So, not to flex BUT, I just had ten days off of school. Here, let me explain. At DIS, you and your core course have a travel week at some point in the semester dedicated to exploring somewhere else in Europe in order to further enhance your core course material outside of Copenhagen. There are two weeks in the semester carved out for travel weeks, one in February and one in March, and you only travel with your core course during one of those weeks. So what do you do the other week you’re not with your class you might ask, well, YOU TRAVEL.
Having the travel week break is an incredible time to satisfy one’s need to travel to other places in Europe without trying to cram everything in one short weekend. My original plan for my time off was to visit my best friend from high school in Parma, Italy for the first half of the week, and then for the latter half of the week I was going to meet up with friends from DIS to go explore Interlaken and Zurich, Switzerland. You could say I was pretty (REALLY) excited.
Stepping off the plane in Italy, I immediately felt the warm Italian sun and lemme tell you: it hit DIFFERENT. I felt my entire body warm-up for the first time in a while. After landing, I took two trains to Parma, Italy where my friend is studying abroad. My only association with Parma before this trip was Parmesan cheese (yes, Parma is where Parmesan cheese was created) so I had no idea what to expect besides a lot of Parmesan.
Parma was truly able to give me a taste, figuratively and literally, of Italian culture for the weekend. The city was incredibly charming and much bigger than I expected. I was also super lucky and the weather for the weekend I was there was SUNNY and WARM which was much needed coming from a colder and more gray Copenhagen. My friend made sure that my weekend was full of Parmesan cheese, DELICIOUS Tortelli, and tons of gelato, and truly, what more can a girl ask for. Parma was also celebrating Carnival when I was visiting so my friend and I went to the citywide parade to take part in the festivities and got COVERED in confetti (and when I say COVERED I mean the confetti is still all over my black jacket a week later).
Unfortunately, I had to cut my trip short due to unexpected circumstances and flew back to Copenhagen a day earlier than I was planning to originally leave Italy. Flying back earlier than expected also unfortunately messed up my travel plans to Switzerland so I decided to stay in Copenhagen for the rest of the week. Luckily, one of my friends from DIS was also in Copenhagen for the week so I wasn’t all alone.
This was my super yummy oat bowl from GRØD. 
While I was definitely sad at first about not being in Switzerland, spending my week in Copenhagen was seriously such an unexpected surprise. I felt so lucky that I had so much unobstructed time to explore the city I’ve been calling home for the past two months. Since arriving in Copenhagen, I haven’t felt too rushed to hit a lot of the major “touristy” sites as I will be here until May, but let me tell you these past two months have gone by SO fast that my friend and I used this time to hit a lot of the places in Copenhagen we’ve been meaning to see but until now didn’t have the time. While we planned some places to go to, we also used our free time to just wander the streets of Copenhagen without any ultimate goal which enabled us to see authentically experience Copenhagen.
While my travel plans didn’t really end up going as planned, this week really made me appreciate how lucky I am to call Copenhagen my home until May. This week truly taught me that sometimes you just gotta expect the unexpected and embark on the unknown.
CopenHANGIN' in Denmark 