Road Trip!

Waiting to get in the cars for the trip.

So a bunch of us took a little road trip to Copenhagen. Road trips can be entertaining anyway, but with the people I was with were really fun. We had a total of 25 people going on our trip to Copenhagen and I was in a van with Ivan, Felix, Maria, Mehek, Mikko, Marika and Arto. Five minutes down the road, Felix jumps out of the van at a stop light and runs to another car to give them a copy of the directions, then runs back. Normally this would not have been a terribly funny event, but we were already wound up for the trip, and Felix was running as fast as he could. Everyone in their cars was staring at him like he was nuts. We were all laughing and yelling out the window “Hurry Felix!” A few hours later we made it to Lübeck. This was good considering that’s where our hostel was, but at some point we were driving around the city and Ivan turns around and says with certainty, “we are lost.” We did eventually find our hostel. The next day we were lost trying to find our way out of Hamburg. This however, was not the fault of Spanish people, it was the Finns. Mikko was driving and Arto was attempting to read the map. He kept saying… “I don’t see that road on the map.” This is a sure sign of inaccurate map reading. We were lost for about and hour. We did however get a lovely tour of Hamburg. We got lost again in Copenhagen and stopped at a pizza place in the ghetto to ask for directions. The people were very nice and told us right where to go. That was very kind of them. On the way home, we did have a bit of a dilemma…no one printed the directions for the return trip, so Marika was reading them backwards to find out which highways we needed to take. This turned out to be more difficult than it sounded, but we didn’t get lost that time. Marika is a good navigator. All in all, our time in the van was memorable.

Lübeck

Paco, Ivan, Maria, Maria, Mehek and I with a devil statue at a church in Lübeck.

We spent Thursday night in Lübeck. It was cool. It was a nice little town where we could walk around and see some really cool buildings. There are tons of churches in Lübeck but I only took pictures of a few. We spent most of the early evening walking the city and taking pictures. Later at night we went to a little pub and had some drinks before heading off to a dance club. We all had a really good time there because entrance was only 5 euros per person, but women got to drink up to 20 euros for free. This meant that we kept getting beer for the guys. It also meant that I was pretty tipsy before I left. In the morning we all packed up, piled back into cars and headed off to spend the day in Hamburg before going to Copenhagen.

Hamburg

Most of the spaniards and a specialty shop in Hamburg

In Hamburg, we parked the cars and just walked around the city taking pictures for about 3 or 4 hours. It was nice to be by the water. I didn’t realize how much I miss being near water until I was around it again. For future reference, I must live somewhere warm near the water when I’m done with school. Spain sounds nice…;) After sightseeing (and getting lost for an hour), we got back in the cars and headed to Copenhagen.

Copenhagen

Here is most of our group with the Mermaid Statue of Copenhagen.

So once we found the hostel, the first night was spent drinking in the parking lot. They wouldn’t let us bring alcohol into the hostel, so we drank outside. The next day we all exchanged our money (they use Cronas, not Euros) and did some sight seeing. We spent most of the day walking around and by mid afternoon it was pouring rain and we were tired. Some of us went back to the hostel and took a nap and others went to the nearby hippie village of Christiania. The rest of us went there later. By evening we were tired again and went back to the hostel and got some food at a nearby pizza place. I was one of the few who didn’t go out because I was just too worn out. But in the morning Ivan and Maria and Eduardo were at the hospital because some time in the middle of the night Maria’s foot (she was drunk) and a bicycle (not one she was riding) had an incident and they wanted to make sure her foot was not broken. In short, she got run over by a bike. Luckily it was just sprained, but we cut our trip short because she couldn’t walk anymore. So we skipped any adventure on Sunday to drive home. It’s ok, the whole group was exhausted by then. We all had a great time. Where we went and what we did was not important, just that we were all together and having fun. There’s not much more time for that, so it was nice to get one last big trip in with these guys.