Icelandic pants, unibrows, and arrival jitters

Greetings from Copenhagen, Denmark!

It is currently around 9:30pm here, and all of you are consumed by the wonderful world of football back home. I am on the brink of hysterical exhaustion, so I decided this would be the perfect time to update my blog. I figure when I wake up tomorrow morning, it will finally feel like a new day, and some of the not-sure-if-I-was-halucinating stories of my travels will fade. So, I'll start at the beginning!

Saturday night at 8:30, I flew out of Boston. My first flight was essentially a mobile sorority/fraternity mixer. I think all but three people were students heading abroad. This was super amusing for like... an hour. Three unreasonably beautiful (and very drunk) gentlemen from St. Lawrence sat across the isle from me, and we chatted about how Kate Mahar has a "bomb ass voice." This is a fact. In addition to travel eye candy, the travel gods were on my side, because I managed to snag a row with an open middle seat. Wammies, foot rest here I come. Unfortunately, I had forgotten that no number of foot resting spots make airplanes seats more comfortable, and sleep was nowhere to be found. Womp, womp.

I landed in Reykjavik, Iceland around 1:30am EST. By this point, I was an absolute crackhead. I remember nothing from this hour layover but the following three things:
1) Icelandic men have the most hilarious pants in the entire world. I saw at least four pairs of purple plaid pants, several strange polka-dot jegging-ish-seeing-too-much-of-your-icelandic-junk pants, and even pants with fur around the ankles. From this point forward, I am abandoning all hope of creating a "european classy lady" costume while I am here, and going straight to icelandic man fashion. CSM Costume room, here I come.
2) This was probably part sleep deprivation and part I'm-a-huge-narcissist-ness, but every single word of Icelandic sounds like my last name. This obviously makes no sense, because Huberlie is in NO way Icelandic, but I accidentally responded "what?!" like three times to the stewardesses.
3) Finally, the man who stamped my passport in customs had what was absolutely the most hilarious unibrow that I will ever see in my entire life. The competition is over. The metals have been awarded. Young Ali Huberlie, your spotlight has been stolen. This brow not only stretched from ear to ear, it also went nearly all the way down his NOSE. Ordinarily, I would feel bad for such an unfortunate brow faced man. However, it legitimately looked like this man had been crafting this brow with great detail his entire life. It looked straight out of the "brow diva", for you Rochester folk. I have decided that upper-face-facial hair is simply another Icelandic fashion statement. Noted.

My flight from Reykjavik to Copenhagen was decent. One screaming child too many, but he was wearing tiny little baby UGG boots, so I pardoned his sins. (Former spiritual director powers, obviously.) I cat napped for about a half hour in the super cosy head-on-tray-table position before abandoning hope of sleep. Finally, at around 6:00am EST, we landed in snowy Copenhagen! Horrray!

My first day here has been a bit of a blur. My bags were some of the last off of the plane, and I think I kissed them when they were finally in my arms. Some nice DIS people took us to our apartments and helped us to get settled. Overall, the program seems super well organized and efficient. We had building orientations, got handed a rainforest worth of paperwork, and went on a guided tour around our neighborhood. There is a bakery right outside the window that has beautiful.... ready, ready!? DANISHES in the windows. Sold. After all of this, we went out to a super-traditional... uhm.. Thai food place? After having eaten nothing but some Cherrios for 12 hours, they could have served me hot garbage.

Now, I am settled back in my room trying to stay up long enough to get on some sort of normal schedule. My room is nice, if sparse. I will post pictures soon. Living in the UofR's most beautiful upperclassman housing, Riverview, probably spoiled me. Oh how I miss you, big kitchen and private bathtub. The showers here are probably strangest thing ever. There is no stall of anything, just a shower head and a little partial curtain. :) Here's too new experiences.

More to come when I'm not cracked out.

Love you all,
Lizard