So a college student and some great Danes walk into a bar...

When landing in Copenhagen, I was running on about an hour of sleep from what was an incredible last night in London. Suffice to say, my extremely high levels of excitement rivaled my desire to curl up in my new bed on Store Kannikestræde, right in the heart of Copenhagen. Now in the spirit of learning from experience and not books, I had done very little research on Copenhagen before arriving, so when greeted by streets older than the United States with shops titled with letters I had never seen used before, I was immediately drawn into the fantastic land of Denmark.

As the day progressed, I became accustomed to my new home in the Danish Residential Community (DRC), which is basically like a dorm for students studying abroad in Copenhagen. Many students in my program live outside the city with host families, danish roommates, or in apartments; while they have a more cultural living situation, we have the benefit of not having to take a bus to get to school and to go home.

I live with 8 Americans on my floor and have a Danish RA--I share a bedroom with 2 guys, and there are 2 rooms for the 6 girls. The apartment comes with a full kitchen, wireless internet, living room, 2 bathrooms, dish washer, and laundry--all things I'm incredibly grateful to have.

Our first week here we had orientation events, which included social events with our individual programs here (mine is Biomedicine), applying for a residence permit, and a scavenger hunt around Copenhagen--which brought us to many points of interest, such as Parliament!

While settling in, I decided it might be useful to make a map of such points of interest in order to get a better handle on the city. I spent many hours using the DIS (the name of my study abroad program) website to find useful information and ended up with this map:

http://g.co/maps/eg244

In doing this, I ended up finding two local rock climbing gyms, and have since found one, Copenhagen Boulders, that I climb at twice a week now. I've met incredible people there and am loving the feeling of climbing regularly, something I haven't done for several years. While I was happy to find a rock gym, one thing I was unhappy about when coming to Copenhagen was leaving my Aerial Arts club at Brown. While I know they're in good hands, I knew I would miss learning aerial arts, something I'd been doing for the past 3 summers at home and 3 semesters at school. However, just when I was really missing Providence, providence struck! While taking a swing dancing class my first week here, I met a girl who told me that she trains regularly at a circus academy nearby. Two days later I was at AFUK, surrounded by trapezes, lyras, chinese poles, trampolines, and acrobats. Since then, I have been taking a partner acrobatics class 4 hours a week on Monday nights, and am learning so much!

Amid all this excitement, I started classes at the end of January. I'm enrolled in Biotechnology and Drug Development, Medical Exploration of HIV/AIDS, Biology of Marine Mammals, Danish 1, and Criminology and Criminal Law in Scandinavia. Classes are generally 15-25 people and I'm the only boy in my Marine Bio class (apparently DIS is 70% girls, 30% guys, so this is not uncommon), but other than that, I'm finding classes to be pretty similar to those back home. I also don't have class on Wednesdays--those are reserved for field studies, in which we get firsthand experiences immersing ourselves in our subject material in the real world. For instance, I went to the private collections of the Danish Zoological Museum today with my Marine Bio class, but more on that later!

That about wraps up my first two weeks in Copenhagen...more soon!