Happy End of Passover/Beginning of Easter Season :)

Привет from St. Petersburg! I hope everyone has had a wonderful Passover, Easter, or whatever holiday you and yours celebrate this time of the year. I had a wonderful Easter with friends in Stockholm, Sweden – but that’s getting a little ahead of ourselves. Thank you to everyone who checked in to make sure I was okay following the tragedy in Moscow last weekend, I had safely left the city Sunday afternoon on a flight to Copenhagen, and only heard about the terrorist bombing in the metro after a few people posted on my facebook wall to make sure I was really out of the country. Both my study abroad organization (CIEE) and scholarship organization (Boren) also checked in to make sure we were all out of harms way, which thankfully we all were. All of the OU students currently studying on our study abroad program in Moscow are also safe and sound. Needless to say, it was an interesting way to start our vacation week.

I arrived at the Copenhagen airport and easily found my metro train – Copenhagen's metro is very new and only has two lines – and followed the directions to my hostel, 'Sleep in Heaven'. It was a very cute hostel in the more multi-ethnic area of Copenhagen, where there are plenty of bars and little restaurants as well as fun grocery stores serving specific nationalities such as Polish and Turkish. I immediately noticed the number of people riding bikes, even though the sky was darkening and rain was threatening much of the city finds its destination via two wheels, rather than four. Got all set up in the hostel and met the German guy, Hungarian guy, and German girl who were also in my room for the night. The room had two triple-bunk-beds, which I had never seen before!! I was in the middle, not sure I would have been able to sleep on the very top, chatted with the guys for a bit and then headed out for a walk to the old town. It was a gorgeous 25 minute walk between my hostel and the train station/main part of the city, through residential area and across a bridge next to a pavilion on the water and then through a park. Lots of people were out running and were carefully avoiding strolling couples pushing baby carriages. They seem to prefer the old school pram type carriages in Denmark, which I found to be a very picturesque trend. That first night I found the train station, where I would be leaving from three days later for Sweden, and wandered through the alley-like streets of the old town window-shopping and people watching. I also found an electronics store since the first matter of business was to buy a camera to replace the one somewhere in a snowbank in Pavlovsk. I was very tired, so it was a pretty early night at the hostel after chatting some more with the guys in the room.

Monday morning I bought a new camera – Canon Ixus 951S based on recommendations of a good friend and techie and glad to be rid of Kodak – from a very helpful salesman in the electronics store. He spoke English well and helped me find a compatible memory card as well and explained the basics of setting it all up to me since the instruction book is in Danish. The software is in English, though, so from now on everything is fine since I have my computer. The only problem was that I had to fully charge the battery before I could use the camera, and I was more than a good half hour walk from my hostel. I thought I'd see if I could find a café on the way instead of walking all the way back, and tried the train station too. Score another point for good old McDonalds, the restaurant in the train station had electrical outlets for some of its tables. I ordered lunch in thanks and plugged in the camera before using the WiFi to find out about the craziness that had just occurred in Moscow. It was a strange feeling, knowing that it was a real possibility that someone I knew had been affected, sitting in another country and time zone with vivid memories of one of the metro stations from just the day before. Before the day was out, though, the news was in that everyone from our group was safe, though it was of course still an incredibly sad day for Russia.

Unfortunately I have to write a paper for literature so to be continued…