onward and northward

I am so tired right now, I could happily keel over and not budge. For the record, it is 7:22pm local time.

In my defense, this is how my last several hours went: After spending the day wandering Galway, I went to see an evening movie (Indy 4; ugh), got out about 10, came back to the hostel, packed my souvenirs and things into my backpack, went to the bus station to catch the midnight bus to the Dublin airport, and slept on the bus for about 3 hours in transit. Sigh.

At the airport, I waited around a bit, called my mom very briefly, waited some more, checked in for my flight, went to my gate and curled up on two adjacent chairs for another hour of sleep. Sigh.

We boarded the plane, and I presume the flight went well, but I slept through both hours of it. Sigh.

But then I was jazzed, because I was exhausted and unshowered, but I am in Copenhagen. For several years, I have been inexplicably but unwaveringly entranced with going to Scandinavia, and I am finally here.

After doing a bunch of dull logistical stuff - customs, reserving train travel for the rest of my time here, finding the hostel, getting settled, getting changed, eating a Danish, all the important things - I hit the town. I basically did a big ol' walking tour of the city, getting to some of the highlights; the rest will have to wait until tomorrow.

Copenhagen is gorgous. It helped that the weather was perfect and that today is a holiday, so all the locals were out enjoying the day. The city has awesome architecture everywhere, both old and new, and makes the most of its green space and waterfront wherever it can. The Danes are supremely gorgeous people, too, unsurprisingly, with phenominal fashion sense. It's as or more expensive as I was braced for, and pretty quick you just have to give up fighting and pay the $4 for a soda and put it up to the experience.

Everyone travels on bikes; I have never seen so many, and I am jealous. People are really friendly, and it seems to be a much younger population than I was expecting somehow. Lots of young families with babies about - and charmingly, all of the babies were in old-fashioned lay-down buggies. Adorable! There are cobblestone streets, and there is evidently an obsession with ice cream, and all the shops make the waffle cones fresh, so the smell wafts out to get me.

I am so exhausted, though, that I can't be much more coherent than that. Tomorrow is more wandering, and ultimately, hopefully more sense.