The End of April 2024

Jokes on me I guess it still did take me half of a month to write a new post 🫣. The next one might end up coming when I'm in the airport coming home 😢. It's crazy how quickly this semester has flown I truly can't believe it's less than 2 weeks until I'm sleeping in my bed back at Gustavus 😧. ANYWAYS we'll focus on the last two weeks rather than the upcoming two! I left you guys hanging on packing for a trip last time... the trip was a week long class trip (with psychopharmacology) to Munich, Germany 🍻. It was honestly a lot better and more entertaining than I anticipated which was such a pleasant surprise. The first stop we made (which I feel was not great planning) was to the Dachau concentration camp memorial. The only downfall of this trip was that we went directly from the airport which we woke up around 6:00 to make this flight (which is in fact tooooo early for college students 🫣). It was honestly such a unique experience and very sad I could feel that my soul was heavy thinking about the atrocities that occurred at this site. I won't go too much in to detail about this stop because it really is something you have to experience rather than read about. After this visit we went to check into our hotel which was in fact in the red light district of munich (I was worried I would scare my grandma to death if I shared this information 🤭). I'm not really sure why they chose this hotel when DIS has plenty of money to put us up in a different area of Munich, but okay I guess. Me and some of my class friends (Chloe (my on the trip roommate) and Maeve ☺️) got some dinner after settling down. This was also tricky because we came in on a Sunday which meant basically nothing was open for dinner 😢. We went to this decently yummy Vietnamese place for dinner which was nice becuase it didn't sit in my stomach luckily. We didn't do much else that night because we had a pretty long day by this point and had to be up decently early for the next activity in the morning. The next day was pretty boring in the morning too, but not everything can be exciting on a class trip I suppose 😕. That afternoon we had to ourselves, but unfortunately it was absolutely downpouring which did not get us excited to go do anything outside. We were planning on going on a hike in the bavarian alps, but we didn't want to buy a train ticket and go for an hour and a half just for the trails to be way too muddy 😢. We ended up exploring the city center for a bit and then heading back to the hotel to rest before dinner. We went to this scrumptious italian restuarant for dinner this night and I had some of the best pizza ever!!!! so yummy 🤤. We ended this night back at the hotel for an early bed time around 10. Sunday and Monday were the only days we had weather that we could handle without a jacket (74 and 60 ☀️) so none of us were looking forward to the weather the rest of the week 😭. Tuesday morning we woke up and it was literally snowing... BRUH 😧. We had a lecture by our professor about the use of meth in the war and we walked around the city while this lecture was going while it was windy and raining which was not super fun, but the content was interesting nonetheless. We ended the walk at one of the famous beer gardens except they didn't let us get any beer because we had an academic tour left 😢. Then we went to a childrens museum? not really sure, but I will always love an interactive museum that's free! We finished off the night at a poke bowl restaurant which I personally didn't really like and then only ate like half of unfortunately 😔. The next day when we woke up it was also snowing 😢. We started our day with lectures in Alois Alzheimer's lab which was pretty cool. We learned about animal research and what they are focusing on in their labs right now. In the afternoon we enjoyed a food walk with this crazy tour guide. She tried guessing which state we were all from and she asked if I was from an important state and I said.... no 😔 and she said SOUTH DAKOTA! 🤭 I was full for the rest of the night so I didn't really get anything else to eat. I did however go to this cute little bar (definetly pictured below) to watch the big champions league quarter final soccer game. They ended up winning which was so fun to be in this bar watching all the fans get so excited!! By the end of the game it was just be and my friend Ojas and we rushed back to our hotel to catch the last bit of the man city game too which ended in PKs and Man city lost 😕. We hung out with the rest of our class and then went to bed around midnight. Thursday was my least favorite day of academics... they made us go out and interview local germans about their health care system. Most of them didn't want to talk to us which was disappointing 😢. I understood though but after 6 interviews we decided that was enough and went and grabbed candy from the store and I rushed back to the hotel!! I had to get there in time to sign up for my classes for next semester which thankfully I got all of the ones I was hoping for 🙏! After I signed up for classes we went to meet up with our class for a beer tour were we all maybe had a bit too much, but we were in munich!!! We finished the night at another beer garden where I got vienna schnitzel and a pretzel 🤤. (I had a total of 10 pretzels by the end of the week 😂). The last day we toured the olympic park stadium and took a little walk along the glass roof of the stadium!!! so awesome!! We finished off the day giving presentations about our interviews and how the week went for our group and then headed to the airport! needless to say I was so happy to be back at the end of the week 🥰. (I'm going to add my road trip after some pictures for you!)

