it so I am sharing it.  I have been wanting a hat with ear flaps for awhile now. Not only do I hate chilly ears, but I just like how cute they look. I happened to wandering around the city on my bike about an hour before my bike trip with my European Urban Designs Theories class was supposed to start.  I rode past a cute little shop with all these hats in the window. I abruptly stopped my bike (after using the nice hand signal for stop, of course) and went in the shop to find a whole table piled high with knit hats.  Mostly neutral colors, but there were also some purples, reds, and blues. Some of them looked pretty cute but then I stumbled upon a grey one. And I was in love.  Fun Rachel fact: Gray is my favorite color. Also, I can never decide which spelling I like the best so I switch it all the time.  It didn't take me long to decide I wanted this gray hat and then the store owner told me it was half off, so instead of being 125 kr, it was half that! Which is only a little over $10. What a steal!  I let him take the price tag off and I wore it out of the store.  So far it has served me very well.  I am already concocting plans for somehow fastening really cute buttons onto it.  

Anyway, as I rode my bike around while proudly wearing my new hat I had a small craving for candy.  Well it wasn't so much a small craving (because at almost every moment in my life I have at least a small craving for candy) but this was a LARGE craving for candy.  And what do you know but at the next intersection I look to my left and there is a brightly colored little candy shop!  I meticulously picked out my mix of safe candy (the kind that looks like the Danish version of Swedish fish *which aren't actually Swedish*, and the gummi peaches) and risky candy (chocolate covered something *turned out to be a marshmallow substance and peanuts...good choice* and little tennis balls that turned out to be gum....very interesting).  After I paid the nice man behind the counter in exact change because that was literally the exact amount of change that I had (with not even an ore to spare), he asked where I was from and we briefly bonded over both having heard of Iowa (he only knew there was corn there...and I think he thought it was right above Texas).  Then he handed me a small Mars bar and said Vaersgo! (there you go!)  I beamed and replied mange tak and went outside to retrieve my bike.

I continued on my way with my gray hat and my assortment of candy in my backpack and I made it to the square where I thought we were supposed to meet about 15 minutes early.  I sat down on one of the fountain steps and simply basked in the cold sun for a few minutes.  I listened to the lovely clarinetist that was playing "My heart will go on" about 50 feet away from me.  He was actually very good and I am sure his fingers must have been freezing.  He kept going though and in the 15 minutes I sat there I ate a good chunk of my candy and listened to My heart will go on, Somewhere over the rainbow and at least one more show tune I couldn't put a name too.  It was one of those moments in Copenhagen where I really just felt content. It's in those moments that I remember why I am abroad. Because that is an experience I simply cannot have at Knox.  Knox provides many things but entertaining clarinet players and beautiful fountains are not among those provisions.  It was really just a wonderful *deep sigh* moment.

And then I realized I was not in the right square.  Oops.  Good thing the right square was only 2 minutes away on bike. I made it to the group in plenty of time and off we went on our bike tour of Copenhagen. More on that next time; right now a certain blogger is just a tad too sleepy to continue.  Godnat! 

P.S. I'm really sorry for the funky spacing and such. I have been trying for the last 10 minutes to fix it and I have been unseccessful thus far. Hopefully the issue does not bother anyone to a serious extent.  

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