Jet Lag?

Me in front of the Palace
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Copenhagen, Denmark was the next stop and it went without a hitch. I arrived around 9:00pm and to my huge relief, the airport was smoke free, clean and friendly. It even had a bit of an architectural flair to it, with clean wood floors, sweeping archways and a few statues interspersed amongst the gates. I found the people, also to my relief, were much nicer here and when I asked for directions to the luggage claim, I was asked where I came from and sincerely welcomed to Denmark. Added bonus, not once did I have to go through customs. My luggage made it mostly unmolested and my friend picked me up just outside the entrance. I surprised her with my single Danish phrase, Hvordan har du det? (how are you?) and then we departed for her Parent's house. They were very sweet and had tea and rolls ready for us when we arrived. The evening tea tradition is something I miss from when I was younger in our own home. We chatted for a little while, some about my culture shock and how Europeans tend to have a much smaller personal bubble when walking in public than Americans, and then went to bed around midnight. At this point, I had been up for about 30 hours, so I was very happy to settle down and go to sleep finally. The next morning, Jeanette woke me up around 10:00 and we met her father outside where he was trying to stuff all of my gear and Jeanette's furniture for her new apartment into the car. I had a years worth of stuff for my trip to try and stuff in there, so it was interesting, but in the end, we got it all safely in and after a lot of hugs and thankyou's as well as a lovely basket for lunch, packed by Jeanette's Mother, we started off on our road trip.

Palace Guard
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Unfortunately, we did not have a lot of time to travel around Copenhagen because my friend had to be back in Norway by Monday for work, but we did a quick travel around and saw tons of awesome stuff. It seems practically no matter where you go in Denmark (or Scandinavia for that matter) you are near water. My kind of place! We had a beautiful drive through harbors and city alike and I got to see the palace where the Queen and Prince live as well as some beautiful architect. The buildings in Denmark are very old and have a character about them that you cannot find in even the oldest cities in the US. After driving around for a little while, we headed off towards the bridge between Sweden and Denmark for our first leg of the road trip.