YAY.




saturday, july 12: we leave the house at 12:30ish, surrender our keys to aunt fe. marcia only realizes at the airport that she was supposed to leave her phone + charger at home, so she gives that to aunt fe last minute in the car. into SFO! i'm excited. we check in our luggage and go through security, then wait and wait and wait for the gate to open. i played checkers with marcie, who WON with BEGINNERS' LUCK, BEGINNERS' LUCK I SAY. then i pwned her at chess. either that or she pwned me, i don't remember. but it wasn't a fair fight, she had the help of my dad!!! okay. well anyway, we board the plane. i call my aunt that we're boarding and then turn off my phone. i don't turn it on for a long time after.

the plane ride was normal. not so great food, but two meals which was nice, i got a bit of sleep. i loved watching the takeoff from sfo...watching the houses turn into boxes and pools turn into water drops and roads into hairs and cars into bugs, and the golden gate bridge looked gorgeous. and to think of the hundreds or thousands of people on the bridge that looked so thin i could snap it in half. then we passed over some mountains with SNOW and lakes. soon there were hella lakes (we thought it was Minnesota, since they have 16k lakes in that one state, but i think it was actually the eastern coast of canada, because the hella lakes turned into a few islands in a really big lake that didn't seem to end (ie, it was the ocean which meant only one thing : NAPTIME!) played cards with my mom and marcie.

then we landed at paris-charles de gaulle airport. sure, it's pretty, and it was nice and warm, but DAMN we had to walk all the way across and let me tell you, it is not fun. whoever came up with that floorplan deserves to be shot. of course i'm exaggerating, i'm sure he or she was a great engineer or architect, but they overestimate the average person's walking speed. especially with my aunt madelyn clogging up the middle walking lane like a heifer and forcing everyone to swerve around her (hello bottleneck). we go through immigration, and then line up to board.

then another flight to copenhagen. smaller plane, nice ride, flew over france, which was v. pretty. my dad frets about not having to go through immigration again but someone informs him that once you've gone into one EU country you don't need to do immigration again. this is nice and low hassle, but i kind of was sad i wouldn't get a lot of stamps. D: we hop into a taxi van, and begin our journey into copenhagen! we stayed two days before our cruise officially started.

  
this is our hotel, THE SQUARE. it is indeed very square in there. but not as in old-fashioned! the design was really very modern and there was free internet! :D :D on the right, taken from the taxi (or TAXA in denmark): HELLA BIKES.

so after taking a much needed nap, we go exploring down the main shopping street, the stroget. there are 7/11s on every corner. they have good bagels and croissants. i'll let the pictures speak for themselves, plus some alt-text for brief descriptions and/or feeble attempts at humor.

  

  

next installment: museum erotica, tivoli gardens, hotel snapshot, bye bye copenhagen, hello cruise ship