I woke up the next morning about 11:45, which isn’t too bad. I ended up sleeping pretty well, only waking up momentarily a couple of times. After getting ready, I took the subway into the center of Copenhagen and walked around the walking streets for a couple of hours. It was really cold out so this might not have been the best day to walk around town but I really just wanted to get my bearings again and wander around. It was a pretty clear day so for the 4 hours of direct sunlight it was pretty bright. I walked past the Round tower, Erotica Museum, and then on down to the square where the Queen lives. There was a big fountain in the middle of the square (not running, of course) and directly around it was a little ice skating rink. Since I didn’t get to go ice skating in New York, I was thinking of going ice skating here. We’ll see if that happens. I grabbed a cup of coffee at this place called Baresso on the square, it’s like the Danish equivalent of a Starbucks. I know, I know, but the coffee isn’t bad and I didn’t see any other coffee places around.
There, I looked at my guide book for a while and then decided to go find the library and check my email. After that, it was getting around near 3ish and starting to get a little dark so I decided to walk up and see this church called Na Frue Kirke or something like that, it loosely translates to Church of Our Lady. I can’t remember if I’ve been there before or not but I wasn’t terribly impressed. I guess that’s why it was free and all the other ones cost money to get in. Oh well. Then I went back to Tess’s and got there a few minutes before she got back from work. We finished our pizza from the night before and watched a little TV. At some point Tess and Ben were talking via texting and it was arranged that I’d go up to his apartment/dorm in Lyngby, about a 30 minute train ride north of Copenhagen, and meet Ben after he got off work around 8/8:30ish.
So I got up there and sure enough, Ben was waiting with 2 bikes. We picked up a few groceries and when I suggested getting some beer he said, “no, we have a fridge.” I wasn’t sure if I was missing something or not so I asked him a little more about it. He said the fridge was always stocked with beer (and sometimes soda) and that all you had to do was put a little mark next to your name on a sheet of paper on the front and at the end of the month you got charged like 6 kroner (a little over a dollar) for each mark next to your name—it’s all on the honor system. I love a country that has this. Also on a side note, his dorm isn’t really a dorm and it isn’t really an apartment. It’s private, about 3 km from the university and reserved for students. There are several communal kitchens and each room is assigned to one and the rooms are small like dorms and with their own private bathrooms. But unlike the states, they have things like special fridges full of beer and on Tuesdays and Saturdays (this is pretty standard in all the dorms, on campus or not) there is a bar in the basement with relatively cheap drinks. Pretty cool stuff.
We got back to his apartment and grabbed a couple beers from the fridge and hung out in Ben’s room for a while, catching up and shooting the shit. Oh yeah, when we got back to his room it was FREEZING because he’d left the window open a day or two earlier. Ben doesn’t spend a whole lot of time in his dorm room because he spends most of his time at his girlfriend’s who lives much closer to campus. We quickly closed the window and turned the heat up, but it only went so high. Throughout the night we periodically kept leaving his room to warm up and went to the kitchen to hang out for a while. Next to the kitchen is a little living room with a TV, kinda like the lounges we had at SU. A lot of his neighbors hang out there pretty frequently and they all seemed like pretty nice guys. I was starting to get pretty drunk because Ben and I had kept going back for more beers and Ben can just be so silly. He’s so fun to drink with. Anyway, we went out to the kitchen at one point and a couple guys were just sitting around so Ben suggested we turn on his gamecube which he leaves out there and play some Mario kart. Naturally, I obliged, expecting to kick some serious ass after my many years of practice on an N64 with Jordan. Unfortunately, Mario kart for the gamecube has a lot of differences and I think I got last on all but one race. Towards the end, I started getting the hang of it and wasn’t losing by quite as much, though.
Finally, Ben and I got tired so we went back to his not-as-cold room and went to bed. But naturally, there’s a catch. Ben had this little collapsible hammock from his last school so we set that up and I slept in that. Needless to say, I had a pretty crappy sleep that night. My jet lag was hitting me pretty hard and after sleeping for probably a couple hours I awoke and didn’t go back to sleep until Ben left for school at like 8 am.
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