Hello again, and Happy TAKsgiving! Ahahah sad I missed it in America, but a British Thanksgiving isn't such a bad alternative. Last Wednesday, I set out on a solo adventure for England/Great Britain/The UK/whatever you want to call it, to visit Rachael. She is studying in Bath, which I discovered is not the EASIEST place in the world to get to from Copenhagen. It was my first time traveling alone, and in order to get there I had to:
1. Take a bus, then the metro to the CPH airport.
2. Fly to Milan. The flight changed gates on me not once, not twice, but THREE times.
3. Exit the Milan airport completely, go through check-in/security/passport control all over again. (Sketchiest airport I've ever seen, btw) Fortunately, I found Hannah from my core class on my flight, so even though we weren't continuing to the same place, we kind of helped each other figure out what the heck we were supposed to do with ourselves.
4. Fly from Milan to Bristol.
5. Take a bus from the Bristol airport to the Bristol Temple Meads train station.
6. Take a train from B.T.M. to Bath. Only.... the machine wasn't accepting my card, because it doesn't have some special chip in it, and I didn't have any cash. I called Rachael and she told me to just chance it and not buy a ticket. But we all know how my luck is with THAT sort of thing. Fortunately, a lovely British man ended up buying my ticket for me. So nice!!!!
Yah, so I finally got there & was pretty pleased with myself for making it that far. Rachael and her friend Greg picked me up at the train station, and we wandered around Bath a little bit, saw the Abbey at night, etc. But it started to rain and I was SOOO tired, so we went back to their house. Rachael's program has only 50 American students, and they all live in these little flats together. Great in theory, but I can see how it can get old pretty quickly. It made me really thankful to be in the DIS program, where I'm still meeting new Americans all the time, and can escape to my own little Danish house if I don't want to be around them.
Bath Abbey @ night. Rachael and Greg are in there too, if you look really closely!
Thursday, we got up and did the most touristy thing EVER: the Roman Baths. Entry came with an audio tour, but we kind of breezed through the museum pretty quickly. I have seen so much Roman stuff lately it's not even funny. Probably the highlight (or lowlight, if you will) was the free glass of bath water that we got to drink. It's supposed to have "healing powers" or something..... but it was warm & tasted like eggs. And you all know how I feel about eggs. GROSSSSSSS.
Roman Baths!
Mmmm... Egg water.
Rachael had class from 4-6, and then we went to see Nicolas Cage "light the city." We got there really late and it was really crowded, so no... I didn't REALLY get to see him. But the lights were pretty, so way to go, Nic. Afterwards, we went to the ASE Thanksgiving dinner, which ... ehhh... wasn't as good as a home cooked Thanksgiving, but it was close enough. I saw an odd selection of people from my school, many of whom I didn't even know went to Gettysburg! You'd think we'd all know each other by now, but apparently not!
After dinner, I went with a bunch of Rachael's friends to a pub called the Huntsman. It was fun... especially since I found a lot of strange connections where her friends have friends who are in MY program, etc. Small world stuff, you know. I will have you know, that I only purchased one drink, but I wasn't even really able to enjoy it. APPARENTLY, the Brits have this rule where someone can toss a coin in your drink at any time if you're not looking, and they say "save the Queen, save the Queen!!" And then you have to drink it really fast and essentially..... save the queen. Being the rookie that I am, I accidentally SWALLOWED the Queen. I mean, I coughed her back up. But it was game over for me at that point. I spent the remainder of the night just trying to take revenge on people.
Friday morning, we got up and explored the Bath Chirstmas market, which is apparently a pretty big deal. It was set up right in the center of town, by the Bath Abbey, and there were tons of little stands set up and it was all decorated and SO CUTE. Rach and I got some hot apple cider, did some Xmas shopping, and sampled a lot of free cheese. (Ok, maybe that was just me.)
Saturday was the big day -- London! Definitely the New York City of Europe, if you ask me. It was cool to be there, but it's not actually at the top of my list of favorite cities. I definitely prefer Copenhagen.... but maybe I'm biased. Anyway, we did a bus tour (rode on the top of a double-decker!! so London-esque!) that enabled us to see a lot of the touristy sites. I took about a million pictures of Big Ben, who incidentally is NOT that big. Our bus tour included a little boat ride out to the Tower Bridge (what most people call the "London Bridge") but it gets dark so early over here, that we ended up seeing the bridge all lit up. 'Twas nice.
LONDON!!We met up with Becky, Sara, and Stephanie for dinner.... they were on the DIS trip to London for the weekend. They said it didn't compare to Brome, but who could have expected it to?! Anyway, I'm really glad Rachael got to meet them, but the place we went for dinner was overpriced and NOT good. Oh well, it happens.
Afterwards, Rachael and I took the train back to Bath.... and even though our train was delayed, we still ended up missing it. So we had to hang out with the gross pigeons for an hour and wait for the next one. THEN, there was some sort of construction or something, so we got kicked off the train a few stops early and had to take a bus back to Bath. We didn't end up getting back until 1:00 am. Oof.
Finally, I left Sunday morning to do the transportation adventure again. Only this time, my layover was in Barcelona!! I spent a solid 4-5 hours in the Barcelona airport, where I tried to brush up my Spanish a little bit. I even stepped outside the airport so that I could say I've technically been to Spain! After all of that though, I was SO ready to come back to Denmark. The kicker is, I LEAVE AGAIN tomorrow night for Paris. I absolutely love all of this traveling, but I'm slowly burning out. Only 2.5 more weeks of living my life at 100 mph! (Ahh, that's actually really sad) I have so much to be TAKful for. <3
Vi ses!
- Caitlin
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