Struenseegade?

Hello briefly from Copenhagen, Denmark.  This Danish keyboard is a little hard to figure out and also doesn't work very well, so quickly...I was just in Amsterdam for three days, and spent one full day here, and am leaving in 40 minutes for Stockholm.  The night train to Amsterdam was fun, I got my own tiny hotel room basically and spoke quick German to the nice Deutsche Bahn people.  It is very strange to wake up in another country, with an announcer speaking a language you've not really heard before.  But Dutch is very close to German, and I think I could learn it easily.  I actually had one or two people say things to me in Dutch that I understood well enough to give answers (in German) to.  After some chaos in the Amsterdam train station, I met up with Rachel and we headed to our hostel, Shelter Jordan.

I think Amsterdam could also be named Don't Get Hit by a Bike.  There are apparently more bikes than people there.  But it's beautiful and doesn't look like any other city I've seen.  Everything is on canals, and somehow it manages to be cleaner and nicer looking than Venice, I think.  We went on the free tour again, which gave us quick history and sights for three hours, starring tour guide Basilio.  The brief dip into the Red Light District was interesting, but of course you have to do it.  We also went to the Van Gogh museum, which is actually more like Some Van Gogh Plus All These Other People That Lived Around the Same Time.  We also spent a long time exploring parks, finding strange birds, going to a wax museum, getting hailed on, and sitting in bars with Dutch men singing American blues quite well.  

Night train to Copenhagen wasn't quite as great because I was in a tiny room with five other people, but they were all very nice.  Including myself there were two Americans, two Danes, and two Germans.  Again, spoke to the German girls quickly and was happy.  The venture into the part of the train that was separating and going to Moscow was just upsetting though, and reinforced my recent aversion to going to Russia.  Everything was ugly and scary looking, painted vomit color teal under horrible lighting.  We also kept getting trapped in the weird Russian doors.  At least Deutsche Bahn makes their trains look nice.  The parts going to Poland and the Czech Republic weren't doing much better, either.  Ahhhh eastern Europe.

We arrived in Copenhagen to find that our hostel, Sleep in Heaven, was kind of far from the city center, but we didn't mind walking.  We spent the day walking all over Copenhagen, which is gorgeous and I want to go back to so much.  There were swans everywhere.  Hans Christian Andersen is also everywhere.  We went in the cheesy little exhibit for him, and I remembered just how depressing all of his stories are.  I guess I forgot about how The Little Match Girl actually ends.  We also went in a Danish castle, which I loved because it didn't look like any other castle and was also not overwhelmingly spectacular.  The crown jewels were inside it.  We then managed to find a harbor out to the ocean, before becoming unbelievably cold and eating a nice Italian meal in the confusing Danish currency.  We will also have to figure out Swedish Krona soon.  Weird.

Okay, almost time to go get on the Danish train system.