The gate of the concentration camp. it has been replaced 3 times over the years.

In Munich, the buildings that were destroyed in the war were rebuilt to look like the originals, but most of the time distinctive features like columns and bricks are just painted on 😲.

this is where Hitler used to give speeches 🫢

The awesome Bayern bar

Glockenspiel... we watched it go off at 11:00!

Who knew you could go surfing in a land locked country 😱

BEST MEAL I HAD

Maeve and I happy we are done with this walk

Continuing on in my storytelling... This last weekend Raiden, Angela, and I went on a super fun weekend road trip to Skagen! IT WAS AWESOME!! this was probably the best weekend trip I went on while I was here. It was so nice because I basically turned off my whole brain for this trip and let Raiden drive us everywhere. Raiden and I only argued like 2 times on the whole trip too 😱 that had to have been some kind of record. Anyways, this trip also made me realize how grateful I am to be in Denmark and have the ability to make friends with the people I have gotten to know and love 🥰. It just seems like the whole semester flew by and it shouldn't be time to go home yet. The likelihood of us all being in one place hanging out again is so incredibly unlikely and this semester and what I have experienced has truly been so unique and I just love that I was able to go. Let's go into what we did in Skagen now since that's what you're really here for 🤠. We made our first stop along the way in Middelfart to see Alberte's hometown... SO CUTE! Raiden did not enjoy this stop because it was a little out of the way 🫣 but I made us go anyways 🤭. We drove around a little bit there and hit the road again until we reached Aarhus. I hadn't had the opportunity to see it during core course week, but both raiden and angie saw it with their class. It seemed cool, but I definitely like Copenhagen better ☺️. We stopped at the streetfood market there for dinner and got some yummy food and popsicles before reaching our final destination for the night! We spent the night at an airbnb that angie and raiden thought we would get murdered at (we didn't and instead the host gave us a free bottle of wine 🥰). The town we stayed in had a population of under 5,000 but was still cute nonetheless. It reminded me of some of the towns I saw near door county, WI! Unfortunately nothing opened until 10:00 am the next morning so we waited until then to get some brekky at a cute little brunch diner. The brunch they gave us was kind of odd, but we still ate it up. We only had about 2 hours on the road again until we finally reached the tip of Denmark! (skagen). We arrived there around 1:30 and walked around the town a little bit (and of course got some ice cream). It was a cute little town, but you could definitely tell that it was geared towards tourism and we later learned that Skagen sees about 2 MILLION tourists every year which was quite shocking because the town was pretty small. We went and checked into our Airbnb which was on a horse farm and the area reminded me a lot of grandma and grandpa vos ☺️. There were cats on the farm and a lots of open field behind our house. And to top it all off much like the buildings at the farm back home there was a giant spider in the corner of the bathroom that I spotted when I tried to go pee 😭. I couldn't use the bathroom until raiden exterminated the spider and once I was able to I found a ginormous wasp near the window in the bathroom to which I screamed and made raiden exterminate that one too 😂. Once those bugs were removed I felt much more at ease and we hung out in the house for a little bit and even let one of the cats inside 🫣. We finished off the night with some delicious seafood and made our way back home to watch the sunset.... IT WAS STUNNING. We even drove a little ways to the beach nearby to watch the sun completely disappear. Once we got back home for the night we decided to play cards and eat oreos. (Raiden was so lost because the airbnb had no wifi so we had to come up with our own fun 😱). We went to bed relatively early and woke up around 9:00 to go do a cold plunge!!!! We made our way back to the beach we were at the night before and ran into the freezing cold water 🥶. After that we found some breakfast at a little bakery in town and the worker there actually studied abroad in MINNESOTA!!!! it was awesome because she was talking about her experience there which was so shocking to me, but so awesome at the same time. After the bakery we headed to where the North sea meets the Kattegat sea! It was so cool and we even saw a baby seal 🥹. We started to make our way home after exploring this area for a bit and we made our first stop in Aalborg. We stopped at another street food market and got some lunch and Ice cream before trekking all the way home! (we saw jellyfish in the bay at this place it was so cool I had never seen them outside of an aquarium 🪼). We decided to eat out again after getting back to cope and Angela's nemesis Maexico. It was soooo yummy yet again 🤤. We were finally reunited with Franny and Kathie and stayed up for a while chit chatting with each other ☺️. I am going to miss copenhagen so much 🥹.