So in the grand scheme of flights, mine was about as enjoyable as being locked in a pressurised tube and hurtling across a couple of continents can be.
For starters, I scored a window seat, and the seat next to me was empty. The man in the aisle seat was a polite Italian who I suspect suffers from narcolepsy since he easily slept for 12 of the 14hr flight. There was a lot of turbulence though.
My stinginess when it comes to movie-going plays in my favour in planes since I always have about a million things I want to watch. So this time I hunkered down and watched "The Hunger Games" (which was quite good), "Up" (which was lovely), " We Need To Talk About Kevin" (which was good in it's way, and I see what the director was trying to do, but just didn't really do much for me), "Bambi", "Toy Story 3", "Suits", "Suburgatory", "New Girl". I can't imagine what air travel must have been like before there were TVs in seats.
And the food, look, I think airline food gets a harsh rap which is a hangover from the days before significant portions of the population lived on freezer meals and we only had a fraction of the preservatives. My meals were perfectly nice - coriander chicken with couscous, Harissa beef hot pot with risoni and veggies, date cake with crème anglaise for dinner, veggie curry pies for snacks and a croissant, fruit, and a "breakfast grill" with spinach, beans, sausage, potato, tomato and onion for breakfast (this is mostly for my parent's benefit).
I arrived in Dubai at around 4:30am. That place is crazy - the sun wasn't even up and it was 32 degrees, and 80% humidity. I only had a couple of hours so I chilled out in the airport. Nothing else too exciting happened, apart from walking across the tarmac to get to the plane (by which time it was 38degrees and even more humid)
However, even with my near-perfect flights, after 17hrs I had a fairly severe case of cabin fever and was nearly overwhelmed by an urge to do sprints up and down the aisle. While I maintain that plane food is underrated, the suspicious green cylinders in my mustard chicken nearly pushed me to the brink. Not a moment too soon, I touched down in Copenhagen for the first time.
After I cleared customs and bought my metro ticket, for the first time I actually got excited rather than just terrified about the whole exchange situation. It sounds dumb, but I think it was the sky that did it. Firstly, it's a truly beautiful day - perfect jeans and tshirt weather, but secondly, in Brisbane, Copenhagen felt like such a long way away and I guess I blew it way out of perspective and expected *Everything* to be completely different. It sounds lame, but it's reassuring that no matter where you go the sky and clouds look the same.
My hostel is lovely, and after settling in I went for a wander around the city. I deliberately didn't look at my map at all until I wanted to come home, so I got delightfully lost. I'm fairly sure that I've visited every park and garden in the city though! It's also the Copenhagen Jazz Festival at the moment, so there were heaps of little stages scattered around with musicians providing a soundtrack to my wanderings.
Copenhaganites also seem to be dog-lovers, to my delight. They're allowed on the metro and into a surprising number of shops, so now all I need to do is find a dog park where I can go when I'm having Barney withdrawals.
Tomorrow (early tomorrow, ugh), I'm off to Oslo.
- L
This is Nyhavn - the cliched photo of Copenhagen
I look thoroughly awful in this photo, but I figure (a) I'm jet lagged and (b) if I'm not in some of the photos you might as well just be Googling "generic Copenhagen photos".
Possibly the coolest thing I found all day - The Lego Shop! The dragon is made entirely out of lego!
They also have a station where you can make your own, completely personalised, lego character!
Lots of bikes, some of which must be at least quintuple-parked.
One of the (many) parks I meandered through today
The Danes seem to place a really high value on green space, and it's absolutely blowing my mind the number of gorgeous old buildings which are carpeted with greenery. It'll be interesting to see how it looks in winter.
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