“Fall Break”

I started my Marine Zoology class this week and my professor (Dr Louise Allcock) is SO cool. She’s done a ton of research on deep sea corals and showed us a video from one of her robot dives that was insane. In our lab I got to work with the deep sea corals she has collected, and now I’m one of the .003% of the worlds population that has ever seen one in real life! The class is all Irish kids so I got to meet and talk to new people during the lab which was so fun too.

The school week was short because Claire, Una, Tommy, Teddy (Tommy’s highschool friend who was visiting) and I all left for the airport bright and early on Thursday morning to go to Copenhagen! We were supposed to leave at 6:50am, but the boys woke up (unpacked) at 6:54am to lots of banging on their door. I’ll admit they did rally relatively quick and we had to taxi to the bus station instead of walk but we (barely…) made our bus thankfully! It was way too early though, we all immediately fell asleep for the 2.5 hour bus ride to the airport. Although we left so early, we didn’t get to our Airbnb until around 4 so we just dropped off our stuff and went off. Our Airbnb was tiny but we are balling on a budget over here. Claire, Una, and I got the couch and Tommy and Teddy got the bed. The bathroom was so small and the only other floor space in the room itself was taken up by a fish tank (that was super cool though). Once we got over the shock of our tight living corridors, we went straight to Tivoli. It’s a huge amusement park in the center of Copenhagen and it’s especially cool at night right now because it’s all decorated for Halloween! There’s so many Halloween decorations and lights and the top 10 winners of the largest pumpkin growing competition had their pumpkins on display in front of the big castle. Una and I went on a cute carousel ride while the rest went on a terrifying rollercoaster and we all ate lots of carnival food and played a bunch of games. We met up with Aidan, our friend from ND studying in Copenhagen, and she took us out for the night which was so fun!

On Friday we did a lot more sight seeing. We Lime scootered to and from Freetown, Christiana which is a community within Copenhagen that claimed their independence and has no laws so it was really interesting to see how that works. The rest of the day we spent walking around, it’s a really big walking/biking city (there’s more bikes than people!). We passed lots of picturesque streets with colorful houses and the Christiansborg palace. We had a reservation to rent a boat but at the time we were supposed to take it out it started raining so they pushed us back a couple hours. In the meantime we left and went up the Round Tower to get super cool 360 degree views of the city (nottt your cup of tea dad). We also got Danish street hotdogs and they were SO good. By the time we made it back to the GoBoat rental place, it was a beautiful day out again and the company gave us an extra hour for free! We literally only paid $13 each to take a boat out on beautiful canals in the middle of Copenhagen for 2 hours all by ourselves and have a super cute picnic on the water too. It was honestly the highlight of my whole weekend! Who in their right mind left 5 college kids take out a motor boat in a foreign country though… We met up with Aidan again that night and went to Vinson’s 90 for “slow beers” and she introduced us to all of her friends- her program is only TWO Notre Dame people so she has a bunch of friends from other American universities which is fun (I thought my program was small though…wow).

Copenhagen was a really cool city, I can’t imagine studying abroad there though. It’s almost eerie how Utopian it is. It’s so clean and quiet and everyone follows the rules. It’s basically a sin to jaywalk which killed me because you know I walk like a New Yorker. There’s no crime in the city either and according to Aidan no one is poor and no one is rich, everyone is just different variations of middle class. We took advantage of the public transportation honor system in Copenhagen the entire trip and wow did that come back get us on our trip to the airport. Two stops before the airport, transportation security came on the train and started checking tickets so we hopped off and laughed at how close we came to getting caught (karma!). We got back on the next train and didn’t see that there was already two transportation security officers in the car until it was too late to escape. They cornered Tommy and Teddy and grilled them about not having a ticket and took them off the train at the last stop before the airport. Claire, Una, and I all got off out a different door, ran downstairs, bought tickets for the one stop left, and then pretended like nothing had happened. Tommy and Teddy, on the other hand, got fined $150 by the transportation security and they copied down their passport information so there’s no getting out of that one, YIKES.

Tommy and Teddy sat across the room from us in the airport because they were so mad they got caught and we didn’t, whoops! We parted ways with Teddy and the rest of us headed off to Amsterdam. Most of Saturday was spent traveling to Amsterdam. As cool as it is bopping around all of Europe, we spend a ridiculous amount of time in airports and on public transportation getting to places. Once we got to Amsterdam, we again just dropped off our bags and hit the ground running. Our apartment was slightly bigger this time and only four of us instead of five so that was clutch. We only had to squeeze two on the couch and two in the bed this time! The bathroom was much nicer and our host left us coupons to attractions and a box of chocolates that we absolutely demolished. Our friends Maria who is studying in London and Marge who is still on campus were both in Amsterdam so we met up with them for dinner and then went to a really cool windmill brewery for their last night.

Sunday was full of walking again, it’s the best way to see a city! In all honesty, no one set an alarm and we didn’t wake up until 1pm though, and then realized daylight savings happened so it was actually 2pm on our body clocks… traveling is exhausting! We walked along all of the canals and came across a tulips museum that was a basically a tulip shop but then a cheese museum that was absolutely incredible. The main floor was all free cheese samples, and I mean I must have had at least 100 pieces of cheese. The bottom floor was the museum part and that was cool too, but not quite as cool as the samples. We walked through the red light district to kill some time before our tour of the Anne Frank House. That was really cool to see- there’s a bunch of her diaries on display and we got to see the actual attic that she and her family hid in for so many years during the Holocaust. Right outside the attraction was the launch point for a ton of canal cruises so we picked one called BoatAmsterdam to do a sunset cruise on because it’s run by college kids and it was SO fun- it competed pretty well with our Copenhagen canal cruise. The kids running the boat liked hanging out with us too so we sweet talked our way into staying on the boat for another round which was amazing.

On Monday morning, we woke up much earlier to seize the day. Our Airbnb was actually in a place called Zaandam, only a 10 minute train ride into downtown Amsterdam but technically it’s not part of the city. Our host told us the center of Zaandam was super cool though so we decided to get breakfast there in the morning and it did not disappoint! First of all, I had my first somewhat decent bagel of my entire study abroad experience so far. Secondly, the architecture was insane it literally felt like I was in Lego Land. After exploring around Zaandam a bit we headed back into the city of Amsterdam. We walked around some more and saw the royal palace of Amsterdam and went to the famous Albert Cuyp Market. We got Dutch mini pancakes and they were SO good and then walked to Vondelpark. We wanted to go to the Picasso museum but it was so expensive so we ended up going to the Moco Museum and saw some modern art, none of us were really that into it though. For dinner we wandered into this very authentic mom and pop restaurant where every single other person in there was definitely from Amsterdam and it felt like we were literally in someone home. It was such a good last meal. Afterwards we went to an arcade that Tommy wanted to go to and it was so fun that we spent the entire night there. We played guitar hero, basketball, air hockey, even lots of board games; the opportunities were endless.

Tuesday morning it was unfortunately back to reality. We again got up bright and early to fly back to Galway. I missed my first two classes on Tuesday but considering the fact that we turned a 3-day weekend for the bank holiday into a 6-day weekend I think it’s pretty impressive I only missed two classes. And every single other study abroad program was on fall break that week so it’s only fair we got a fall break too!