Little Green River

We get three weeks off in October/November. Today I worked on coming up with a travel plan for the second week of the break.

Sunday: Fly into Zurich in the morning, stay at at Youthhostel Zurich
Monday: Train day #1: Go to Lugano, stay at Youth Hostel Lugano-Savosa
Tuesday: Spend the day in Lugano
Wednesday: Train day #2: Take morning train to Lucerne, stay at Youthhostel Luzern
Thursday: Train day #3: Spend morning in Lucerne, go to Interlaken, stay at Alplodge/Backpackers Interlaken (the cheapest hostels I’ve found in Switzerland are in Interlaken for some reason)
Friday: Spend the day in Interlaken
Saturday: Train day #4: Take morning train to Zurich, fly back to Copenhagen in the evening.

Comments: This seems to be the most feasible way for me to see Switzerland. Plane tickets into Geneva/Montreaux are significantly more expensive and there’s no good way to get there from the Ticino. So I’ll miss that. I also won’t be able to see France at all, but that’s alright. If I were going to see more than one country, I’d want to have more than a week to see it all–otherwise you’d be too rushed to see anything! And I don’t have the budget to travel for more than a week. So there it is.

Costs:
Airfare: $226 on Snowflake (Switzerland is, conveniently enough, the one place in Europe Ryanair *doesn’t* fly too. I looked at going by train, but that’s more than $100 more expensive.)
Four-day Swiss train pass: $185.
Hostel stays: Est. $30/night; some are more or less than that estimate (read: Interlaken rocks), but it should be around $180 total.
Food: Find me a grocery store where I can buy bread, cheese, apples, and a carrot or two. At the cheapest I imagine I could get by for a week on $20. If I eat out at all, though, it’ll be more. Throw in a fondue night or two and call it $40.
Souvenirs: I guess we’ll see… Maybe $20 for chocolate? I don’t think there’ll be any cuckoo clocks in my future, though.

Total: $650.

Comments: Oof. I thought travel in Europe was cheap? If I cut Lucerne and Interlaken out by just getting a Zurich-Lugano ticket instead of the train pass and also cut the trip two nights shorter, it’d be down to $550. But even then…

Thoughts?

Another DIS student linked me to this: Fly to most places in Europe (and a few places elsewhere) from London for $0.02!

Meaning that, with a cheap ticket from Copenhagen, I could go to, like, Morocco for $140 $75. If I wanted. And didn’t mind the lack of carry-on baggage.

My mind, she is blown.

I passed this stencil on the way to school today. Burn, baby, burn!

When I first got to the airport in Denmark, I exchanged about $250 into kroner at a rate of 5.7 kroner to the dollar. Now I learn that, according to Yahoo, the official kroner/dollar exchange rate is around 5.86 DKK/$. Okay, close enough.

Yesterday, though, I decided to get some money from a Danish ATM, to prove I could do it *before* I ran out of money. It worked…but when I went out I realized how crappy the rate was. I got 300 kroner for $51.75. Including the “NON-WELLS FARGO ATM FEE”, this comes to 5.23 DKK/$. If you buy something with your debit card instead of cash, the fee rises to 3% of the purchase price. As if the cost of living in Copenhagen wasn’t high enough!

I’m not sure what else I can do to get money while I’m here, though. Wells Fargo has a service where you can order foreign currency by mail. The rate for that is about 5.54 DKK/$ plus an $8 shipping fee, so better, but…

Suddenly I’m so much happier I got that work-study job!

Someday, I will learn how to buy grapes in Danish that are neither tough, nor squishy, nor having seeds, nor liable to get lost on trains.

This loaf of crusty “Fransk brød” I got at a Vesterbro konditori (bakery) for $3 is pretty damn awesome, though. As is Vesterbro. Too bad it’s more than an hour away from where I live…

Finally, I need to start borrowing more of my fellow folkehøjskolers’ food. We’ve agreed upon a collective arrangement for food (really we should’ve talked earlier; having three jars of jelly and two or three dozen eggs in the fridge is kind of silly) but, except for some of Brian’s giant jar of peanut butter (impossible to find here) and someone’s bag of sugar (for corn flakes), it’s been more like me buying fruit and bread, and other people eating some of it.

Maybe I’ll have an egg for dinner tomorrow…

I came home from an hour-long commute, put my fruit in the fridge, and a half hour later I was out the door again. DIS had organized a student get-together for Friday night at nearby bar Den Glade Gris (“The Happy Pig”). Taking place three hours after my class, it was slightly less inconvenient to commute home and back than to wait around and haul my backpack to the bar. I wasn’t particularly excited about the whole barhopping/clubbing culture, but I figured I ought to try and be social. Also DIS gave us each a coupon for a free drink and a free hot dog.

A minute after I got on the bus to go back, it started raining. Note to everyone: When in Copenhagen, NEVER be without an umbrella, or at least a good raincoat. The rain tonight was light, thank goodness, but it still easily penetrated my sweater.

The first floor was crowded with students. I didn’t recognize anyone from the folkehøjskole, though I ran into a Chinese student in my media class for whom this was also her first time in a bar. It was impossible to find the bathroom, so I went up to the bar. Not even my visit to Carlsberg Brewery had convinced me to appreciate beer, so I got the other beverage the coupon was good for–a glass of wine. They only served one kind of wine there, but at least it wasn’t in a cardboard box.

I wandered about the bar, wine glass and pølse fransk (basically a hotdog stuck in a baguette) in hand, and settled at an empty table to watch the band set up their instruments. They weren’t scheduled to begin playing until 9, though. All the other tables were full of jocky guys and straightened blonde girls with beers. I didn’t recognize anybody. Who was there to recognize? This week, we have bounced and collided like gas molecules, exchanging boilerplates–names, hometowns, schools–until we go on to the next event and forget it all.

A girl who had stood next to me in line for the hot dogs (name, hometown, school, rinse, repeat–already I can’t remember her name!) adopted me. She, her friends, and I went upstairs to the bar’s dance floor, where Backstreet Boys blared and no one danced yet. We sat ourselves down at a table and talked a bit (name, hometowns, schools) as I finished my wine. I decided to go and see if the bar had anything decent to drink. I’d gotten a glimpse of the bottles behind the counter–lots of gin and whiskey, neither of which I am fond of. I still held out hope that they might have schnapps, though.

Nope. The way the barkeep reacted, I’m not sure he’d even heard of schnappes. I was sad.

Came back with an overpriced ginger ale to find that my seat had been thoroughly usurped by two other girls. I stood there awkwardly for a few moments. Everyone else was wrapped in conversation. I went back downstairs. The rain had abated for the moment, so I decided it would be as good a time as any to leave. I’d stayed for an hour. I’d tried.

I love taking long walks in Copenhagen. I can’t explain the charm of the streets. How could I be lonely with the city for company, the produce stands and cobblestones and the cute Turkish woman who works at the ice cream stand? I am alone, but I’m at peace. Perhaps a little loosened-up from the wine, too.

I’m only lonely when I’m at home…

At the stop for the bus home tonight, there was a pot of mums sitting on the ground. No one around seemed to have any attachment to it; someone must have bought it from the flower stand and then forgot it. Like how I forgot my grapes on the train yesterday. I thought about taking the mums, but I didn’t want to be stealing someone else’s stuff if someone around knew whose it was. The bus arrived; one by one people boarded. No one gave any thought to the pot of flowers.

Panicked in the moment, I boarded the bus. Sans mums.

I wish I had adopted them.